Unless they're adding a second USB hub/controller, adding 1-2 more USB is a trivial cost - mere cents for the added space the sockets would take.
Wifi would maybe add $20-30 to the end cost, I'd imagine - maybe less. A second ethernet port would likely be $10 or so.
Since the initial reports say $80 (or was it $60?) for a commercial, non-dev version sometime later in this year (and that wasn't just marketing hubub to garner more attention), those features seem like they could reasonably be put in the device at $100.
I'm going to bet that MS is planning to give Starter away for free to XP and Vista users. They'll get the person to upgrade, then get them to fork out for Home or Professional or whatever.
And you can bet there'll be a crack - registry or DLL - within a couple days of release which allows for unencumbered use.
I know it's kind of like an abused type mentality, where you assume your lover hasn't changed, but really: this time, he has. Windows hasn't been beating its lovers for a couple years now, at least. At least not regularly.
You have got to be kidding. Science fiction? Could we have picked a fiction genre more devoid of factual understanding? Fantasy, maybe?
There is a reason why sci-fi and fantasy are often grouped together. They're both factually delusional in many regards. One has space ships and perfect governments; the other has faeries and trolls. There is little difference, in most cases. Yes, some sci-fi has a political theme, but more often than not it takes the role of poor plot device or fantastical utopia (ala Star Trek - vs. Battlestar Gallactica, which is somewhat less idyllic).
But let's make a distinction here. BSG is entirely different than something like Star Trek. It is a political, moral, and religious commentary set in a fictional world (which is more-or-less plausible - and could be substituted for any any midevil or modern setting, more or less). BSG, and a similar but small subset of science fiction (like 1984) is first and foremost political fiction. Not "science" fiction. The 'science' part in their story is merely the backdrop - an unfamiliar but physically possible world - in which things are put into motion.
"Real" science fiction has a necessary requirement of suspended disbelief. Yes, it explores new, or different ideas. But it always starts out "Let's pretend". THAT is dangerous when we're dealing with real people with real lives, and it's terrifying that
This kind of bullshit is what makes me think that Obama's putting Kumar (of Harold and Kumar fame - Kal Penn) in the "Associate Director in the White House Office of Public Liaison" position is going to be indicative of the kind of farce we should expect from here on out. What's next, asking the ALF how to manage our forests (hint: it'll involve many, many more forest fires than we've currently got, and a complete cease to all US wood production)?
Unless this guy has a personal bankroll that he's using to fund his lethargy, his parents are likely paying for the lifestyle he's leading (in part or whole). Angry parents can do quite a bit to motivate a person. Maybe it's time someone called his parents.
The world he lives in is not idyllic. In it, you either step up to your responsibilities or you fail - and then have a very difficult life in an attempt to recover, or even just maintain a modicum of normalcy and comfort.
You are only (realistically) a certain amount of idyllicism in your life; this is usually related to how much money you have sitting around for such purposes. Short of being independently wealthy, chances are this guy's going to run his course of care free days and have to face the music sooner than later.
It's slightly more significant than that. It's a 1GHz ARM board with 512Mb of RAM for $100. That's maybe a 5th what you'd find in a SBC format.
Now, if only it had enough of the right kind of i/o ports to make hobbiest projects more appealing. 2x Ethernet and/or wifi would have been a good start.
Maybe. Maybe not. It might take a while, but unless it drags on for over a year or so, I'd wager it won't be much of an issue.
Yes, mindshare in the initiate is important. But it is not the end-all, be-all. They don't make decisions, and if they're not complete idiots, they're looking to their technical superiors for recommendations and input.
It'd take a lot of botching on both Oracle's and the "MySQL community's" part for MySQL to get seriously dropped, I think.
Gee, this is hardly surprising. Who'd have thought that over-indulgence of soft drinks (or 'adult' drinks like beer and liquor) would result in physical problems?
