What I "don't get" about these so-called tablets is their design limits. Do people actually want to spend that much on a Star Trek gadget that has very limited utility, without a keyboard? "Internet connected" means very little if you can't type w/o an added peripheral.
What ever happened to the 'old' style computer tablets - you know, the kind which were first laptops, and secondarily tablets? You know: the screen rotates/flips over once open, allowing you to re-latch it in place? That would be perfect for this form factor, contrary to the large 17" touchscreen tablet I had years ago. Presumably, the cost difference would be negligible while the functionality increase would be significant. (Given the form factor, it wouldn't even need to be a 100% keyboard or anything like that. Just something small and utilitarian.)
No, not the baby variety. And no, that's not a tablet - that's a freaking death star of a handheld.
I really like the specifications, and the pictures are sleek and sci-fi like, but I can't help but think that thing would be a literal pain to use. The edges look sharp and uncomfortable. I'd think they'd put more of a 'bulge' or 'bubble' around the edges so you'd have something to (comfortably) grab with one hand. Not just on one or two sides, but all around it.
Oh yeah, and I'll probably be getting one. It's the first "awesome" ARM based platform I've seen in some time which justifies the cost. (Of course, if they're mentioning $300, the lying fuckers are likely going to release it at $400, which is, IMO, just outside the price envelope. A netbook with similar specs, maybe.)
Tax refunds? Oh yeah, good. I'd not thought of that fact. Guess that might be where a lot of the hip trendsters get their toy money. Most people I know actually have to pay in, so the thought never occurred to me that some might be getting back.
What horrid timing - they're about a month and a half late, if indeed they do come out with this thing next month. Next month will not only be after Christmas, but it'll also be after this healthcare bill has passed.
Granted, there weren't too many, if any, "socially big item" releases this Christmas, that I can think of. No new game systems, no special new electronics (though, I'm sure there are netbooks aplenty under trees), no new product from Apple, and all the big PC vendors pretty much stayed stable throughout the year.
Of course, the "uninsured" demographic will have more money this coming year due to not having to pay hospital bills, which in my experience means the kind of people who buy $3000 Macs as often as it means homeless people. So it might work out for Apple to 'release late' anyway.
Not really. I'm a Linux guy who's trying to figure out how to write code that will be able to run on a number of platforms without too much platform-specific rewrite. I also think a GUI should be made in the same way it's used (IE with a mouse), so...
Yeah, I get that, but apparently you don't know what you're talking about. Water isn't explosive, either, yet if you add the right chemicals, *boom*.
You realize that it's the fertilizer that makes those 'fertilizer bombs' explosive, right? I don't know about you, but I don't typically put that stuff in my gas tank.
Somehow I suspect you're the same (trolling) AC as above.
I'm not even sure where he got his prejudices from. Certainly not from the rest of the world, where diesel is a preference. (If they sucked, they wouldn't both cost more and be more popular, now would they?) Personally, I blame Ford and the inexpensive gas engine for this shortcoming.
Yeah, some diesels burnt too much oil. Some ran like crap, particularly large trucks when dumping too much fuel. If anything, the smaller ones run better, in my limited experience.
But even an old Cummins or Detroit runs better than a similar gas engine, by quite a bit. Considering the amount of junk people throw in landfills, I'd think not throwing huge chunks of metal out to rust would be on the priorities list of the greens and warmers. But, apparently, most want to actually add more heavy metals to our waste heaps via their EV batteries instead of using what we've already got.
Also, the idle on a diesel isn't as hard on the engine as with a gas engine (also using significantly less fuel). That's important in colder climates, where a lot of people start their cars to warm up before going out.
Short of using a battery backup for 24/7 server equipment (and even then, monitor it closely) several friends and I have sworn off the things.
Why?
We'll take a downed server over a house/business fire.
I'm not saying don't use power filtering and the like. But unless you've got really, really good monitoring on these devices (as in, they report more than just the battery load) they're dangerous. A friend's exploded on him this past summer - it was about 3 years old. Toxic smoke, bulged batteries, and high heat were the results of that one. I've had one burn, and another explode loudly (though thankfully not forcefully - I was sitting nearby. I think it was the capacitors going, but I didn't examine it) after 2 years of operation.
Honestly, I've had almost as many power related problems from battery backup as I have seen from the power going out - if not more. It's just not worth it for the marginal increases in uptime and/or scheduled downtime.
