Not exactly. You still haven't grasped the idea of feedbacks, which is why the units are W per cubic metre per degree C -- i.e. they represent the increase in thermal conductivity per degree of warming (and thus are feedbacks, including upon themselves). You simply can't tie feedbacks accurately to a doubling of CO2, since the greater the temperature increase, the greater the feedbacks feedback upon themselves and the less important CO2 becomes. (Also, the graph you cited is the direct net change in anthropogenic forcings since 1750, and does not include atmospheric feedbacks).
Realclimate has a two-part introduction to feedbacks here and here if you're interested. The end of the second article explains how a runaway greenhouse effect can happen (as, to return to my original comment, is thought to have occurred on Venus).
If you just need something to look things up online, why don't you use your existing Kindle?
More to the point, why not use your smart phone?
I'm sure it's nice to have the bigger screen on occasion, but is that enough to justify purchasing a completely separate device for looking up things on the couch?
The difference is that nobody expects to use a kindle to surf the web, a la a tablet. Kindles sacrifice interface speed for battery life and readability -- it's kudos to Amazon that they've managed to convince users that a slow refresh rate is not necessarily a bad thing when you're just reading books.
But the Fire is another matter, since people think they're getting a replacement iPad. And considering that the Fire's OS is based off a highly-customised Eclair base (and has therefore presumably been in development for about two years) you have to wonder why Amazon didn't focus on using GPU acceleration more...
We *have* a Kindle, and it lasts about 15 hours (radios off.) That's what made me go look it up -- the difference between the fanboi claims and my actual experience. And Amazon confirmed exactly what I'm seeing -- they're not making any false claims, that's fanboi territory.
I don't think it's fanboi territory, there's just been a misunderstanding here. You linked to the new basic $79 kindle, which does indeed have half the battery life of the previous models and probably about 15 hours' of usage. However, most people commenting about kindles here (including myself) will have the older (and arguably much better) keyboard kindles, which had double the battery life and easily gave a months' charge. I assume that you've got the new $79 model; if you do have one of the keyboard kindles, then I'm afraid that you might have got yourself a lemon there.
The other caveat to battery life is that you really need to consider page flips (since changing the display is the main source of power usage) rather than reading hours. If you or your partner are speed-readers and are constantly flipping pages, then the battery life will be less. Also, if you're trying to learn something (like a language, that my partner does on her kindle) and are flipping through a reference manual constantly trying to find things, the battery will likewise go down.
Seriously, dude, you need to self-assess a bit better. So far, I've seen no evidence that you understand the role of feedbacks in climate change -- in trying to talk about feedback effects, you just went and quoted an IPCC report figure on the change in human-induced radiative forcings from 1750-2005 (and which does not consider feedbacks at all)!
If you want an IPCC reference, then the section you really should be reading is 8.6 ("Climate Sensitivity and Feedbacks") pp. 629 and following. To give you a quick summary, the feedback contribution of water vapour is generally calculated to be around 1-2W per cubic metre per degree C (after adjustment for the negative impacts of increased lapse-rate). Changes in ice-albedo contribute another 25% or so. Then compare that to the little graph from the IPCC report you cited, and maybe you'll see why this is an important factor...
(ps -- before you post again and do yourself further injury, you might like to read this.)
Oh, genius argument you have there, but taken a look at Mars lately? It's freezing cold even though it's atmosphere is primarily CO2! Must be global warming! Argumentum ad planetum
No, you're right, I've seen the light. We're saved! Venus never had any runaway feedbacks in its climate, no sir -- no feedbacks at all. And Mars, with all that incredibly thick atmosphere is proof that even radiative forcing is a myth. Huzzah!
Come on, Earth will never be like Venus or Mars (without massive solar changes), and making predictions based on what happens there is idiotic.
I wasn't suggesting Earth will end up like Venus, I was merely pointing out that Venus' climate is thought to have arisen through runaway feedbacks. You were, you may recall, suggesting that feedbacks in atmospheric systems could never create massive changes.
Which one of us is idiotic I'll leave to you to consider further. You can also debate whether it's you or Mars' atmosphere that's incredibly thick...
(And when you've finished all of that, take a look at water vapour and ice-albedo feedbacks sometime. You might be surprised.)
But saying that there is a 'point of no return,' a point where massive feedbacks start making the planet vastly hotter than what CO2 could do on its own, where ocean currents stop flowing.......that stretches belief.