With soda/cola/pop/whatever, you are consuming a supersaturate. There is a shitload of sugar in there, and its consumption will dehydrate you. And it's not all that good for the ol' pancreas, either.
Diet sodas are also a problem, as they have aspartame in them. Aspartame is a mild neurotoxin. No, you won't get dehydrated and get muscle fatigue that way, but you sure as hell will cause problems down the line. Some people who are highly environmentally sensitive will have an allergic/asthmatic reaction to the stuff.
It's somewhat like a CS course where a student gets marked down for poor namespace use and/or indentation in a non-strict language - or for not documenting their code. IE, it's perfectly acceptable.
Yes, their code might compile, and it might even result in a superior program. But if the commenting/formatting of the code is shit, then they've failed the objective of the course. Same as if you've written something in a high-level language and the course was about low-level languages and their principles.
Same with TeX. It might not be immediately pertinent to the task at hand, but the objective is to learn when you're in school, not produce results. If your process is poor, then you're going to get marked down. No, you may not have needed TeX capabilities for that specific paper, but chances are you would for a subsequent one, or in the real world. And then you're hampered academically and/or professionally from doing the task properly.
A week or so ago I tried to download the Windows 7 RC. I tried to get the x64 and x32 version, both from within Firefox. 3.0 on Linux (x64 Ubuntu). Neither would actually start the download.
At the time, I was wondering if they were throttling or somehow inhibiting me from downloading, intentionally. The little spinning pie kept spinning, and nothing happened; no data was being sent or received, according to wireshark - it was just an irritating graphic to keep me occupied. Now I'm wondering again if it was intentional.
So it'd have been fine if someone handed in a binder full of ratty, coffee-stained 3-ring-binder paper, written on with a mixture of pens and pencils, as their final thesis - as long as it was scientifically sound?
Oh, that's right! Presentation matters - and has always mattered. First, it was penmanship. Then, your papers had to be typed (ever see a scientific paper that was typed on a typewriter, with the fine parts of the equation added in afterwards - carefully! - with a pen? That's dedication). And once computers came about as commonplace, they had to be properly printed.
You're either making this up, or your "just fine" is "my god this is taking a while; I'm getting some coffee". Or, I suppose, option #3, which is "you don't do anything with your computer"/"don't use firefox".
I've got a similarly spec'd laptop which is capable of basic web browsing and email, but don't think of using more than several tabs at once. Likewise, it's nowhere near capable enough to use KDE 4; hell, a WindPC, or my P4M 1.2GHz/512M laptop, is unsuitable for KDE4 (if I want to do anything) due to latency and memory use.
We're talking about hardware which, 3 years ago, "ran Linux as a desktop really well" to "my god that's painful, just decent for bare minimum". That's really not cool.
Current 'netbooks' were touted as entering the market at the $100 mark. I've yet to see one within $100 of that (to the exception of the Alpha 400, which doesn't exactly qualify - you can get the same thing on Ebay, but 8-years-old, for that much).
6h is an acceptable, even admirable battery life for a laptop. Yes, it's 'long' for a portable device, but that's only because laptops have (for the past 6 or so years) pushed ever downward in their battery life. For an ultraportable, carry everywhere device, I'd say it's on the low side of acceptable.
That initial statement of your's is so far from the mark it'd be farcical if it wasn't so horribly ignorant. It speaks of "I've never used Linux".
The standard MO for 'migrating' a Linux machine to new hardware these days is, essentially, creating partitions and then copying files. When it boots, you change one or two little things, and only then if you had to do so on the initial install to adapt for odd hardware. It's intuitive and dead easy. X automatically detects input and output devices; the boot process (not sure what does it these days) will detect all common controllers (audio, network drive, etc.) and even many uncommon ones. It's even pretty straightforward to migrate from one RAID controller to another, or from PATA to Linux md RAID.
