You've got it backwards. We're not pissed because they needed help, we're pissed because being a Jedi was initially presented as something almost anybody could do if they were willing to train long and hard, not as winners of some sort of microbiological lottery.
It's made clear that midichlorians are present in "all things". Presumably in sentient, biological beings they do nothing except indicate how easily one can learn to manipulate the "Force". In that, they're no different to other physiological attributes that engender certain individuals with better stamina, higher muscle density, etc.
More importantly, once it's reached, they can reach you. Before that they are stuck in their shithole planet, so you can ignore them, since they can't follow you home.
...And attack you.
A fallacious argument. Five year olds lack the physical capacity to handle a loaded gun in a safe way. Their brains simply aren't working well enough yet.
Which is, you know, the point of my argument. The rationale is that until they've hit a certain level of technology, their "brains" (that is, culture) aren't working well enough yet.
On the other hand, an adult of any culture is perfectly capable of handling the gun safely, assuming of course that he has been shown and explained to how it works and what the safety requirements are.
And you call my argument fallacious. Were that true, deaths from guns would be a bare fraction of what they are today.
Unless, of course, by "safely" you mean "without self injury" rather than "without endangering others".
Besides, if you try to treat said adult like a five-year old, the chances are you get either a scatching reply or said gun pointed at you - and deservedly so.
Thus proving the point. Heck, look at how angry people get about driver's licenses, despite a non-trivial chunk of them being incapable of safely operating a bicycle.
Yours is simply a new version of white man's burden [wikipedia.org], or perhaps the Noble Savage horsehit: [...]
It's nothing of the sort. If anything, it's the complete opposite (the "White Man's Burden" is about the "White Man" having to nurture and guide other culters - the "Prime Directive" is about leaving them alone).
There's also suggestions throughout Trek that the Prime Directive is as much about avoiding problems on the Federation side of the equation (eg: someone lobbing into a primitive culture with modern technology and setting themselves up as dictator). From memory, several episodes talk about earlier, failed attempts to do what you suggest.
[...] the pre-starfaring people are childlike and naive, and can't be expected to live up to civilized standards, so we better watch them from afar, even as they die by millions from diseases and starvation our advanced technology could easily fix, all for their own good of course - we wouldn't want to corrupt their "natural development".
"Advanced technology" like guns, chemical weapons and the like sure has been a runaway success in the third world, hasn't it ?
Cultures are not analogous to persons. A primitive culture doesn't mean that it's members are stupid.
Who said anything about stupidity ? This is about ignorance and immaturity.
It simply means that they have less accumulated knowledge than members of a more advanced culture.
And less accumulated wisdom, which is far, far more important.
Given this, the moral thing to do is to give them the option to learn - not forcefeeding, not witholding information. Anything else is condescending.
Yeah. For example, we should give all the religious nutters (to pick a contemporary example) full access to all the information and resources they need to make nukes. Should end just peachy.
because people like aspiring to more or less godlike powers and the fact that the jedi and sith needed any kind of help to do all that 'magic', that they weren't gods by themselves pisses off everyone.
I just don't see how the midichlorians are different to any other aspect of an individual's physique. Just like some people are better runners, have better co-ordination or build up muscle easier, some would be more predisposed to being able to manipulate the "Force".
I certainly found midichlorians a far more satisfying explanation than the mysticism/magic of earlier episodes.
Maybe this will run against popular opinion here, but I think this class-action suit against Microsoft is seriously misguided, frivolous, and ultimately pointless. I would be much more in favor of lawsuits against system manufacturers like Dell, Lenovo, and HP who knowingly switched almost their entire product line to an OS that couldn't run on any but the highest-end machines.
At no point has Vista ever required anything remotely close to "the highest end machines".
You are correct, however, this is certainly a lawsuit that should be aimed at hardware sellers. When all that's needed to turn a machine from "barely runs Vista" to "Vista runs well" is US$50ish worth of RAM, not communicating that to customers is borderline fraud.
Rubbish. OS X is a dog on anything with less than a gig of RAM and a G5 CPU.