Yeah, taken a look at Venus lately? Now, there's a planet that clearly proves there's no way a climate system could ever get out of control...
Seriously, though, I think you need to do a little more research into climate feedbacks. They're most certainly not insignificant, and there's a lot of them out there. (Hint: water vapour's one, the albedo of ice vs water is another... I could go on...)
If you think China gives one rat's ass what the IEA thinks about 'climate change' you've got more lead and mercury in your brain than a resident of Shenzhen. The only way their CO2 output is going to stop growing is if we apply tariffs. We won't do that, because we like keeping the industry that makes our stuff faaar away from our precious selves.
Funnily enough, China's actually doing a heap more stuff on reducing emissions than most countries, including starting trial emissions trading schemes next year. And their investment in renewable energies is extraordinary. Unfortunately, they're also the largest country in the world and they're industrialising their population at a crazy rate -- so whether they do enough remains to be seen.
But they certainly care a lot more than one rat's ass, and more than a lot of developed countries also.
Here in Australia they just passed a carbon tax - as if we can just tax the problem away.
Well, it's not a tax -- it's an Emissions Trading Scheme, but with a fixed-price set on permits by the Government for the first three years of its operation. Even in those first three years, permits are still able to be traded and sold as in any ETS, rather than CO2 emissions being directly taxed (as is the case in a carbon tax).
Once it starts being a fully-fledged ETS, incidentally, there are two separate non-governmental bodies that should hopefully ensure that CO2 reduction targets are set independently of the government (just as the reserve bank, not the government, sets interest rates). It's perhaps not the best solution, but it's not a bad way of doing things (and has a heck of a lot more chances of success than the Rudd Government's previous CPRS legislation).
The trick is getting enough countries to do similar, and in that respect the best hope is probably China (which will start a limited trial ETS next year). That'll help that 60% down, for starters:)
They are going to try their best to provide a Gnome 2 fork (MATE) which can be installed alongside Gnome 3 without conflicts. See the MATE section in this post.
You didn't read the first part of my post very well, did you?:) As I said above, MATE (surely the worst-named project in history!) is still very much a "maybe" according to that blog post, which doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
One of this big draws of the Kindle Fire is that has Amazon Silk built in.
Personally, I'd go a long way to avoid a browser like Amazon Silk and the privacy issues it raises. And quite seriously, if you have trouble loading web pages fast enough over wifi on a dual-core 1Ghz+ processor, then there's something wrong with the way the browser was programmed. Silk sounds like a solution in search of a problem to me.
Note that there's a Debian-based mint and an Ubuntu-based mint -- the Ubuntu flavour is the standard one (and is the current Linux Mint 11 release, based on Natty). Any Ubuntu ppa should be fully compatible with the Ubuntu Mint version.
Linux is about choice. Don't like it? Install something else.
The issue is that with the latest ubuntu release, it's very difficult to install Gnome 2 (there's no repository for it, to my knowledge... and Gnome's not a beast you'd wish to compile from source without a lot of spare time). Interestingly, following the release of Ubuntu 11.10, linux mint reported a 40% increase in their user base -- so a lot of people did install something else. But sometimes it's frustrating having to faff with your computer when you just want it to work; and switching to a new distro generally requires some serious faffing to get things back to how you want them again.
Probably the most important lesson to come from all of this is to make sure you retain a separate/home partition to allow easy distro switching. I've noticed that a lot of distros won't create a separate home partition by default, which seems a highly user-unfriendly decision to make.
look out for linux mint 12, it's supposed to have the most sane ui since gnome2
But still, apparently, using Gnome 3... and still, according to the screenshots on the blog, looking as fugly and stupidly designed as ever. At least they may possibly be including MATE, although the most recent blog post didn't seem to positive about the chances.
As a user who switched to linux mint because of Ubuntu's adoption of Unity and Gnome 3, I really hope they don't adopt Gnome 3 without a Gnome 2 fallback. Gnome 3 is a terrible UI concept, poorly executed, and no amount of linux mint window dressing (which I don't believe linux mint does very well, incidentally) is going to change that.
Actually, the one useful thing I've seen Siri do is make appointments in your calendar via voice. That's a damn useful trick -- it's embarrassing to break off a meeting to type in a new calendar appointment, but if you can say, "make an appointment to meet with Joe Blogs at 4pm this Wednesday" and have it all instantly done, that's worth something.