That goes doubly for making sure my alarm clock doesn't blink. I'd rather be late for work than have an unstable bomb in the basement. I'll keep my batteries small or low density, thanks.
How about diesel engines? They're got more torque (ie, much more energy efficient for stop-and-go city driving), burn a fuel which requires significantly less refinement than gasoline (and can run w/o modification on treated waste oils), have a LOT more power than gasoline or diesel (1.39x as energy dense, largely due to the lack of over-refinement, IIRC), and the fuel isn't explosive at all (in fact, good luck trying to get it to burn).
No? Too much so-called "smog"? It's largely avoidable. Besides, there's negligible CO2 compared to gasoline, as well. And hardly any of the other Greenhouse gasses.
Great, I don't want prices to go up any more. I'll keep driving my consistently-$0.08/mile 2-ton, 20-year-old vehicle; you can experiment with fantasy technologies for a large corporation.
There are a myriad of other reasons why this is a bad idea.
Aside from the "blowing up" issue, you've got: * More likely to blow up due to moisture, on account of where it will most likely be stored. * Likely to never have much/any utility in the average home (short of, maybe, a failover device for brownouts). We get plenty of winter storms here, and I've only seen power out for more than a couple days once in my life (think that was in '96 or so). * It will be useless in 3-5 years. Then you've got a big lump of lithium to dispose of which, in many cases, will remain where it is indefinitely (ie in the basement, next to the water heater and/or sump.) The container/contacts will corrode, and then you'll start to have problems. (See "explode, page 1.)
Yeah, I don't think you understand what I'm talking about. With diagrams of existing power plants available, anyone can acquire them for nefarious purposes.
I'm not talking about taking them and using the diagrams to make a bomb/plant/whatever. I'm talking about someone taking the diagrams and using them for the purposes of planning intrusion routes with nefarious purposes in mind.
The technical details of how to build a reactor need not be sequestered - just keep these crude diagrams unavailable, please.
Here's some anecdotal evidence of how horrible Verizon is, in practice, in my area and how they're losing ground to other carriers. My area is the "rural midwest", specifically the state of South Dakota.
Mission, South Dakota. If you haven't heard of it, look it up on Wikipedia or something. It's nowhere.
A friend and I drove there recently to visit another friend from Rapid City. Our reception along i90 was fairly similar: we'd both lose signal completely in the 'valleys' between the hills from time to time between Wall and Mission (note: this is plains country, so a hill is still pretty marginal) - a ~150 mile stretch of major interstate.
My friend has a HTC Touch Pro 2 (which is a really nice phone) on t-mobile. His actual signal/sound quality was significantly better when he had reception. My phone, a common "free" flip phone from Verizon, lost signal along i90 approximately 2/3 as often, but the conversations had a lot of "say that again" in them due to lack of audio quality/over-encryption and the like.
Then we got south of i90 to head directly to Mission. Suddenly, he's got full bar EDGE signal (through iwireless, I think). I don't think I had more than 2 bars the entire trip, yet he was able to sync with his Exchange server and a bunch of other nice things (for all intents and purposes) unavailable on other providers.
Isn't this one of those things which, while not difficult to acquire with greased palms, might be best kept low-key? No, they're not blueprints. But the information certainly poses
Kinda along the lines of why the NSA doesn't have network diagrams of their internal networks made available - even if they're just illustrated with cute penguins, flying Windows, and hostnames.
They're the first-gen Celeron 7" ones, but if you're going to run Linux on it as a kiosk type device (minimal use, Skype, etc.), the price is perfect.
I've been too strapped to get one, and don't really need it, so I can't comment on how beat up they are or anything like that. But here they are:
http://www.memorylabs.net/aseerew90daa5.html
I believe I found them via pricewatch several months ago. No idea if they're still listed there; this seller also has (had) a number of similar refurbished netbooks at pretty good prices.
Yes, now the question is: is it x86 or ARM? Or something else?
$100 for an ARM or PPC machine with those specs isn't bad. It's not great, but it's not bad, either.
However, those specs on an x86 machine are astoundingly poor, and not worth the money. An x86 CPU of 400MHz won't perform nearly as wellas an ARM or PPC, for starters. Also, that's the "minimum" spec. What if I want a 7" or 9" screen, but they're shipping old POS Dells from '2001 with 14" screens?
Are they buying used crap off ebay for $20 and reselling it with a battery refurbish? What's the deal?