Heck, even on my mum's G5 iMac with 2G, it still chunks up regularly. My old 1Ghz iBook with 768MB was painfully slow doing anything more than basic web browsing and email (Vista is noticably more responsive on a similarly specced ca. 2000 deskop PC).
In addition to the fact that each major release has run FASTER on all of my hardware.
This stopped about 10.4. Also, it's not hard to get faster with every release when you start off so slow to begin with. It was _years_ after OS X was first released before hardware that could run it well even existed. Windows has never, ever been that bad.
You need similar levels of hardware to run OS X and Vista at similar levels of performance. OS X might give slightly more leeway at the low end, but when "the low end" is machines from 5+ years ago, and a brand new machine with dual cores and 2G RAM is under US$450, that's really not anything more than a footnote.
Would you find somebody defending child pornography.
In fact, you'll find people "defending" it all over the world. Two examples that spring immediately to mind are "children" recording their own consensual sex with other "children" and "children" involved in pornography where the age they are allowed to do so just happens to be lower than where ever you are.
BTW movies where where they muder people are illegal last time I checked.
I'm pretty sure it's not illegal to have one of thos "terrorist beheading" videos on your computer.
yes, good lawyers are very useful people to have (good accountants also fall in the undervalued category), but there are way too many bad (where bad="complete lack of ethics") ones around, hence the big-brushing of the profession.
As a nitpick, the problem with "bad lawyers" is usually their morals, not their ethics.
Indeed, such people (along with, say, the average large corporation's upper management) are usually an excellent example for demonstrating the difference between "ethical" and "moral".
What crap! WTF is so damned "magical" about the state of some planet's culture when they invent interstellar travel, as opposed to 50 or 200 or 1000 years earlier?
Because doing so effectively requires having hit the technological point where energy generation is no longer a bottleneck. This in turn implies that the technological barriers for eliminating poverty, hunger, etc are also either passed, or within close grasp.
Basically, it's a general measure of technology, with the assumption that once it is reached, suitable "social enlightenment" also has been, or will be shortly thereafter.
(I am by no means a hardcore Trek fan, but that's the interpretation I've always had.)
Any space culture that does that is no no friend of humanity or justice.
As difficult a concept as it might be to grasp, sometimes others really do know better. Would you give a five year old a loaded gun ?
Anyways, back off topic. I shuddered when I heard midichlorians. Then, in order to bring sanity back to the Star Wars universe, I decided that these midichlorians didn't *Generate* the force, they merely found beings who were strong with the force to be good habitats. So your midichlorian count mirrored your capabilities for using the force, but did not contribute towards it.
I really don't get the angst against midichlorians. Why get so uptight about an attempt to come up with an actual explanation of the force that wasn't akin to medieval religion ?
And the next person who shows me how awesome Time Machine is has a three word answer from me: Volume Shadow Copy. Windows Server has had this feature since 2003. And with a few mouse click and GPO push (read: automatic) of one app, all machines in my company can pull up network data from any time without use of backup tapes.
I think you've missed the point of Time Machine, which is solving a completely different problem to VSS.
The left is acting conservative and the right have the lack of shame to call themselves the "liberals"
The "Liberal" part of "The Liberals" refers to their fiscal policy, not their social attitudes.
They're called "The Liberals" because they're (supposedly) pro-free-market and anti-Labour-Union (hence the reason they're on the opposite side to Labor).
Earlier you said that new CPUs over the last "umpty-odd years" was producing longer battery life and this is your reply?
No, I did not. I said they were typically providing more performance with the same power consumption and, if anything, the power consumption would be reduced, rather than increased.
This does not mean the power consumption will definitely be reduced, it means it *might* be, but that is unlikely. Is English not your native tongue, or are you just being intentionally obtuse ?
Then that comment comment is invalid if you believe that the device vendors are putting in cheap batteries to offset costs because the customer never sees bettery battery life without adding to the product.
This is what's known as a non-sequitur.
No it doesn't but from what I've heard, even with more interest in power management on Windows, I often hear of worst battery life on the same hardware when running Windows. I've heard the same with the Eee PC.
I'm sure you have.