Paradoxically, it's the one thing Android can't do with voice, and it's the one thing you never see anyone actually doing to show off Siri. I recently watched one of my colleagues fooling around with his new 4S, trying (and failing) to have a "conversation" with Siri and impressing nobody (and hell, Apple paid money for that clunky attempt at AI?? I remember Apple ][ programs that could do exactly the same pseudo-babble stuff). But taking the phone, saying, "make an appointment to meet with Damien for lunch" and watching it happen like that got everyone's attention.
I assume that one of the many Android voice recognition spin-offs (and there's about a hundred on the market, most of which were there before Siri) will adopt this before long -- it's no more difficult than any other voice recognition task, and voice recognition is built right into ever Android phone. But sadly, they haven't yet.
It's because Android devices are marketed for nerds, by nerds. And nerds don't understand marketing or user experience
... and yet, Android has gone beyond iOS in market share of new sales -- even with the worst marketing campaign ever, people are wanting to get an Android when it comes right down to it. I'm not sure why it's working, but clearly it's not because of advertising.
I suspect that for most people, technology ads have just become a little irrelevant. And maybe that's because of social media recommending Android, and extolling all the virtues that the ads don't seem to. Or maybe it's because most people who would be persuaded by the Apple ad probably haven't heard of cloud storage before they saw that ad, and represent older, middle-aged people who are being left behind by technology anyway. But either way, it probably doesn't matter.
Well, I guess I'm glad (?) it's not just me. But it's not "LCD screen tech" -- I'm looking at an LED monitor on my desk right now and it has a great picture with none of the color-shifting and washing-out issues of my HP laptop. It may be something to do with how you have to engineer an LED panel for a hinge-type laptop case, or maybe power consumption issues -- but those are only guesses.
I think it's more that all laptop manufacturers are using twisted nematic displays, and have decided that the price cut (and possibly lower power consumption) they can offer by doing so is all the consumer cares about. They may or may not be right -- few laptop reviews even seem to mention the terrible viewing angles -- but everyone seems to be doing it, even Apple. I'd happily pay more for a better LCD screen.
Why switch? Are you looking for cheaper hardware? Philosophical leaning towards Linux?
While I can't speak for the OP, I recently bought a new laptop and chose (god help me!) an HP dv6-6135tx over a Macbook pro. Although I think the Mac hardware is exceptional, the fact that (in Australia, at least) it was 3x the price was a deciding factor. Another (less important) factor was the lack of a right (or middle) mouse button and a numeric keypad. And finally, there was an ethical decision to not support a company whose ideas on free and open don't match my own (but note that I'm not upholding HP as a bastion of these either -- they just benefited by not being Apple). I should add that I was considering both laptops as linux-only (I dislike both Windows and MacOS and would never use either by choice).
For the record, the HP works very well with linux after a few minor tweaks (with the exception of the Radeon graphics card, and the slightly increased powerusage of Sandybridge under kernel 3.1, everything works and works well). Since I don't do 3D gaming (and the integrated intel graphics is otherwise more than capable) and I still get 4 hours of battery life even with the Sandybridge issues, I don't see either of these as a problem.
Otherwise, my only gripe with the current round of laptops (including my dv6, but every single machine I looked at) is the incredibly crap LCD screens, that have a vertical viewing angle of approximately 0 degrees before either washing out or inverting. My one regret is not trying to get one with a higher-res panel (which seem to have better viewing angles)... but really, how did LCD screen tech get to be so appallingly bad? My 6 year-old laptop that I was replacing (both the burner and the touchpad had died) has a far superior screen, with superb viewing angles. Whatever happened to progress?
Assuming it's like Gingerbread, then yes and yes. Depending on your phone, you will probably need hardware drivers for some things, though (for which, just as with any linux distribution, you'll have to speak to the hardware manufacturers or wait until a compatible ROM is released by the phone manufacturer).
for e.g., Linux kernel is open source.i can always over write my kernel from the distro by downloading the source from kernel.org. can i do the same with android?
That's possibly not the best example for you to pick -- are you aware that Android runs on top of the linux kernel, and that you can build and install your own custom kernel on your Android system if you want?? But yes, you can download the full android source from here and build your own AOSP ROM should you so wish.
Of course, you could have found this out by using the search engine of your choice rather than trolling/. -- googling for "android source" brings up the relevant link on the first hit.
Nokia was considering Android and dumped it, because it was too painful.
