...Now lets assume that the system uses a conservative 50W of power
Good analysis, even if you lengthen the stroke and reduce the key force - I've been using notebooks heavily for at least six years and my typing has evolved to employ *much* less than 1 pound. However, 50W is far from conservative, unless your use of the term was the opposite of the way I interpreted ("conservative of power"). I'm not sure about Intel-based notebooks (well actually I have a good idea, they pretty much suck for power-conservation), but the power manager hardware and software in Powerbooks is able to report the actual power dissipation, and software exists to read it. My current 180MHz 603e dissipates about 18W *maximum*, and typically 10-12W. By spinning down the drive, lowering the backlight, and turning off PCMCIA cards I can get it to 6W and still be able to usefully use the computer for typing. Also, there are considerably more power-saving modes available to PPC chips (603 and 750/"G3") than x86, and they're well exploited by the Mac OS (and to a currently lesser extent, LinuxPPC), so the power dissipation fluctuates at those times when I stop to think (at least while I'm using the Mac OS, which has few background processes - let's remember Compaq's main market is still Windows users).
So for the power-paranoid user (a journalist, say) who might want to benefit from this invention, assume her notebook commonly draws 10W and her battery normally lasts (*cough*) 6 hours. With the ideal figure of.01W from typing, her battery consumption drops by 1%, so she gets back 1% of 6 hours, or three-and-a-half minutes of battery life. Hmm, might fire off an extra slug to your editor in that time, but it's hardly a major selling point. And that doesn't even consider that few people actually type that much (particularly with Windows or the Mac) that a surprisingly large amount of power is typically expended just paying for DRAM while a notebook is asleep, and that the figures we're using are absurdly optimistic (6 hours, suuuure). In fact, most people use their notebooks plugged-in almost all the time, and the battery is essentially a RAM backup. Until battery times extend by at least an order of magnitude, this won't change.
>Maybe we should start encouraging the use of a command line switch that would tell us what kind of license the software is under?
Frequently there is one. Unfortunately it's not as consistent as it ought to be, even for GNU stuff. Try your example with gzip instead of gcc, and -L or (the more GNUish) --license instead of -license (that is, use two dashes).
In other words, what's needed is the mythical holy grail of command-line consistency Unix has been looking for since forever. But it would be especially nice if software with non-free (in the beer sense) terms did allude to licensing in the usage message.
This is actually one of the reasons I use Debian - it's generally pretty clear what's free and what isn't. Sometimes I do agree with RMS. Not that he's really done anything for command-line consistency.
The original ][ (with the Integer BASIC in ROM, which Woz wrote in his head) and ][+ (with the lamer, slower, but floating-point AppleSoft BASIC, licenced from Microsoft and thus based on a BASIC partly written by Bill Gates) used the bracket notation on the case (which may not have been the first beige case, but was the first plastic case due to Jobs's insistence - prior stuff like the Altair tended toward unpainted metal). The//e and//c used the slash notation. The IIgs (and possibly the IIc+ and later IIe) used the capial-I notation in Garamond font (and didn't really use lowercase letters, but did use double-height 'I' characters, which leads to this ASCII approximation). As someone has noted, these things weren't always preserved in the media (II was probably most common there, since it was interpreted as roman numeral information rather than an atomic product trademark; note that "IIgs" can be trademarked, but roman numeral "II" can't). One might well argue that only a demented person would care anyway, let alone continue to remember after all these years.;)
As for the lawsuit itself, it seems to have some merit; one could argue that Future Power is attempting to create confusion with the similarity of their design (it appears their defence will be "but it's obviously different, it has a prominently featured floppy drive!"), both with the computer itself and especially the associated advertising and product shots. I'd prefer they just left it alone and let their product sell itself (which it does largely on the basis of the hardware quality and design and the user interface, which still kicks ass on everything else in myriad and subtle ways). For example, the price of that ePower thing leads me to believe that the monitor is the usual low-end crap; the iMac monitor is a little small, but it's pretty darn nice to look at for a 15" shadow mask. Though I have turned into an LCD snob in the past few years (from being a Trinitron snob previously).
Personally I don't like the iMac design all that much, and I bought a 20th Anniversary Mac for my parents when they needed a computer (best move I could have made). For myself I run LinuxPPC half the time on an older-model Powerbook, and my old IIgs still shares files via netatalk and FreeBSD on a crappy PC someone gave me.
btw, answering yet another misinformed poster, the original ][ and//e cases were beige, same colour as a Mac Plus - the only black ones were later produced for Bell & Howell in a special order. The//c was white (very dumb choice for a supposedly portable computer), and later models were all "platinum", which was the colour of Macs until recently. Curiously, the last colour is now referred to as beige, as in "beige G3". There's probably a Taoist parable in that.
Actually, if humankind would invest a tenth of what's been spent on the space program on breast cancer research, less people I know would be dying (or scared of dying).
Or women's health care in general for that matter.
