Re:"I'm still waiting for my under $50 Macbook."
on
The $45 Windows Laptop
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Every time I've seen this sort of comparison, closer inspection has revealed that the Apple laptop in question has a number of other features that the cheaper one doesn't.
What happened? The iPad happened. Customers are shifting away from PCs of all types as the move to mobile computing accelerates.
I'll believe that when someone I know buys a tablet. I've seen a few people using them, but I've seen hundreds of times as many people using desktop PCs and laptops.
Re:"I'm still waiting for my under $50 Macbook."
on
The $45 Windows Laptop
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm amazed how few people actually price shop before they claim the Apple laptops are overpriced.
I did just that when I bought my new laptop a couple of years ago. My Toshiba cost $1100 while the closest equivalent Mac -- AFAIR it had a sligfhtly faster CPU, less RAM and a smaller hard drive -- was about $2500.
What I implied is that an established Western Democracy like Britain cannot pull out of a major Human Rights treaty without causing a huge bruhaha in the international media.
Like I said. The horror.
No serious government gives a crap about what 'human rights groups' say unless what they're saying is promoting whatever policy the government wants to impose. Sadly, Britain hasn't had a serious government since the 80s.
I've noticed that the left always go crazy when the working class vote conservative because people who actually work for a living know that most 'progressive' policies are just a means for the middle class to give their kids well-paid government jobs to tell everyone else what to do. The working class are naturally conservative, which is why the left have done their best to destroy working class culture and turn them into the welfare class, who will keep voting themselves more free stuff.
So, which party can Britons vote for which doesn't want this stuff?
And even if they could vote for someone, most seats are so safe that it would make no difference. Where I used to live in the UK I could vote for any party I wanted and the Tories would still win.
I agree that was the case on the older systems. Luckily with the increase in processor speed it's not that much of a problem any longer.
I can only assume you've never used Eclipse.
Dumb programmer approach to Java:
1. Don't even think about memory allocation. Forget to free up references to objects you're not using and lose references to objects you still need, so your program leaks memory or randomly stops working. 2. Notice that the program freezes regularly when the garbage collector runs. 3. Increase the amount of RAM allocated to the program to stop the garbage collector running and compensate for those memory leaks you forgot to clean up. 4. Now the program runs for a few hours without garbage collection, but takes up half the RAM in the machine and when the garbage collector does run it freezes for thirty seconds as it has to scan through gigabytes of RAM looking for unreferenced objects. 5. Fortunately you relied on the garbage collector to close open files rather than doing so explicitly, so in normal use the program runs out of file descriptors and crashes before that happens.
Nvidia must have paid PowerVR to start releasing mobile chips so Linus won't be able to say they're the worst hardware manufacturer for Linux any more.
It is stupid, keeping the specs secret is a lose/lose for everyone.
When I worked for a chip company, we weren't allowed to release specs.
Why? Guess.
Patents. We had no idea whether we were violating some obscure patent that no-one had ever heard of, and we weren't willing to put the specs out there where any troll could sue us for millions.
Emulating x86 on ARM is impractical, it would be something like emulating the PS3 on a Wii.
That's funny. We used to emulate x86 on a 40MHz SPARC to run Word and similar apps; and that was emulating the whole of Windows and the underlying hardware, not just the application.
A GHz-era ARM should be plenty fast enough to run apps that aren't excessively CPU-intensive; most of the time when interacting with everyday apps the CPU is idle waiting for the user to do something, so there's plenty of CPU power available even with a 10x or more slowdown for the emulation.
Fiat currencies, on the other hand, are alive and kicking. You can find them in every corner store.
The average lifespan of a fiat currency is around 40 years.
The world came off the last vestiges of the gold standard around 40 years ago. Gold is exploding and the Euro, at least, is heading toward the dustbin of history.
Now imagine what they are gonna be able to do with a couple of tick tocks and a couple of shrinks. It'll be like having a Core2 in your pocket, really cool to think about all you'll be able to do.
So in a few years they'll be able to put ten year old hardware into your pocket?
Actually, now reading that quote again, it doesn't give me much confidence in their capability. They might have to rely on going to a smaller size for it to work.