Surely the $1 billion MS paid them to take on WP7 had something to do with it? I think Nokia was a bit silly in eschewing Android, personally... but then, their previous decisions on phone OSes haven't really inspired confidence in their ability to pick the market.
Android has really never been an open development model: the applications that make android "android"(from the consumer perspective) are closed
Um... the phone, messaging, browser, music apps -- in fact, pretty much everything in a consumer's "Android" except Gmail, the Market, and some mostly unknown odds-and-ends -- are open sourced. And groups like Cyanogenmod are developing these constantly. Sounds pretty damn open to me...
Don't be taking a holier-than-thou stance and say you're open and the competition is closed though.
Except that they are holier than either Apple or MS -- they are releasing their code base as open source (and not doing anything to stop AOSP-based ROMs).
And here's the thing: even if Google turned around tomorrow and said that they were never going to release any more source code, period, it wouldn't matter: people such as the CM team would continue to develop the existing code, and we'd still have a fully-functional open sourced phone OS running on top of linux. That used to be every geek's dream five years ago, and we've got it in spades. You don't need any closed source (Google) code to run a fully-functional Android system -- the only things you'll miss out on without the Google apps is a native Gmail client (which doesn't matter, as you still get the native email client OSS) and the Market (which doesn't matter because you can side-load apps, and even use a marketplace like GetJar's if you want to have a market interface). There is no way you could claim that iOS or WP7 provide anything like this level of openness or freedom.
To me, that's worth a few brownie points for Google any day, and Android definitely gets my vote in the OS-of-choice awards.
Obviously, you don't want a bunch of open-source hotshots coming up with a vastly more efficient version of Android so that people will be able to keep their older phones useful for longer: best to keep control of the firmware load so you can effectively obsolesce the devices at will.
... except that both HTC and Samsung seem very happy for customers to root their phones, and no other manufacturer that I know of has gone down Motorola's "extreme" bootloader locking path. Given the awareness of Android fragmentation in the community, it's not a great look for a manufacturer to be locking phones out of upgrades, anyway. Sure, it might work for the first phone a customer buys, but they're unlikely to remain loyal to the brand if the brand shuts them out and treats them like crap.
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Not exactly. You still haven't grasped the idea of feedbacks, which is why the units are W per cubic metre per degree C -- i.e. they represent the increase in thermal conductivity per degree of warming (and thus are feedbacks, including upon themselves). You simply can't tie feedbacks accurately to a doubling of CO2, since the greater the temperature increase, the greater the feedbacks feedback upon themselves and the less important CO2 becomes. (Also, the graph you cited is the direct net change in anthropogenic forcings since 1750, and does not include atmospheric feedbacks).
Realclimate has a two-part introduction to feedbacks here and here if you're interested. The end of the second article explains how a runaway greenhouse effect can happen (as, to return to my original comment, is thought to have occurred on Venus).
If you just need something to look things up online, why don't you use your existing Kindle?
More to the point, why not use your smart phone?
I'm sure it's nice to have the bigger screen on occasion, but is that enough to justify purchasing a completely separate device for looking up things on the couch?
The difference is that nobody expects to use a kindle to surf the web, a la a tablet. Kindles sacrifice interface speed for battery life and readability -- it's kudos to Amazon that they've managed to convince users that a slow refresh rate is not necessarily a bad thing when you're just reading books.
But the Fire is another matter, since people think they're getting a replacement iPad. And considering that the Fire's OS is based off a highly-customised Eclair base (and has therefore presumably been in development for about two years) you have to wonder why Amazon didn't focus on using GPU acceleration more ...
We *have* a Kindle, and it lasts about 15 hours (radios off.) That's what made me go look it up -- the difference between the fanboi claims and my actual experience. And Amazon confirmed exactly what I'm seeing -- they're not making any false claims, that's fanboi territory.
I don't think it's fanboi territory, there's just been a misunderstanding here. You linked to the new basic $79 kindle, which does indeed have half the battery life of the previous models and probably about 15 hours' of usage. However, most people commenting about kindles here (including myself) will have the older (and arguably much better) keyboard kindles, which had double the battery life and easily gave a months' charge. I assume that you've got the new $79 model; if you do have one of the keyboard kindles, then I'm afraid that you might have got yourself a lemon there.
The other caveat to battery life is that you really need to consider page flips (since changing the display is the main source of power usage) rather than reading hours. If you or your partner are speed-readers and are constantly flipping pages, then the battery life will be less. Also, if you're trying to learn something (like a language, that my partner does on her kindle) and are flipping through a reference manual constantly trying to find things, the battery will likewise go down.