"Everything breaks" in Africa not so much due to an inherent quality possessed by the continent, but by its people. It's difficult to 'have something nice' when doing so makes you a target for theft and murder pretty much anywhere on the continent.
Connectivity goes down because the power and communication lines are stolen for their value in raw materials.
Power goes down because transformers are stolen for their resale value. Or maybe some militant/rebel/whatever shot it for fun. The power then does not come up for weeks because the company responsible has to find someone capable of fixing it who isn't off somewhere drinking off his last pay check.
Then, someone tries to fix the mess and jury rigs it. The company 'representative' comes out to fix it, see that it was "fixed" and goes to find a bottle.
My aunt was a missionary to Togo, Africa. Not necessarily representative of the continent, but a part of Africa none the less. They had to live in a walled compound with its own dedicated generators due to the robber-barons who lived by. The generators were primarily for nighttime security lighting and indoor lighting/computer use for a couple hours. They had wired electricity only several times in the decade that they were there (due to the lines being constantly torn up for scrap). They finally did fibre a couple years ago and the area has had intermittent connectivity, but still no regular power.
They usually heard gunfire at night, and often found where the bullets impacted the walls.
Painting the residents of Africa as victims is foolish. It shows the people of Africa disrespect - as if they are unable to shape their own destiny. Africa is the way it is because the Africans living there refuse (or do not know how to) to make it better.
A $100 laptop won't make any difference, except maybe lead to a couple more thefts.
If I were to buy a gun from my neighbor and shoot myself in the head, my neighbor would not be responsible for homicide. If my neighbor were to use the money from the gun sale to buy crack - get addicted and ruin his life - I would not be responsible.
What you are proposing is a world where such scenarios as noted above are true.
We've been over this before, and it's starting to get irritating. I really, really, really want to want one of these, but when netbooks are available refurbished with 1G of RAM and 16G SSD for $250...
We've been hearing about the sub-$100 netbook/computer now for about 2 years, it seems. Invariably it's an ARM processor based device, and it's going to revolutionize computing. Some promises sounded nice. Mostly, the products are vaporware or just crap.
Basically, this device has the specifications of a handheld CE device from 5 years+ ago, plus a little (and i do mean a little) extra RAM. 256Mb isn't enough for much anymore. It's dated. As a special-purpose device to be hacked, or to be used as a very basic connectivity/mobile entry/admin device, sure. It would beat a cell phone for any of those tasks. But its utility for even checking webmail is severely questionable.
(On the other hand, if it had a touchscreen, I'd pay $150 for it without thinking twice.)
For the same price, you can get a refurbished first-generation Eee 7". It has twice as much memory, a processor twice as fast, and USB 2.0 instead of 1.1. It's also extensively hackable: you can add to it and modify the hell out of it. The battery life is also comparable (more than 3h but fewer than 6h).
Let me know when I can get a $200 netbook with a 9" display, 1GHz or so ARM processor (with the kind of dedicated coprocessors one would expect for audio/video these days) and 1Gb of RAM. You know, something which might be able to compete on performance with a 10-year-old desktop. Even better, let me know when it hits the 1-1-1 trifecta: 1Gb, 1GHz, $100. Of course, I expect to have to wait 15 years for such a device - and then, I'll find it on eBay.
I think you might be exaggerating just a bit. They're at least as fast as a Pentium 4 with 1Gb of RAM (IE similar specs). The dual cores are pretty snappy, too. Even with Intel graphics, it's enough for something like Hulu.
Yes, if you do a lot of multitasking (such as installing things while browsing) they'll bog down a bit. But they're acceptable systems and will meet 90% of peoples' needs.
Personally, I'd rather have an ARM based netbook, but where am I going to find one of those? The only ones I've seen have - at best - 256Mb RAM and a 400MHz CPU. That's enough to do some things, but certainly not more than 1 or 2 tabs in a modern browser.
I've got a friend who used the Open64 compile to rebuild his Gentoo system (on a AMD64 CPU). Aside from ATI related issues with video, he said it was observably faster by about 50%, and 30% faster in the simple benchmarks. Either way - even if it's a 20% improvement in one area - that's an incredible boost.
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What I "don't get" about these so-called tablets is their design limits. Do people actually want to spend that much on a Star Trek gadget that has very limited utility, without a keyboard? "Internet connected" means very little if you can't type w/o an added peripheral.