When I was writing emulators years ago, the things that made it a right bastard were external hardware emulation (e.g. the interrupt controller), and weird software practices like self-modifying code or DRM code that ran in the interrupt vector table or modified the instruction that it was executing in order to confuse a debugger. Since you generally don't need to worry about those things on a modern OS, a straightforward binary translation shouldn't be too hard, and should be reasonably efficient.
And that's our (the voting public's) fault. We have become unwilling to compromise and negotiate and instead we prefer highly publicized stand offs over minute issues while our paid taxes slowly swirl down the drain.
Uh, no. The problem is far too much compromise.
The Bad Guys view compromise as weakness and after they've convinced the Good Guys to compromise away part of their freedom, they come back in a year or two demanding more. Then repeat until it's all gone.
Only a total no-compromise attitude can prevent that, and the Good Guys are too good to do that. This nonsense will only stop when the majority are willing to say 'No More' and mean it.
I think you miss the point. When Joe Sixpack doesn't have to pay for Product X, he doesn't care whether Product X costs $10 or $10,000,000.
Health insurers pass the cost on to employers, who have to keep paying the increased premiums to keep their employees happy. If Joe Sixpack had to pay for their own health insurance, then he would object when they doubled the premiums to cover those $10,000,000 products that could have been bought in a free market for $10.
You have the power to not purchase locked down motherboards.
Of course once Windows requires that all systems are locked down before it runs, there'll be a remarkable lack of affordable motherboards that will run any other operating system. Nor will you be able to buy a Windows machine and install another operating system instead.
Anyone who thinks this isn't intended to create vendor lockin is incredibly naive.
Before you start flaming about DRM and TPM taking over your computer and all, please remember that all TPM chips currently available allow you to install your own keys.
And once you're tied to using them, they'll stop allowing you to install your own keys.
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Every time I've seen this sort of comparison, closer inspection has revealed that the Apple laptop in question has a number of other features that the cheaper one doesn't.
Yes, it had an Apple logo on the lid.
64K? We had 32K, and most of that was reserved for other things so we couldn't actually use it.
32k? We had 1k and most of that was used by the OS and the video RAM.
What happened? The iPad happened. Customers are shifting away from PCs of all types as the move to mobile computing accelerates.
I'll believe that when someone I know buys a tablet. I've seen a few people using them, but I've seen hundreds of times as many people using desktop PCs and laptops.
I'm amazed how few people actually price shop before they claim the Apple laptops are overpriced.
I did just that when I bought my new laptop a couple of years ago. My Toshiba cost $1100 while the closest equivalent Mac -- AFAIR it had a sligfhtly faster CPU, less RAM and a smaller hard drive -- was about $2500.
So yes, overpriced it was.
It's the only way to be sure...
What I implied is that an established Western Democracy like Britain cannot pull out of a major Human Rights treaty without causing a huge bruhaha in the international media.
Like I said. The horror.
No serious government gives a crap about what 'human rights groups' say unless what they're saying is promoting whatever policy the government wants to impose. Sadly, Britain hasn't had a serious government since the 80s.
I've noticed that the left always go crazy when the working class vote conservative because people who actually work for a living know that most 'progressive' policies are just a means for the middle class to give their kids well-paid government jobs to tell everyone else what to do. The working class are naturally conservative, which is why the left have done their best to destroy working class culture and turn them into the welfare class, who will keep voting themselves more free stuff.
It would cause a serious uproar by human rights groups worldwide, were something like that to be done in a major country like Britain.
Oh, the horror.
(1) Political apathy
So, which party can Britons vote for which doesn't want this stuff?
And even if they could vote for someone, most seats are so safe that it would make no difference. Where I used to live in the UK I could vote for any party I wanted and the Tories would still win.
I agree that was the case on the older systems. Luckily with the increase in processor speed it's not that much of a problem any longer.
I can only assume you've never used Eclipse.
Dumb programmer approach to Java:
1. Don't even think about memory allocation. Forget to free up references to objects you're not using and lose references to objects you still need, so your program leaks memory or randomly stops working.
2. Notice that the program freezes regularly when the garbage collector runs.
3. Increase the amount of RAM allocated to the program to stop the garbage collector running and compensate for those memory leaks you forgot to clean up.
4. Now the program runs for a few hours without garbage collection, but takes up half the RAM in the machine and when the garbage collector does run it freezes for thirty seconds as it has to scan through gigabytes of RAM looking for unreferenced objects.