Seriously, dude, you need to self-assess a bit better. So far, I've seen no evidence that you understand the role of feedbacks in climate change -- in trying to talk about feedback effects, you just went and quoted an IPCC report figure on the change in human-induced radiative forcings from 1750-2005 (and which does not consider feedbacks at all)!
If you want an IPCC reference, then the section you really should be reading is 8.6 ("Climate Sensitivity and Feedbacks") pp. 629 and following. To give you a quick summary, the feedback contribution of water vapour is generally calculated to be around 1-2W per cubic metre per degree C (after adjustment for the negative impacts of increased lapse-rate). Changes in ice-albedo contribute another 25% or so. Then compare that to the little graph from the IPCC report you cited, and maybe you'll see why this is an important factor ...
(ps -- before you post again and do yourself further injury, you might like to read this.)
Oh, genius argument you have there, but taken a look at Mars lately? It's freezing cold even though it's atmosphere is primarily CO2! Must be global warming! Argumentum ad planetum
No, you're right, I've seen the light. We're saved! Venus never had any runaway feedbacks in its climate, no sir -- no feedbacks at all. And Mars, with all that incredibly thick atmosphere is proof that even radiative forcing is a myth. Huzzah!
Come on, Earth will never be like Venus or Mars (without massive solar changes), and making predictions based on what happens there is idiotic.
I wasn't suggesting Earth will end up like Venus, I was merely pointing out that Venus' climate is thought to have arisen through runaway feedbacks. You were, you may recall, suggesting that feedbacks in atmospheric systems could never create massive changes.
Which one of us is idiotic I'll leave to you to consider further. You can also debate whether it's you or Mars' atmosphere that's incredibly thick ...
(And when you've finished all of that, take a look at water vapour and ice-albedo feedbacks sometime. You might be surprised.)
But saying that there is a 'point of no return,' a point where massive feedbacks start making the planet vastly hotter than what CO2 could do on its own, where ocean currents stop flowing.......that stretches belief.
Yeah, taken a look at Venus lately? Now, there's a planet that clearly proves there's no way a climate system could ever get out of control ...
Seriously, though, I think you need to do a little more research into climate feedbacks. They're most certainly not insignificant, and there's a lot of them out there. (Hint: water vapour's one, the albedo of ice vs water is another ... I could go on ...)
If you think China gives one rat's ass what the IEA thinks about 'climate change' you've got more lead and mercury in your brain than a resident of Shenzhen. The only way their CO2 output is going to stop growing is if we apply tariffs. We won't do that, because we like keeping the industry that makes our stuff faaar away from our precious selves.
Funnily enough, China's actually doing a heap more stuff on reducing emissions than most countries, including starting trial emissions trading schemes next year. And their investment in renewable energies is extraordinary. Unfortunately, they're also the largest country in the world and they're industrialising their population at a crazy rate -- so whether they do enough remains to be seen.
But they certainly care a lot more than one rat's ass, and more than a lot of developed countries also.
Here in Australia they just passed a carbon tax - as if we can just tax the problem away.
Well, it's not a tax -- it's an Emissions Trading Scheme, but with a fixed-price set on permits by the Government for the first three years of its operation. Even in those first three years, permits are still able to be traded and sold as in any ETS, rather than CO2 emissions being directly taxed (as is the case in a carbon tax).
Once it starts being a fully-fledged ETS, incidentally, there are two separate non-governmental bodies that should hopefully ensure that CO2 reduction targets are set independently of the government (just as the reserve bank, not the government, sets interest rates). It's perhaps not the best solution, but it's not a bad way of doing things (and has a heck of a lot more chances of success than the Rudd Government's previous CPRS legislation).
The trick is getting enough countries to do similar, and in that respect the best hope is probably China (which will start a limited trial ETS next year). That'll help that 60% down, for starters :)
They are going to try their best to provide a Gnome 2 fork (MATE) which can be installed alongside Gnome 3 without conflicts. See the MATE section in this post.
You didn't read the first part of my post very well, did you? :) As I said above, MATE (surely the worst-named project in history!) is still very much a "maybe" according to that blog post, which doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
One of this big draws of the Kindle Fire is that has Amazon Silk built in.
Personally, I'd go a long way to avoid a browser like Amazon Silk and the privacy issues it raises. And quite seriously, if you have trouble loading web pages fast enough over wifi on a dual-core 1Ghz+ processor, then there's something wrong with the way the browser was programmed. Silk sounds like a solution in search of a problem to me.