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...Now lets assume that the system uses a conservative 50W of power
.01W from typing, her battery consumption drops by 1%, so she gets back 1% of 6 hours, or three-and-a-half minutes of battery life. Hmm, might fire off an extra slug to your editor in that time, but it's hardly a major selling point. And that doesn't even consider that few people actually type that much (particularly with Windows or the Mac) that a surprisingly large amount of power is typically expended just paying for DRAM while a notebook is asleep, and that the figures we're using are absurdly optimistic (6 hours, suuuure). In fact, most people use their notebooks plugged-in almost all the time, and the battery is essentially a RAM backup. Until battery times extend by at least an order of magnitude, this won't change.
Good analysis, even if you lengthen the stroke and reduce the key force - I've been using notebooks heavily for at least six years and my typing has evolved to employ *much* less than 1 pound. However, 50W is far from conservative, unless your use of the term was the opposite of the way I interpreted ("conservative of power"). I'm not sure about Intel-based notebooks (well actually I have a good idea, they pretty much suck for power-conservation), but the power manager hardware and software in Powerbooks is able to report the actual power dissipation, and software exists to read it. My current 180MHz 603e dissipates about 18W *maximum*, and typically 10-12W. By spinning down the drive, lowering the backlight, and turning off PCMCIA cards I can get it to 6W and still be able to usefully use the computer for typing. Also, there are considerably more power-saving modes available to PPC chips (603 and 750/"G3") than x86, and they're well exploited by the Mac OS (and to a currently lesser extent, LinuxPPC), so the power dissipation fluctuates at those times when I stop to think (at least while I'm using the Mac OS, which has few background processes - let's remember Compaq's main market is still Windows users).
So for the power-paranoid user (a journalist, say) who might want to benefit from this invention, assume her notebook commonly draws 10W and her battery normally lasts (*cough*) 6 hours. With the ideal figure of
If it's not an July Fool's patent, it oughta be.
>Maybe we should start encouraging the use of a command line switch that would tell us what kind of license the software is under?
Frequently there is one. Unfortunately it's not as consistent as it ought to be, even for GNU stuff. Try your example with gzip instead of gcc, and -L or (the more GNUish) --license instead of -license (that is, use two dashes).
In other words, what's needed is the mythical holy grail of command-line consistency Unix has been looking for since forever. But it would be especially nice if software with non-free (in the beer sense) terms did allude to licensing in the usage message.
This is actually one of the reasons I use Debian - it's generally pretty clear what's free and what isn't. Sometimes I do agree with RMS. Not that he's really done anything for command-line consistency.
The original ][ (with the Integer BASIC in ROM, which Woz wrote in his head) and ][+ (with the lamer, slower, but floating-point AppleSoft BASIC, licenced from Microsoft and thus based on a BASIC partly written by Bill Gates) used the bracket notation on the case (which may not have been the first beige case, but was the first plastic case due to Jobs's insistence - prior stuff like the Altair tended toward unpainted metal). The //e and //c used the slash notation. The IIgs (and possibly the IIc+ and later IIe) used the capial-I notation in Garamond font (and didn't really use lowercase letters, but did use double-height 'I' characters, which leads to this ASCII approximation). As someone has noted, these things weren't always preserved in the media (II was probably most common there, since it was interpreted as roman numeral information rather than an atomic product trademark; note that "IIgs" can be trademarked, but roman numeral "II" can't). ;)
//e cases were beige, same colour as a Mac Plus - the only black ones were later produced for Bell & Howell in a special order. The //c was white (very dumb choice for a supposedly portable computer), and later models were all "platinum", which was the colour of Macs until recently. Curiously, the last colour is now referred to as beige, as in "beige G3". There's probably a Taoist parable in that.
One might well argue that only a demented person would care anyway, let alone continue to remember after all these years.
As for the lawsuit itself, it seems to have some merit; one could argue that Future Power is attempting to create confusion with the similarity of their design (it appears their defence will be "but it's obviously different, it has a prominently featured floppy drive!"), both with the computer itself and especially the associated advertising and product shots. I'd prefer they just left it alone and let their product sell itself (which it does largely on the basis of the hardware quality and design and the user interface, which still kicks ass on everything else in myriad and subtle ways). For example, the price of that ePower thing leads me to believe that the monitor is the usual low-end crap; the iMac monitor is a little small, but it's pretty darn nice to look at for a 15" shadow mask. Though I have turned into an LCD snob in the past few years (from being a Trinitron snob previously).
Personally I don't like the iMac design all that much, and I bought a 20th Anniversary Mac for my parents when they needed a computer (best move I could have made). For myself I run LinuxPPC half the time on an older-model Powerbook, and my old IIgs still shares files via netatalk and FreeBSD on a crappy PC someone gave me.
btw, answering yet another misinformed poster, the original ][ and
And I spray painted the donated PC black.
Actually, if humankind would invest a tenth of what's been spent on the space program on breast cancer research, less people I know would be dying (or scared of dying).
Or women's health care in general for that matter.