Well, something is wrong here and as someone who has worked in product development and the consumer distribution channels, well, something is wrong here. Asus didn't do what would be expected and there is definitely a market perception associated with two like products where one has a lower price. Cranking up the hardware so the Linux version is the same cost is a strange maneuver and well, Microsoft has been found guilty of many times worst kinds of manipulations. What is a person to think if they know these facts? It sure wasn't due to a full moon or Budda.
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say they've picked a price point and are trying to get the best computer they can into it.
In case you've never noticed, adding features usually has a bigger price delta than removing them.
The added screen resolution seems to be a smart move and we'll see if "atom" really is anything like the marketing hype they are putting behind it. I would not hold my breath as you seem to be doing because I've made myself blue in the face too many times and been burned. What is here and now is what is important because marketing dweebs can and will tell you all kinds of wonderful lies about the rosy future but only a drop might be true. The here and now is where it's at IMO.
Ever seen an elderly person trying to hit a small target with the mouse? It's just about impossible. The title bar is ok, but trying to hit the window borders to resize a window is damn near impossible for some people. KDE (probably gnome too) makes that dead easy. ALT+Drag anywhere on the window to move it, and ALT+right drag anywhere to resize it.
Or they could use the keyboard and forego that mouse they're having so much difficulty with completely.
However, I don't see the relevance of this to being able to drag windows out of the visible desktop, something the post I responded to was trying to pass off as "basic window management".
Riiight.. It sure is great when the software knows better and makes it impossible to use the system.
No, it's better when the software does the right thing (ie: makes it impossible to create oversized dialog boxes and makes it impossible to move them somewhere where they can't be seen).
then why do you suppose the new Eee PC currently only gets about 2.5 hours of out of a charge?
Small, probably low-capacity and low-quality battery to keep costs down.
And that's with the Linux install so I can't wait to see how the Windows version is.
At least as well, I would imagine. Linux doesn't exactly have a glowing history of power-management support and the hardware requirements aren't any lower (with the possible exception of disk space).
Me thinks customer choice was tampered with as Microsoft is a tough 'partner' and does not like to see companies be successful with Linux. IMO.
Yes, but people like you see Microsoft conspiracies in anything. It's actually quite fascinating to watch the mental gymnastics of explaining why $MANUFACTURERS hate doing $SOMETHING and then ignoring all other possible explanations to come to the conclusion that "Microsoft forced them to".
And so much for this being a cheap device now that the hardware was ramped up to handle Microsofts older version of an OS.
The older hardware handled it fine. The hardware has been "ramped up" to make the machine more _useful_. Personally I'm looking forward to the next iteration, after which it might be a genuinely useful machine rather than a cool toy.
I don't remember IE 4 being better than NS 4, but I do remember IE 4 replacing the Windows shell with something that gave a lot more eye-candy. I, and most of my friends at the time, had both NS 4 and IE 4 installed - NS 4 for browsing and IE 4 for the new shell. If IE 4 had been just a browser, I might well not have bothered with it.
Given the clusterfuck that was Navigator 4.x, it's amazing how anyone could remember it as being better than anything.
throw in the hope for better/cheaper battery technology or else your XP capable UMP will be back to a ~2 hour battery life.
Why ? Power consumption isn't like to change much. Today's mobile processors are substantially faster than those of, say, 2 years ago but have similar levels of power usage.
If anything, the newer CPUs would use _less_ power and improve battery life. That's been the trend for the last umpty-odd years.
Selective quoting for sure. The quad core processor is all well and good but, if we're going by clock speed, has a slower clock speed than the older Pentium.
Which is a meaningless metric, in addition to a attempt to move the goalposts. Your original post makes it clear you're talking about "speed" as in performance, not "speed" as in clock speed.
Also, it can not do a single task any faster than that single processor.
Most certainly it does. A Core 2 processor is - worst case - about 50% faster at the same clock speed than a Pentium 4. That's without taking into consideration tasks the would benefit from the newer SSE implementations and larger cache of the Core 2.
Since most people use one program at a time, the quad code will not help them much.
Most people's computers run several things at a time and the additional cores are most certainly noticable. Even for a relatively casual user, there is a perceivable performance difference between a single and dual-core machine (even when the dual core has a lower clock speed).