Note that there's a Debian-based mint and an Ubuntu-based mint -- the Ubuntu flavour is the standard one (and is the current Linux Mint 11 release, based on Natty). Any Ubuntu ppa should be fully compatible with the Ubuntu Mint version.
Linux is about choice. Don't like it? Install something else.
The issue is that with the latest ubuntu release, it's very difficult to install Gnome 2 (there's no repository for it, to my knowledge ... and Gnome's not a beast you'd wish to compile from source without a lot of spare time). Interestingly, following the release of Ubuntu 11.10, linux mint reported a 40% increase in their user base -- so a lot of people did install something else. But sometimes it's frustrating having to faff with your computer when you just want it to work; and switching to a new distro generally requires some serious faffing to get things back to how you want them again.
Probably the most important lesson to come from all of this is to make sure you retain a separate /home partition to allow easy distro switching. I've noticed that a lot of distros won't create a separate home partition by default, which seems a highly user-unfriendly decision to make.
look out for linux mint 12, it's supposed to have the most sane ui since gnome2
But still, apparently, using Gnome 3 ... and still, according to the screenshots on the blog, looking as fugly and stupidly designed as ever. At least they may possibly be including MATE, although the most recent blog post didn't seem to positive about the chances.
As a user who switched to linux mint because of Ubuntu's adoption of Unity and Gnome 3, I really hope they don't adopt Gnome 3 without a Gnome 2 fallback. Gnome 3 is a terrible UI concept, poorly executed, and no amount of linux mint window dressing (which I don't believe linux mint does very well, incidentally) is going to change that.
Actually, the one useful thing I've seen Siri do is make appointments in your calendar via voice. That's a damn useful trick -- it's embarrassing to break off a meeting to type in a new calendar appointment, but if you can say, "make an appointment to meet with Joe Blogs at 4pm this Wednesday" and have it all instantly done, that's worth something.
Paradoxically, it's the one thing Android can't do with voice, and it's the one thing you never see anyone actually doing to show off Siri. I recently watched one of my colleagues fooling around with his new 4S, trying (and failing) to have a "conversation" with Siri and impressing nobody (and hell, Apple paid money for that clunky attempt at AI?? I remember Apple ][ programs that could do exactly the same pseudo-babble stuff). But taking the phone, saying, "make an appointment to meet with Damien for lunch" and watching it happen like that got everyone's attention.
I assume that one of the many Android voice recognition spin-offs (and there's about a hundred on the market, most of which were there before Siri) will adopt this before long -- it's no more difficult than any other voice recognition task, and voice recognition is built right into ever Android phone. But sadly, they haven't yet.
It's because Android devices are marketed for nerds, by nerds. And nerds don't understand marketing or user experience
... and yet, Android has gone beyond iOS in market share of new sales -- even with the worst marketing campaign ever, people are wanting to get an Android when it comes right down to it. I'm not sure why it's working, but clearly it's not because of advertising.
I suspect that for most people, technology ads have just become a little irrelevant. And maybe that's because of social media recommending Android, and extolling all the virtues that the ads don't seem to. Or maybe it's because most people who would be persuaded by the Apple ad probably haven't heard of cloud storage before they saw that ad, and represent older, middle-aged people who are being left behind by technology anyway. But either way, it probably doesn't matter.
Well, I guess I'm glad (?) it's not just me. But it's not "LCD screen tech" -- I'm looking at an LED monitor on my desk right now and it has a great picture with none of the color-shifting and washing-out issues of my HP laptop. It may be something to do with how you have to engineer an LED panel for a hinge-type laptop case, or maybe power consumption issues -- but those are only guesses.
I think it's more that all laptop manufacturers are using twisted nematic displays, and have decided that the price cut (and possibly lower power consumption) they can offer by doing so is all the consumer cares about. They may or may not be right -- few laptop reviews even seem to mention the terrible viewing angles -- but everyone seems to be doing it, even Apple. I'd happily pay more for a better LCD screen.
Why switch? Are you looking for cheaper hardware? Philosophical leaning towards Linux?