What ever happened to the 'old' style computer tablets - you know, the kind which were first laptops, and secondarily tablets? You know: the screen rotates/flips over once open, allowing you to re-latch it in place? That would be perfect for this form factor, contrary to the large 17" touchscreen tablet I had years ago. Presumably, the cost difference would be negligible while the functionality increase would be significant. (Given the form factor, it wouldn't even need to be a 100% keyboard or anything like that. Just something small and utilitarian.)
No, not the baby variety. And no, that's not a tablet - that's a freaking death star of a handheld.
I really like the specifications, and the pictures are sleek and sci-fi like, but I can't help but think that thing would be a literal pain to use. The edges look sharp and uncomfortable. I'd think they'd put more of a 'bulge' or 'bubble' around the edges so you'd have something to (comfortably) grab with one hand. Not just on one or two sides, but all around it.
Oh yeah, and I'll probably be getting one. It's the first "awesome" ARM based platform I've seen in some time which justifies the cost. (Of course, if they're mentioning $300, the lying fuckers are likely going to release it at $400, which is, IMO, just outside the price envelope. A netbook with similar specs, maybe.)
Tax refunds? Oh yeah, good. I'd not thought of that fact. Guess that might be where a lot of the hip trendsters get their toy money. Most people I know actually have to pay in, so the thought never occurred to me that some might be getting back.
What horrid timing - they're about a month and a half late, if indeed they do come out with this thing next month. Next month will not only be after Christmas, but it'll also be after this healthcare bill has passed.
Granted, there weren't too many, if any, "socially big item" releases this Christmas, that I can think of. No new game systems, no special new electronics (though, I'm sure there are netbooks aplenty under trees), no new product from Apple, and all the big PC vendors pretty much stayed stable throughout the year.
Of course, the "uninsured" demographic will have more money this coming year due to not having to pay hospital bills, which in my experience means the kind of people who buy $3000 Macs as often as it means homeless people. So it might work out for Apple to 'release late' anyway.
Not really. I'm a Linux guy who's trying to figure out how to write code that will be able to run on a number of platforms without too much platform-specific rewrite. I also think a GUI should be made in the same way it's used (IE with a mouse), so...
Yeah, I get that, but apparently you don't know what you're talking about. Water isn't explosive, either, yet if you add the right chemicals, *boom*.
You realize that it's the fertilizer that makes those 'fertilizer bombs' explosive, right? I don't know about you, but I don't typically put that stuff in my gas tank.
Somehow I suspect you're the same (trolling) AC as above.
I'm not even sure where he got his prejudices from. Certainly not from the rest of the world, where diesel is a preference. (If they sucked, they wouldn't both cost more and be more popular, now would they?) Personally, I blame Ford and the inexpensive gas engine for this shortcoming.
Yeah, some diesels burnt too much oil. Some ran like crap, particularly large trucks when dumping too much fuel. If anything, the smaller ones run better, in my limited experience.
But even an old Cummins or Detroit runs better than a similar gas engine, by quite a bit. Considering the amount of junk people throw in landfills, I'd think not throwing huge chunks of metal out to rust would be on the priorities list of the greens and warmers. But, apparently, most want to actually add more heavy metals to our waste heaps via their EV batteries instead of using what we've already got.
Also, the idle on a diesel isn't as hard on the engine as with a gas engine (also using significantly less fuel). That's important in colder climates, where a lot of people start their cars to warm up before going out.
Short of using a battery backup for 24/7 server equipment (and even then, monitor it closely) several friends and I have sworn off the things.
Why?
We'll take a downed server over a house/business fire.
I'm not saying don't use power filtering and the like. But unless you've got really, really good monitoring on these devices (as in, they report more than just the battery load) they're dangerous. A friend's exploded on him this past summer - it was about 3 years old. Toxic smoke, bulged batteries, and high heat were the results of that one. I've had one burn, and another explode loudly (though thankfully not forcefully - I was sitting nearby. I think it was the capacitors going, but I didn't examine it) after 2 years of operation.
Honestly, I've had almost as many power related problems from battery backup as I have seen from the power going out - if not more. It's just not worth it for the marginal increases in uptime and/or scheduled downtime.
That goes doubly for making sure my alarm clock doesn't blink. I'd rather be late for work than have an unstable bomb in the basement. I'll keep my batteries small or low density, thanks.
Quite evidently there should be a third option.