To be blunt, your assertion that an Eee PC is "almost as fast" as the average desktop PC is so wide of the mark you've nearly hit the person standing beside you. Heck, even going by the worthless clock speed comparison, an Eee runs at ~600Mhz and the average desktop PC will have a clock speed anywhere from 3-5x higher.
A 5 year old processor is not much slower than a newer one, comparatively speaking.
A "fast" 5 year old processor was a 3Ghz Pentium 4 (released April, 2003).
A "fast" processor today is a 2.8Ghz Core 2 Quad.
The second CPU is on the order of 6-8 times faster than the former. Which is a hell of a lot, relatively speaking.
When I said CPU speed, you misinterpreted it to mean merely clock speed, which was your mistake, not mine.
It doesn't matter how you interpret it, you're still wrong. The "CPUs are twice as fast every 18 months" colloquial interpretation of "Moore's Law" is holding straight and true, and has been for the last 5 years.
For the time being, bloat can't be cured with a new computer, so people aren't buying them. Low end computers like the EeePC are almost as fast as your desktop. Microsoft's bloat to sell boxes (with Windows, of course) is starting to backfire.
What ? My desktop PC *8 years ago* was faster than the Eee PC, and it certainly wasn't top of the line.
A desktop PC you buy for US$400-odd has a ~2Ghz, dual-core CPU and 2G of RAM. It would utterly destroy the Eee in terms of performance. Moving onto mid-range desktop PCs with 4 cores and 4G+ RAM and your statement doesn't even pass the laugh test. This is before getting to high-end desktops with 8 cores, 16G+ RAM and the like.
The idea that computer price/performance isn't increasing as fast as it ever has is just ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever anyone claims that society should be responsible for something, what they really mean is "somebody besides me should pay for it."
Or they mean "everyone else should help me pay for it".
You've got it backwards. We're not pissed because they needed help, we're pissed because being a Jedi was initially presented as something almost anybody could do if they were willing to train long and hard, not as winners of some sort of microbiological lottery.
It's made clear that midichlorians are present in "all things". Presumably in sentient, biological beings they do nothing except indicate how easily one can learn to manipulate the "Force". In that, they're no different to other physiological attributes that engender certain individuals with better stamina, higher muscle density, etc.
More importantly, once it's reached, they can reach you. Before that they are stuck in their shithole planet, so you can ignore them, since they can't follow you home.
...And attack you.
A fallacious argument. Five year olds lack the physical capacity to handle a loaded gun in a safe way. Their brains simply aren't working well enough yet.
Which is, you know, the point of my argument. The rationale is that until they've hit a certain level of technology, their "brains" (that is, culture) aren't working well enough yet.
On the other hand, an adult of any culture is perfectly capable of handling the gun safely, assuming of course that he has been shown and explained to how it works and what the safety requirements are.
And you call my argument fallacious. Were that true, deaths from guns would be a bare fraction of what they are today.
Unless, of course, by "safely" you mean "without self injury" rather than "without endangering others".
Besides, if you try to treat said adult like a five-year old, the chances are you get either a scatching reply or said gun pointed at you - and deservedly so.
Thus proving the point. Heck, look at how angry people get about driver's licenses, despite a non-trivial chunk of them being incapable of safely operating a bicycle.
Yours is simply a new version of white man's burden [wikipedia.org], or perhaps the Noble Savage horsehit: [...]
It's nothing of the sort. If anything, it's the complete opposite (the "White Man's Burden" is about the "White Man" having to nurture and guide other culters - the "Prime Directive" is about leaving them alone).
There's also suggestions throughout Trek that the Prime Directive is as much about avoiding problems on the Federation side of the equation (eg: someone lobbing into a primitive culture with modern technology and setting themselves up as dictator). From memory, several episodes talk about earlier, failed attempts to do what you suggest.
[...] the pre-starfaring people are childlike and naive, and can't be expected to live up to civilized standards, so we better watch them from afar, even as they die by millions from diseases and starvation our advanced technology could easily fix, all for their own good of course - we wouldn't want to corrupt their "natural development".
"Advanced technology" like guns, chemical weapons and the like sure has been a runaway success in the third world, hasn't it ?