While I can't speak for the OP, I recently bought a new laptop and chose (god help me!) an HP dv6-6135tx over a Macbook pro. Although I think the Mac hardware is exceptional, the fact that (in Australia, at least) it was 3x the price was a deciding factor. Another (less important) factor was the lack of a right (or middle) mouse button and a numeric keypad. And finally, there was an ethical decision to not support a company whose ideas on free and open don't match my own (but note that I'm not upholding HP as a bastion of these either -- they just benefited by not being Apple). I should add that I was considering both laptops as linux-only (I dislike both Windows and MacOS and would never use either by choice).
For the record, the HP works very well with linux after a few minor tweaks (with the exception of the Radeon graphics card, and the slightly increased powerusage of Sandybridge under kernel 3.1, everything works and works well). Since I don't do 3D gaming (and the integrated intel graphics is otherwise more than capable) and I still get 4 hours of battery life even with the Sandybridge issues, I don't see either of these as a problem.
Otherwise, my only gripe with the current round of laptops (including my dv6, but every single machine I looked at) is the incredibly crap LCD screens, that have a vertical viewing angle of approximately 0 degrees before either washing out or inverting. My one regret is not trying to get one with a higher-res panel (which seem to have better viewing angles) ... but really, how did LCD screen tech get to be so appallingly bad? My 6 year-old laptop that I was replacing (both the burner and the touchpad had died) has a far superior screen, with superb viewing angles. Whatever happened to progress?
Assuming it's like Gingerbread, then yes and yes. Depending on your phone, you will probably need hardware drivers for some things, though (for which, just as with any linux distribution, you'll have to speak to the hardware manufacturers or wait until a compatible ROM is released by the phone manufacturer).
for e.g., Linux kernel is open source .i can always over write my kernel from the distro by downloading the source from kernel.org. can i do the same with android?
That's possibly not the best example for you to pick -- are you aware that Android runs on top of the linux kernel, and that you can build and install your own custom kernel on your Android system if you want?? But yes, you can download the full android source from here and build your own AOSP ROM should you so wish.
Of course, you could have found this out by using the search engine of your choice rather than trolling /. -- googling for "android source" brings up the relevant link on the first hit.
Nokia was considering Android and dumped it, because it was too painful.
Surely the $1 billion MS paid them to take on WP7 had something to do with it? I think Nokia was a bit silly in eschewing Android, personally ... but then, their previous decisions on phone OSes haven't really inspired confidence in their ability to pick the market.
Android has really never been an open development model: the applications that make android "android"(from the consumer perspective) are closed
Um ... the phone, messaging, browser, music apps -- in fact, pretty much everything in a consumer's "Android" except Gmail, the Market, and some mostly unknown odds-and-ends -- are open sourced. And groups like Cyanogenmod are developing these constantly. Sounds pretty damn open to me ...
Don't be taking a holier-than-thou stance and say you're open and the competition is closed though.
Except that they are holier than either Apple or MS -- they are releasing their code base as open source (and not doing anything to stop AOSP-based ROMs).
And here's the thing: even if Google turned around tomorrow and said that they were never going to release any more source code, period, it wouldn't matter: people such as the CM team would continue to develop the existing code, and we'd still have a fully-functional open sourced phone OS running on top of linux. That used to be every geek's dream five years ago, and we've got it in spades. You don't need any closed source (Google) code to run a fully-functional Android system -- the only things you'll miss out on without the Google apps is a native Gmail client (which doesn't matter, as you still get the native email client OSS) and the Market (which doesn't matter because you can side-load apps, and even use a marketplace like GetJar's if you want to have a market interface). There is no way you could claim that iOS or WP7 provide anything like this level of openness or freedom.
To me, that's worth a few brownie points for Google any day, and Android definitely gets my vote in the OS-of-choice awards.
Obviously, you don't want a bunch of open-source hotshots coming up with a vastly more efficient version of Android so that people will be able to keep their older phones useful for longer: best to keep control of the firmware load so you can effectively obsolesce the devices at will.
... except that both HTC and Samsung seem very happy for customers to root their phones, and no other manufacturer that I know of has gone down Motorola's "extreme" bootloader locking path. Given the awareness of Android fragmentation in the community, it's not a great look for a manufacturer to be locking phones out of upgrades, anyway. Sure, it might work for the first phone a customer buys, but they're unlikely to remain loyal to the brand if the brand shuts them out and treats them like crap.
Sure is :)
Such an underrated movie ...
*laughs* ... I first started reading /. in 1999 (sadly didn't sign up for an account until mid-2002 ... oh, the missed opportunity for low ID number)
This story is pretty bad even by /.'s lowly standards, though.