Contrast this to the convoluted hoops you've got to hop through to get Windows installed on different hardware (or for that matter, simply migrate to another drive or replace a minor component like a video card). Slipstreaming a driver itself is more convoluted than the whole Linux process, never mind the fact that you've then got to strip out per-install data and deal with different processor profiles.
Now, for someone who doesn't know what they're doing and/or has a graphic card that's unsupported/poorly supported, I can see how this (incorrect) opinion might be reached. But even then, I'd bet the majority of the hardware gets correctly recognized.
How is this different than AMD-v, which Intel licenses for their virtualization (or maybe I'm confusing it with a64, which Intel licenses)?
Either way, if AMD "died tomorrow", the same thing would happen as would happen if Nvidia did: some other company, likely a previous competitor, would buy up the technology, and things would continue with barely a hickup.
A product or technology does not need to be open source or 'standards based' to gain wild adoption. Sometimes, a technology speaks for itself. After all, ARM CPUs are literally everywhere, as are many other things which are quite closed (as I'm sure you're aware). There will be someone else waiting in the wings to pick up the chalice, should it be dropped, with all worthwhile technology.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, should be in a "technology bill of rights". Why?
Simply put, the more thoroughly you define the 'shall not' ('shall not infringe') and 'shall' clauses ('the people are to be secure in their persons and effects') the more wiggle room is given to 'experiment' around the edges.
For instance, while not perfect (in today's understanding/nomenclature), the US Bill of Rights is short. it was was even shorter when conceived (some would argue to the better), but it has covered every single right in this country for 230 years. Yes, there is case law to iron out the specifics as the need arises, but the general principles are pretty damn clear cut.
At least in the US, this bullshit (the perceived need for a Technology Bill of Rights) is not necessary. Things like DRM, Trusted Computing, etc. could all be put to the courts under the "secure in one's person and effects" clause of the bill of rights. And you could assign pretty much anything as a corollary. Hell, what is an "arm"? Could you say that it's a constitutional right to be possess purely offensive digital tools in a largely digital world?
Nonsense. It hasn't been the promise, it's been the dream - good or bad. Fiction. It's like a flying car or 3D goggles for $0.99: nobody outside of 12-year-old boys (or those who thought like them) ever thought such things would be real in their lifetimes.
Since the article is almost completely pointless (it could've been written at any point in the last decade, almost), here's my list.
1) The Linux kernel. Yes, I use linux almost exclusively these days, but what the fuck happened to the quality since 2.6 came out? ext3 performance issues, CFQ and general i/o issues (I could do things on my 550MHz athlon w/ 256M - with respect to concurrency of tasks - that made my 1.2GHz, 512M system grind to a halt); VM priority; potential libata problems with PATA disks; breaking and shipping a new version with broken drivers (acpi) or architectures (PCMCIA/bluetooth) when it worked previously, just because the architecture was being re-written to make it 'work better'. "Leave it to the distro packagers to fix".
2) Ubuntu. It has a lot of promise, but once you scratch the candy coating, you can see the rust underneath due to hasty product development. Part of this is due to #1, but the rest is due to simple negligence. There is absolutely no reason for basic SMB/CIFS filesharing to be fundamentally broken in a distro indefinitely; and there is no sane reason why a bug that's been fixed upstream should not be in a new distro release months after the bug has been fixed.
3) Xorg. I remember when it forked from XFree86 and thought "good, maybe they can improve it". It's being improved, but damn is it taking a while. I imagine an alternative could've been written in the time they've taken to get this far, with the ability to run Xnest (and still have all the features of today). Why is X taking almost a gig of memory?
4) "netbooks". I know they've only been out for a couple years now in any concrete form, and that they're "wildly" popular, but they're selling something which doesn't take advantage of what was learned 7-9 years ago when "HPC" computers were around. There were certain features which were almost a sure-thing sell: long battery life, decent display readability, touchscreen, and a usable keyboard. Current netbooks are awkward and lacking in all of these points.