How about diesel engines? They're got more torque (ie, much more energy efficient for stop-and-go city driving), burn a fuel which requires significantly less refinement than gasoline (and can run w/o modification on treated waste oils), have a LOT more power than gasoline or diesel (1.39x as energy dense, largely due to the lack of over-refinement, IIRC), and the fuel isn't explosive at all (in fact, good luck trying to get it to burn).
No? Too much so-called "smog"? It's largely avoidable. Besides, there's negligible CO2 compared to gasoline, as well. And hardly any of the other Greenhouse gasses.
Great, I don't want prices to go up any more. I'll keep driving my consistently-$0.08/mile 2-ton, 20-year-old vehicle; you can experiment with fantasy technologies for a large corporation.
There are a myriad of other reasons why this is a bad idea.
Aside from the "blowing up" issue, you've got:
* More likely to blow up due to moisture, on account of where it will most likely be stored.
* Likely to never have much/any utility in the average home (short of, maybe, a failover device for brownouts). We get plenty of winter storms here, and I've only seen power out for more than a couple days once in my life (think that was in '96 or so).
* It will be useless in 3-5 years. Then you've got a big lump of lithium to dispose of which, in many cases, will remain where it is indefinitely (ie in the basement, next to the water heater and/or sump.) The container/contacts will corrode, and then you'll start to have problems. (See "explode, page 1.)
Yeah, I don't think you understand what I'm talking about. With diagrams of existing power plants available, anyone can acquire them for nefarious purposes.
I'm not talking about taking them and using the diagrams to make a bomb/plant/whatever. I'm talking about someone taking the diagrams and using them for the purposes of planning intrusion routes with nefarious purposes in mind.
The technical details of how to build a reactor need not be sequestered - just keep these crude diagrams unavailable, please.
Except, in rural areas, where reception was spotty previously. Sure, you'd get TV signal, just slightly 'snowed'.
Now, good luck watching TV if there's inclement weather.
Here's some anecdotal evidence of how horrible Verizon is, in practice, in my area and how they're losing ground to other carriers. My area is the "rural midwest", specifically the state of South Dakota.
Mission, South Dakota. If you haven't heard of it, look it up on Wikipedia or something. It's nowhere.
A friend and I drove there recently to visit another friend from Rapid City. Our reception along i90 was fairly similar: we'd both lose signal completely in the 'valleys' between the hills from time to time between Wall and Mission (note: this is plains country, so a hill is still pretty marginal) - a ~150 mile stretch of major interstate.
My friend has a HTC Touch Pro 2 (which is a really nice phone) on t-mobile. His actual signal/sound quality was significantly better when he had reception. My phone, a common "free" flip phone from Verizon, lost signal along i90 approximately 2/3 as often, but the conversations had a lot of "say that again" in them due to lack of audio quality/over-encryption and the like.
Then we got south of i90 to head directly to Mission. Suddenly, he's got full bar EDGE signal (through iwireless, I think). I don't think I had more than 2 bars the entire trip, yet he was able to sync with his Exchange server and a bunch of other nice things (for all intents and purposes) unavailable on other providers.
What is the Bing you speak of?
Isn't this one of those things which, while not difficult to acquire with greased palms, might be best kept low-key? No, they're not blueprints. But the information certainly poses
Kinda along the lines of why the NSA doesn't have network diagrams of their internal networks made available - even if they're just illustrated with cute penguins, flying Windows, and hostnames.
They're the first-gen Celeron 7" ones, but if you're going to run Linux on it as a kiosk type device (minimal use, Skype, etc.), the price is perfect.
I've been too strapped to get one, and don't really need it, so I can't comment on how beat up they are or anything like that. But here they are:
http://www.memorylabs.net/aseerew90daa5.html
I believe I found them via pricewatch several months ago. No idea if they're still listed there; this seller also has (had) a number of similar refurbished netbooks at pretty good prices.
Yet, 25 years ago, South Africa was on par with much of the Western world - industrially, economically, and culturally. What happened?
Which blog entry is that? I missed it. :-/
Yes, now the question is: is it x86 or ARM? Or something else?
$100 for an ARM or PPC machine with those specs isn't bad. It's not great, but it's not bad, either.
However, those specs on an x86 machine are astoundingly poor, and not worth the money. An x86 CPU of 400MHz won't perform nearly as wellas an ARM or PPC, for starters. Also, that's the "minimum" spec. What if I want a 7" or 9" screen, but they're shipping old POS Dells from '2001 with 14" screens?