Cultures are not analogous to persons. A primitive culture doesn't mean that it's members are stupid.
Who said anything about stupidity ? This is about ignorance and immaturity.
It simply means that they have less accumulated knowledge than members of a more advanced culture.
And less accumulated wisdom, which is far, far more important.
Given this, the moral thing to do is to give them the option to learn - not forcefeeding, not witholding information. Anything else is condescending.
Yeah. For example, we should give all the religious nutters (to pick a contemporary example) full access to all the information and resources they need to make nukes. Should end just peachy.
because people like aspiring to more or less godlike powers and the fact that the jedi and sith needed any kind of help to do all that 'magic', that they weren't gods by themselves pisses off everyone.
I just don't see how the midichlorians are different to any other aspect of an individual's physique. Just like some people are better runners, have better co-ordination or build up muscle easier, some would be more predisposed to being able to manipulate the "Force".
I certainly found midichlorians a far more satisfying explanation than the mysticism/magic of earlier episodes.
Maybe this will run against popular opinion here, but I think this class-action suit against Microsoft is seriously misguided, frivolous, and ultimately pointless. I would be much more in favor of lawsuits against system manufacturers like Dell, Lenovo, and HP who knowingly switched almost their entire product line to an OS that couldn't run on any but the highest-end machines.
At no point has Vista ever required anything remotely close to "the highest end machines".
You are correct, however, this is certainly a lawsuit that should be aimed at hardware sellers. When all that's needed to turn a machine from "barely runs Vista" to "Vista runs well" is US$50ish worth of RAM, not communicating that to customers is borderline fraud.
OS X runs fairly well on the 'bare minimum'.
Rubbish. OS X is a dog on anything with less than a gig of RAM and a G5 CPU.
Heck, even on my mum's G5 iMac with 2G, it still chunks up regularly. My old 1Ghz iBook with 768MB was painfully slow doing anything more than basic web browsing and email (Vista is noticably more responsive on a similarly specced ca. 2000 deskop PC).
In addition to the fact that each major release has run FASTER on all of my hardware.
This stopped about 10.4. Also, it's not hard to get faster with every release when you start off so slow to begin with. It was _years_ after OS X was first released before hardware that could run it well even existed. Windows has never, ever been that bad.
You need similar levels of hardware to run OS X and Vista at similar levels of performance. OS X might give slightly more leeway at the low end, but when "the low end" is machines from 5+ years ago, and a brand new machine with dual cores and 2G RAM is under US$450, that's really not anything more than a footnote.
Would you find somebody defending child pornography.
In fact, you'll find people "defending" it all over the world. Two examples that spring immediately to mind are "children" recording their own consensual sex with other "children" and "children" involved in pornography where the age they are allowed to do so just happens to be lower than where ever you are.
BTW movies where where they muder people are illegal last time I checked.
I'm pretty sure it's not illegal to have one of thos "terrorist beheading" videos on your computer.
yes, good lawyers are very useful people to have (good accountants also fall in the undervalued category), but there are way too many bad (where bad="complete lack of ethics") ones around, hence the big-brushing of the profession.
As a nitpick, the problem with "bad lawyers" is usually their morals, not their ethics.
Indeed, such people (along with, say, the average large corporation's upper management) are usually an excellent example for demonstrating the difference between "ethical" and "moral".
What crap! WTF is so damned "magical" about the state of some planet's culture when they invent interstellar travel, as opposed to 50 or 200 or 1000 years earlier?
Because doing so effectively requires having hit the technological point where energy generation is no longer a bottleneck. This in turn implies that the technological barriers for eliminating poverty, hunger, etc are also either passed, or within close grasp.
Basically, it's a general measure of technology, with the assumption that once it is reached, suitable "social enlightenment" also has been, or will be shortly thereafter.
(I am by no means a hardcore Trek fan, but that's the interpretation I've always had.)
Any space culture that does that is no no friend of humanity or justice.
As difficult a concept as it might be to grasp, sometimes others really do know better. Would you give a five year old a loaded gun ?
Anyways, back off topic. I shuddered when I heard midichlorians. Then, in order to bring sanity back to the Star Wars universe, I decided that these midichlorians didn't *Generate* the force, they merely found beings who were strong with the force to be good habitats. So your midichlorian count mirrored your capabilities for using the force, but did not contribute towards it.