5) ARM processors/SBC/SoC as offered to the 'consumer'. This directly, somewhat, relates to #4. In the last 3-5 years, their prices have gone up - but with no substantial improvement in their specs. Yes, you can get a SoC with a 400MHz ARM CPU and 512M and host USB and SATA, but it'll cost you over $400 to do so. And really, for the cost of a 200MHz non-Intel SoC, running at ~130-250MHz with 32-64Mb, it'll still cost more than an entire Atom system (WindPC).
6) Intel Atom. 40W power use with the Intel chipset, and (until just now, basically) you were limited to the Intel chipset. That's horribly self-defeating, making them only desirable on price.
7) "Smartphones". If they're so damn smart, why can't I use them to their full potential? Most of them have some awesome hardware, yet we're restricted to the horrid software stacks on them (Apple included). Why no host mini-USB? I can't wait for MS to release a WinMo phone, because at least then things would (hopefully) get stirred up a bit.
8) Anti-spam filtering. It's still a huge up-hill battle to try and deal with it, and there isn't a solution in sight.
9) SSD storage, and rotation-free storage in general. It is not living up to expectations or promises, never mind the crystal storage methods mentioned almost a decade ago that got some really nice density.
10) Duke Nukem Forever. Let's face it: everyone wanted to at least see if it'd be as fun as Duke3D.
We've been around for millions of years, and yet we're only now just beginning to understand what makes ourselves - people - tick. Yet there are still massive, massive realms of psychology and biology of which we have an incomplete (to say the best) understanding. What makes you think we'd be able to - effectively - emulate that architecture?
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Unless they're adding a second USB hub/controller, adding 1-2 more USB is a trivial cost - mere cents for the added space the sockets would take.
Wifi would maybe add $20-30 to the end cost, I'd imagine - maybe less. A second ethernet port would likely be $10 or so.
Since the initial reports say $80 (or was it $60?) for a commercial, non-dev version sometime later in this year (and that wasn't just marketing hubub to garner more attention), those features seem like they could reasonably be put in the device at $100.
I'm going to bet that MS is planning to give Starter away for free to XP and Vista users. They'll get the person to upgrade, then get them to fork out for Home or Professional or whatever.
And you can bet there'll be a crack - registry or DLL - within a couple days of release which allows for unencumbered use.
Oh come off it. Those jokes are getting old.
I know it's kind of like an abused type mentality, where you assume your lover hasn't changed, but really: this time, he has. Windows hasn't been beating its lovers for a couple years now, at least. At least not regularly.
You have got to be kidding. Science fiction? Could we have picked a fiction genre more devoid of factual understanding? Fantasy, maybe?
There is a reason why sci-fi and fantasy are often grouped together. They're both factually delusional in many regards. One has space ships and perfect governments; the other has faeries and trolls. There is little difference, in most cases. Yes, some sci-fi has a political theme, but more often than not it takes the role of poor plot device or fantastical utopia (ala Star Trek - vs. Battlestar Gallactica, which is somewhat less idyllic).
But let's make a distinction here. BSG is entirely different than something like Star Trek. It is a political, moral, and religious commentary set in a fictional world (which is more-or-less plausible - and could be substituted for any any midevil or modern setting, more or less). BSG, and a similar but small subset of science fiction (like 1984) is first and foremost political fiction. Not "science" fiction. The 'science' part in their story is merely the backdrop - an unfamiliar but physically possible world - in which things are put into motion.
"Real" science fiction has a necessary requirement of suspended disbelief. Yes, it explores new, or different ideas. But it always starts out "Let's pretend". THAT is dangerous when we're dealing with real people with real lives, and it's terrifying that
This kind of bullshit is what makes me think that Obama's putting Kumar (of Harold and Kumar fame - Kal Penn) in the "Associate Director in the White House Office of Public Liaison" position is going to be indicative of the kind of farce we should expect from here on out. What's next, asking the ALF how to manage our forests (hint: it'll involve many, many more forest fires than we've currently got, and a complete cease to all US wood production)?