Are they buying used crap off ebay for $20 and reselling it with a battery refurbish? What's the deal?
"Everything breaks" in Africa not so much due to an inherent quality possessed by the continent, but by its people. It's difficult to 'have something nice' when doing so makes you a target for theft and murder pretty much anywhere on the continent.
Connectivity goes down because the power and communication lines are stolen for their value in raw materials.
Power goes down because transformers are stolen for their resale value. Or maybe some militant/rebel/whatever shot it for fun. The power then does not come up for weeks because the company responsible has to find someone capable of fixing it who isn't off somewhere drinking off his last pay check.
Then, someone tries to fix the mess and jury rigs it. The company 'representative' comes out to fix it, see that it was "fixed" and goes to find a bottle.
My aunt was a missionary to Togo, Africa. Not necessarily representative of the continent, but a part of Africa none the less. They had to live in a walled compound with its own dedicated generators due to the robber-barons who lived by. The generators were primarily for nighttime security lighting and indoor lighting/computer use for a couple hours. They had wired electricity only several times in the decade that they were there (due to the lines being constantly torn up for scrap). They finally did fibre a couple years ago and the area has had intermittent connectivity, but still no regular power.
They usually heard gunfire at night, and often found where the bullets impacted the walls.
Painting the residents of Africa as victims is foolish. It shows the people of Africa disrespect - as if they are unable to shape their own destiny. Africa is the way it is because the Africans living there refuse (or do not know how to) to make it better.
A $100 laptop won't make any difference, except maybe lead to a couple more thefts.
If I were to buy a gun from my neighbor and shoot myself in the head, my neighbor would not be responsible for homicide. If my neighbor were to use the money from the gun sale to buy crack - get addicted and ruin his life - I would not be responsible.
What you are proposing is a world where such scenarios as noted above are true.
Does calling a "half-assed managery of parts" computer an Africa seem terribly racist to you? It does to me.
I'd like one.
We've been over this before, and it's starting to get irritating. I really, really, really want to want one of these, but when netbooks are available refurbished with 1G of RAM and 16G SSD for $250...
We've been hearing about the sub-$100 netbook/computer now for about 2 years, it seems. Invariably it's an ARM processor based device, and it's going to revolutionize computing. Some promises sounded nice. Mostly, the products are vaporware or just crap.
Basically, this device has the specifications of a handheld CE device from 5 years+ ago, plus a little (and i do mean a little) extra RAM. 256Mb isn't enough for much anymore. It's dated. As a special-purpose device to be hacked, or to be used as a very basic connectivity/mobile entry/admin device, sure. It would beat a cell phone for any of those tasks. But its utility for even checking webmail is severely questionable.
(On the other hand, if it had a touchscreen, I'd pay $150 for it without thinking twice.)
For the same price, you can get a refurbished first-generation Eee 7". It has twice as much memory, a processor twice as fast, and USB 2.0 instead of 1.1. It's also extensively hackable: you can add to it and modify the hell out of it. The battery life is also comparable (more than 3h but fewer than 6h).
Let me know when I can get a $200 netbook with a 9" display, 1GHz or so ARM processor (with the kind of dedicated coprocessors one would expect for audio/video these days) and 1Gb of RAM. You know, something which might be able to compete on performance with a 10-year-old desktop. Even better, let me know when it hits the 1-1-1 trifecta: 1Gb, 1GHz, $100. Of course, I expect to have to wait 15 years for such a device - and then, I'll find it on eBay.
I think you might be exaggerating just a bit. They're at least as fast as a Pentium 4 with 1Gb of RAM (IE similar specs). The dual cores are pretty snappy, too. Even with Intel graphics, it's enough for something like Hulu.
Yes, if you do a lot of multitasking (such as installing things while browsing) they'll bog down a bit. But they're acceptable systems and will meet 90% of peoples' needs.
Personally, I'd rather have an ARM based netbook, but where am I going to find one of those? The only ones I've seen have - at best - 256Mb RAM and a 400MHz CPU. That's enough to do some things, but certainly not more than 1 or 2 tabs in a modern browser.
I've got a friend who used the Open64 compile to rebuild his Gentoo system (on a AMD64 CPU). Aside from ATI related issues with video, he said it was observably faster by about 50%, and 30% faster in the simple benchmarks. Either way - even if it's a 20% improvement in one area - that's an incredible boost.