I really don't get the angst against midichlorians. Why get so uptight about an attempt to come up with an actual explanation of the force that wasn't akin to medieval religion ?
What motherboard and case did you use ?
And the next person who shows me how awesome Time Machine is has a three word answer from me: Volume Shadow Copy. Windows Server has had this feature since 2003. And with a few mouse click and GPO push (read: automatic) of one app, all machines in my company can pull up network data from any time without use of backup tapes.
I think you've missed the point of Time Machine, which is solving a completely different problem to VSS.
The left is acting conservative and the right have the lack of shame to call themselves the "liberals"
The "Liberal" part of "The Liberals" refers to their fiscal policy, not their social attitudes.
They're called "The Liberals" because they're (supposedly) pro-free-market and anti-Labour-Union (hence the reason they're on the opposite side to Labor).
Earlier you said that new CPUs over the last "umpty-odd years" was producing longer battery life and this is your reply?
No, I did not. I said they were typically providing more performance with the same power consumption and, if anything, the power consumption would be reduced, rather than increased.
This does not mean the power consumption will definitely be reduced, it means it *might* be, but that is unlikely. Is English not your native tongue, or are you just being intentionally obtuse ?
Then that comment comment is invalid if you believe that the device vendors are putting in cheap batteries to offset costs because the customer never sees bettery battery life without adding to the product.
This is what's known as a non-sequitur.
No it doesn't but from what I've heard, even with more interest in power management on Windows, I often hear of worst battery life on the same hardware when running Windows. I've heard the same with the Eee PC.
I'm sure you have.
Well, something is wrong here and as someone who has worked in product development and the consumer distribution channels, well, something is wrong here. Asus didn't do what would be expected and there is definitely a market perception associated with two like products where one has a lower price. Cranking up the hardware so the Linux version is the same cost is a strange maneuver and well, Microsoft has been found guilty of many times worst kinds of manipulations. What is a person to think if they know these facts? It sure wasn't due to a full moon or Budda.
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say they've picked a price point and are trying to get the best computer they can into it.
In case you've never noticed, adding features usually has a bigger price delta than removing them.
The added screen resolution seems to be a smart move and we'll see if "atom" really is anything like the marketing hype they are putting behind it. I would not hold my breath as you seem to be doing because I've made myself blue in the face too many times and been burned. What is here and now is what is important because marketing dweebs can and will tell you all kinds of wonderful lies about the rosy future but only a drop might be true. The here and now is where it's at IMO.
I'm not holding my breath for anything.
Why can't I use a negligible amount of bandwidth when you are not using it?
Because you have no way of knowing whether or not a) it's a negligible amount of bandwidth and b) I'm using it.
Ever seen an elderly person trying to hit a small target with the mouse? It's just about impossible. The title bar is ok, but trying to hit the window borders to resize a window is damn near impossible for some people. KDE (probably gnome too) makes that dead easy. ALT+Drag anywhere on the window to move it, and ALT+right drag anywhere to resize it.
Or they could use the keyboard and forego that mouse they're having so much difficulty with completely.
However, I don't see the relevance of this to being able to drag windows out of the visible desktop, something the post I responded to was trying to pass off as "basic window management".
Riiight.. It sure is great when the software knows better and makes it impossible to use the system.
No, it's better when the software does the right thing (ie: makes it impossible to create oversized dialog boxes and makes it impossible to move them somewhere where they can't be seen).
then why do you suppose the new Eee PC currently only gets about 2.5 hours of out of a charge?
Small, probably low-capacity and low-quality battery to keep costs down.
And that's with the Linux install so I can't wait to see how the Windows version is.
At least as well, I would imagine. Linux doesn't exactly have a glowing history of power-management support and the hardware requirements aren't any lower (with the possible exception of disk space).
Me thinks customer choice was tampered with as Microsoft is a tough 'partner' and does not like to see companies be successful with Linux. IMO.