Unless this guy has a personal bankroll that he's using to fund his lethargy, his parents are likely paying for the lifestyle he's leading (in part or whole). Angry parents can do quite a bit to motivate a person. Maybe it's time someone called his parents.
The world he lives in is not idyllic. In it, you either step up to your responsibilities or you fail - and then have a very difficult life in an attempt to recover, or even just maintain a modicum of normalcy and comfort.
You are only (realistically) a certain amount of idyllicism in your life; this is usually related to how much money you have sitting around for such purposes. Short of being independently wealthy, chances are this guy's going to run his course of care free days and have to face the music sooner than later.
It's slightly more significant than that. It's a 1GHz ARM board with 512Mb of RAM for $100. That's maybe a 5th what you'd find in a SBC format.
Now, if only it had enough of the right kind of i/o ports to make hobbiest projects more appealing. 2x Ethernet and/or wifi would have been a good start.
These are missing features which would make these well suited for wider geekdom adoption.
Namely (in this order):
* 2x Ethernet (only has one)
* eSATA (only has CPU intensive USB 2.0)
* WiFi (with a hostap capable chip)
No, not all those features are necessary, and they're not all inclusively necessary, but they'd certainly push it a long way in any combination.
One or the other would make these very appealing. As it stands, they're only a cursory attraction. Their cost outweighs any functionality.
Maybe. Maybe not. It might take a while, but unless it drags on for over a year or so, I'd wager it won't be much of an issue.
Yes, mindshare in the initiate is important. But it is not the end-all, be-all. They don't make decisions, and if they're not complete idiots, they're looking to their technical superiors for recommendations and input.
It'd take a lot of botching on both Oracle's and the "MySQL community's" part for MySQL to get seriously dropped, I think.
Well, that doesn't really count. Intel video is least-common-denominator; their chipsets haven't improved markedly in the last 6 years.
If you go integrated (as in, on-motherboard) go ATI or Nvidia. There's a huge difference.
Gee, this is hardly surprising. Who'd have thought that over-indulgence of soft drinks (or 'adult' drinks like beer and liquor) would result in physical problems?
With soda/cola/pop/whatever, you are consuming a supersaturate. There is a shitload of sugar in there, and its consumption will dehydrate you. And it's not all that good for the ol' pancreas, either.
Diet sodas are also a problem, as they have aspartame in them. Aspartame is a mild neurotoxin. No, you won't get dehydrated and get muscle fatigue that way, but you sure as hell will cause problems down the line. Some people who are highly environmentally sensitive will have an allergic/asthmatic reaction to the stuff.
It's somewhat like a CS course where a student gets marked down for poor namespace use and/or indentation in a non-strict language - or for not documenting their code. IE, it's perfectly acceptable.
Yes, their code might compile, and it might even result in a superior program. But if the commenting/formatting of the code is shit, then they've failed the objective of the course. Same as if you've written something in a high-level language and the course was about low-level languages and their principles.
Same with TeX. It might not be immediately pertinent to the task at hand, but the objective is to learn when you're in school, not produce results. If your process is poor, then you're going to get marked down. No, you may not have needed TeX capabilities for that specific paper, but chances are you would for a subsequent one, or in the real world. And then you're hampered academically and/or professionally from doing the task properly.
A week or so ago I tried to download the Windows 7 RC. I tried to get the x64 and x32 version, both from within Firefox. 3.0 on Linux (x64 Ubuntu). Neither would actually start the download.
At the time, I was wondering if they were throttling or somehow inhibiting me from downloading, intentionally. The little spinning pie kept spinning, and nothing happened; no data was being sent or received, according to wireshark - it was just an irritating graphic to keep me occupied. Now I'm wondering again if it was intentional.
Uh, doesn't all of MS's servers get fronted by Alkamai systems (running Linux) to distribute the load and help mitigate DDoS attacks?
Output is all that matters?