5. Fortunately you relied on the garbage collector to close open files rather than doing so explicitly, so in normal use the program runs out of file descriptors and crashes before that happens.
Java is fairly simple for a beginner. No need to worry about memory management.
So long as you don't mind your UI regularly freezing for 2-3 seconds while it cleans up your garbage.
Nvidia must have paid PowerVR to start releasing mobile chips so Linus won't be able to say they're the worst hardware manufacturer for Linux any more.
It is stupid, keeping the specs secret is a lose/lose for everyone.
When I worked for a chip company, we weren't allowed to release specs.
Why? Guess.
Patents. We had no idea whether we were violating some obscure patent that no-one had ever heard of, and we weren't willing to put the specs out there where any troll could sue us for millions.
Emulating x86 on ARM is impractical, it would be something like emulating the PS3 on a Wii.
That's funny. We used to emulate x86 on a 40MHz SPARC to run Word and similar apps; and that was emulating the whole of Windows and the underlying hardware, not just the application.
A GHz-era ARM should be plenty fast enough to run apps that aren't excessively CPU-intensive; most of the time when interacting with everyday apps the CPU is idle waiting for the user to do something, so there's plenty of CPU power available even with a 10x or more slowdown for the emulation.
Fiat currencies, on the other hand, are alive and kicking. You can find them in every corner store.
The average lifespan of a fiat currency is around 40 years.
The world came off the last vestiges of the gold standard around 40 years ago. Gold is exploding and the Euro, at least, is heading toward the dustbin of history.
Odd, that.
watch it hit 750 gigs, roughly the point where a normal consumer can't max it out, and then it's lights out.
"750 gigabytes should be enough for anyone."
Remember folks, you heard it here first!
Now imagine what they are gonna be able to do with a couple of tick tocks and a couple of shrinks. It'll be like having a Core2 in your pocket, really cool to think about all you'll be able to do.
So in a few years they'll be able to put ten year old hardware into your pocket?
Actually, now reading that quote again, it doesn't give me much confidence in their capability. They might have to rely on going to a smaller size for it to work.
When I was writing emulators years ago, the things that made it a right bastard were external hardware emulation (e.g. the interrupt controller), and weird software practices like self-modifying code or DRM code that ran in the interrupt vector table or modified the instruction that it was executing in order to confuse a debugger. Since you generally don't need to worry about those things on a modern OS, a straightforward binary translation shouldn't be too hard, and should be reasonably efficient.
And that's our (the voting public's) fault. We have become unwilling to compromise and negotiate and instead we prefer highly publicized stand offs over minute issues while our paid taxes slowly swirl down the drain.
Uh, no. The problem is far too much compromise.
The Bad Guys view compromise as weakness and after they've convinced the Good Guys to compromise away part of their freedom, they come back in a year or two demanding more. Then repeat until it's all gone.
Only a total no-compromise attitude can prevent that, and the Good Guys are too good to do that. This nonsense will only stop when the majority are willing to say 'No More' and mean it.
So what manner of corruption is going on here?
Politicians.
You didn't really think the Tories were any less corrupt than Labour, did you?
But what if I don't have a tablet and only have a desktop. Now I have to get a touchscreen to launch any application on my home desktop.
Everyone loves touchscreens, they're so cool. Haven't you watched sci-fi movies? Haven't you seen CSI?
I think you miss the point. When Joe Sixpack doesn't have to pay for Product X, he doesn't care whether Product X costs $10 or $10,000,000.
Health insurers pass the cost on to employers, who have to keep paying the increased premiums to keep their employees happy. If Joe Sixpack had to pay for their own health insurance, then he would object when they doubled the premiums to cover those $10,000,000 products that could have been bought in a free market for $10.
You have the power to not purchase locked down motherboards.
Of course once Windows requires that all systems are locked down before it runs, there'll be a remarkable lack of affordable motherboards that will run any other operating system. Nor will you be able to buy a Windows machine and install another operating system instead.
Anyone who thinks this isn't intended to create vendor lockin is incredibly naive.
Before you start flaming about DRM and TPM taking over your computer and all, please remember that all TPM chips currently available allow you to install your own keys.
And once you're tied to using them, they'll stop allowing you to install your own keys.
Vendor lockin FTW.
Scientists 'alter the statistical method until any statistical significance is found'. Full story at 11.
Is there anyone who knows much about science and scientists who didn't realise that this was common practice these days?