Yes, but people like you see Microsoft conspiracies in anything. It's actually quite fascinating to watch the mental gymnastics of explaining why $MANUFACTURERS hate doing $SOMETHING and then ignoring all other possible explanations to come to the conclusion that "Microsoft forced them to".
And so much for this being a cheap device now that the hardware was ramped up to handle Microsofts older version of an OS.
The older hardware handled it fine. The hardware has been "ramped up" to make the machine more _useful_. Personally I'm looking forward to the next iteration, after which it might be a genuinely useful machine rather than a cool toy.
I don't remember IE 4 being better than NS 4, but I do remember IE 4 replacing the Windows shell with something that gave a lot more eye-candy. I, and most of my friends at the time, had both NS 4 and IE 4 installed - NS 4 for browsing and IE 4 for the new shell. If IE 4 had been just a browser, I might well not have bothered with it.
Given the clusterfuck that was Navigator 4.x, it's amazing how anyone could remember it as being better than anything.
That won't move the window out of the screen resolution in windows. You can just move the screen within the resolution
And the relevance to moving an off-screen dialog on-screen would be...?
Unlike on Linux, where this kind of basic window management is trivial.
In no way, shape, or form, is that "basic window management".
Indeed, there's a pretty strong UI argument that it shouldn't even be possible.
throw in the hope for better/cheaper battery technology or else your XP capable UMP will be back to a ~2 hour battery life.
Why ? Power consumption isn't like to change much. Today's mobile processors are substantially faster than those of, say, 2 years ago but have similar levels of power usage.
If anything, the newer CPUs would use _less_ power and improve battery life. That's been the trend for the last umpty-odd years.
Of course on Linux you can easily hold the ALT key and drag the window to make the buttons visible. Not possible on windows without third party hacks.
Alt+Space,m,[arrow keys].
Selective quoting for sure. The quad core processor is all well and good but, if we're going by clock speed, has a slower clock speed than the older Pentium.
Which is a meaningless metric, in addition to a attempt to move the goalposts. Your original post makes it clear you're talking about "speed" as in performance, not "speed" as in clock speed.
Also, it can not do a single task any faster than that single processor.
Most certainly it does. A Core 2 processor is - worst case - about 50% faster at the same clock speed than a Pentium 4. That's without taking into consideration tasks the would benefit from the newer SSE implementations and larger cache of the Core 2.
Since most people use one program at a time, the quad code will not help them much.
Most people's computers run several things at a time and the additional cores are most certainly noticable. Even for a relatively casual user, there is a perceivable performance difference between a single and dual-core machine (even when the dual core has a lower clock speed).
To be blunt, your assertion that an Eee PC is "almost as fast" as the average desktop PC is so wide of the mark you've nearly hit the person standing beside you. Heck, even going by the worthless clock speed comparison, an Eee runs at ~600Mhz and the average desktop PC will have a clock speed anywhere from 3-5x higher.
A 5 year old processor is not much slower than a newer one, comparatively speaking.
A "fast" 5 year old processor was a 3Ghz Pentium 4 (released April, 2003).
A "fast" processor today is a 2.8Ghz Core 2 Quad.
The second CPU is on the order of 6-8 times faster than the former. Which is a hell of a lot, relatively speaking.
When I said CPU speed, you misinterpreted it to mean merely clock speed, which was your mistake, not mine.
It doesn't matter how you interpret it, you're still wrong. The "CPUs are twice as fast every 18 months" colloquial interpretation of "Moore's Law" is holding straight and true, and has been for the last 5 years.
For the time being, bloat can't be cured with a new computer, so people aren't buying them. Low end computers like the EeePC are almost as fast as your desktop. Microsoft's bloat to sell boxes (with Windows, of course) is starting to backfire.
What ? My desktop PC *8 years ago* was faster than the Eee PC, and it certainly wasn't top of the line.
A desktop PC you buy for US$400-odd has a ~2Ghz, dual-core CPU and 2G of RAM. It would utterly destroy the Eee in terms of performance. Moving onto mid-range desktop PCs with 4 cores and 4G+ RAM and your statement doesn't even pass the laugh test. This is before getting to high-end desktops with 8 cores, 16G+ RAM and the like.
The idea that computer price/performance isn't increasing as fast as it ever has is just ridiculous.