So it'd have been fine if someone handed in a binder full of ratty, coffee-stained 3-ring-binder paper, written on with a mixture of pens and pencils, as their final thesis - as long as it was scientifically sound?
Oh, that's right! Presentation matters - and has always mattered. First, it was penmanship. Then, your papers had to be typed (ever see a scientific paper that was typed on a typewriter, with the fine parts of the equation added in afterwards - carefully! - with a pen? That's dedication). And once computers came about as commonplace, they had to be properly printed.
You're either making this up, or your "just fine" is "my god this is taking a while; I'm getting some coffee". Or, I suppose, option #3, which is "you don't do anything with your computer"/"don't use firefox".
I've got a similarly spec'd laptop which is capable of basic web browsing and email, but don't think of using more than several tabs at once. Likewise, it's nowhere near capable enough to use KDE 4; hell, a WindPC, or my P4M 1.2GHz/512M laptop, is unsuitable for KDE4 (if I want to do anything) due to latency and memory use.
We're talking about hardware which, 3 years ago, "ran Linux as a desktop really well" to "my god that's painful, just decent for bare minimum". That's really not cool.
Current 'netbooks' were touted as entering the market at the $100 mark. I've yet to see one within $100 of that (to the exception of the Alpha 400, which doesn't exactly qualify - you can get the same thing on Ebay, but 8-years-old, for that much).
6h is an acceptable, even admirable battery life for a laptop. Yes, it's 'long' for a portable device, but that's only because laptops have (for the past 6 or so years) pushed ever downward in their battery life. For an ultraportable, carry everywhere device, I'd say it's on the low side of acceptable.
That initial statement of your's is so far from the mark it'd be farcical if it wasn't so horribly ignorant. It speaks of "I've never used Linux".
The standard MO for 'migrating' a Linux machine to new hardware these days is, essentially, creating partitions and then copying files. When it boots, you change one or two little things, and only then if you had to do so on the initial install to adapt for odd hardware. It's intuitive and dead easy. X automatically detects input and output devices; the boot process (not sure what does it these days) will detect all common controllers (audio, network drive, etc.) and even many uncommon ones. It's even pretty straightforward to migrate from one RAID controller to another, or from PATA to Linux md RAID.
Contrast this to the convoluted hoops you've got to hop through to get Windows installed on different hardware (or for that matter, simply migrate to another drive or replace a minor component like a video card). Slipstreaming a driver itself is more convoluted than the whole Linux process, never mind the fact that you've then got to strip out per-install data and deal with different processor profiles.
Now, for someone who doesn't know what they're doing and/or has a graphic card that's unsupported/poorly supported, I can see how this (incorrect) opinion might be reached. But even then, I'd bet the majority of the hardware gets correctly recognized.
How is this different than AMD-v, which Intel licenses for their virtualization (or maybe I'm confusing it with a64, which Intel licenses)?
Either way, if AMD "died tomorrow", the same thing would happen as would happen if Nvidia did: some other company, likely a previous competitor, would buy up the technology, and things would continue with barely a hickup.
A product or technology does not need to be open source or 'standards based' to gain wild adoption. Sometimes, a technology speaks for itself. After all, ARM CPUs are literally everywhere, as are many other things which are quite closed (as I'm sure you're aware). There will be someone else waiting in the wings to pick up the chalice, should it be dropped, with all worthwhile technology.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, should be in a "technology bill of rights". Why?
Simply put, the more thoroughly you define the 'shall not' ('shall not infringe') and 'shall' clauses ('the people are to be secure in their persons and effects') the more wiggle room is given to 'experiment' around the edges.
For instance, while not perfect (in today's understanding/nomenclature), the US Bill of Rights is short. it was was even shorter when conceived (some would argue to the better), but it has covered every single right in this country for 230 years. Yes, there is case law to iron out the specifics as the need arises, but the general principles are pretty damn clear cut.
At least in the US, this bullshit (the perceived need for a Technology Bill of Rights) is not necessary. Things like DRM, Trusted Computing, etc. could all be put to the courts under the "secure in one's person and effects" clause of the bill of rights. And you could assign pretty much anything as a corollary. Hell, what is an "arm"? Could you say that it's a constitutional right to be possess purely offensive digital tools in a largely digital world?
Nonsense. It hasn't been the promise, it's been the dream - good or bad. Fiction. It's like a flying car or 3D goggles for $0.99: nobody outside of 12-year-old boys (or those who thought like them) ever thought such things would be real in their lifetimes.
Since the article is almost completely pointless (it could've been written at any point in the last decade, almost), here's my list.
1) The Linux kernel. Yes, I use linux almost exclusively these days, but what the fuck happened to the quality since 2.6 came out? ext3 performance issues, CFQ and general i/o issues (I could do things on my 550MHz athlon w/ 256M - with respect to concurrency of tasks - that made my 1.2GHz, 512M system grind to a halt); VM priority; potential libata problems with PATA disks; breaking and shipping a new version with broken drivers (acpi) or architectures (PCMCIA/bluetooth) when it worked previously, just because the architecture was being re-written to make it 'work better'. "Leave it to the distro packagers to fix".
2) Ubuntu. It has a lot of promise, but once you scratch the candy coating, you can see the rust underneath due to hasty product development. Part of this is due to #1, but the rest is due to simple negligence. There is absolutely no reason for basic SMB/CIFS filesharing to be fundamentally broken in a distro indefinitely; and there is no sane reason why a bug that's been fixed upstream should not be in a new distro release months after the bug has been fixed.
3) Xorg. I remember when it forked from XFree86 and thought "good, maybe they can improve it". It's being improved, but damn is it taking a while. I imagine an alternative could've been written in the time they've taken to get this far, with the ability to run Xnest (and still have all the features of today). Why is X taking almost a gig of memory?
4) "netbooks". I know they've only been out for a couple years now in any concrete form, and that they're "wildly" popular, but they're selling something which doesn't take advantage of what was learned 7-9 years ago when "HPC" computers were around. There were certain features which were almost a sure-thing sell: long battery life, decent display readability, touchscreen, and a usable keyboard. Current netbooks are awkward and lacking in all of these points.
5) ARM processors/SBC/SoC as offered to the 'consumer'. This directly, somewhat, relates to #4. In the last 3-5 years, their prices have gone up - but with no substantial improvement in their specs. Yes, you can get a SoC with a 400MHz ARM CPU and 512M and host USB and SATA, but it'll cost you over $400 to do so. And really, for the cost of a 200MHz non-Intel SoC, running at ~130-250MHz with 32-64Mb, it'll still cost more than an entire Atom system (WindPC).
6) Intel Atom. 40W power use with the Intel chipset, and (until just now, basically) you were limited to the Intel chipset. That's horribly self-defeating, making them only desirable on price.
7) "Smartphones". If they're so damn smart, why can't I use them to their full potential? Most of them have some awesome hardware, yet we're restricted to the horrid software stacks on them (Apple included). Why no host mini-USB? I can't wait for MS to release a WinMo phone, because at least then things would (hopefully) get stirred up a bit.
8) Anti-spam filtering. It's still a huge up-hill battle to try and deal with it, and there isn't a solution in sight.
9) SSD storage, and rotation-free storage in general. It is not living up to expectations or promises, never mind the crystal storage methods mentioned almost a decade ago that got some really nice density.
10) Duke Nukem Forever. Let's face it: everyone wanted to at least see if it'd be as fun as Duke3D.
We've been around for millions of years, and yet we're only now just beginning to understand what makes ourselves - people - tick. Yet there are still massive, massive realms of psychology and biology of which we have an incomplete (to say the best) understanding. What makes you think we'd be able to - effectively - emulate that architecture?
My friend, Duke, just read the article, and man is he pissed.
nt