I have a MBP 5.1, one with both the on-board and discrete Nvidia cards. OS X switches between them depending on whether it is going for power savings or performance.
The drivers for Windows XP and Linux do not seem to have this ability. When I'm doing nothing but surfing, I get about 4.5 hours of battery life in OS X, but only about 2.1 hours in Linux (Ubuntu Jaunty) and Windows XP.
I always assumed it was the inability of XP and Linux to switch to the on-board graphics card.
A couple of days ago I installed FF 3.5 in Jaunty manually, alongside FF 3.0, because Ubuntu had not yet updated their repositories with FF 3.5.
I believe that at the moment, if you are running Ubuntu, you won't have FF 3.5 unless you've manually installed it from mozilla.org, or you are using a PPA.
One more data point: runs very smoothly on MBP 5.1 in Firefox.
Oops, sorry - I mistook it for some knee-jerk anti-Google sentiment, and wanted to know what you had to say on the matter! Glad I asked instead of responding with some knee-jerk anti-anti-Google sentiment.;)
It's been interesting watching Apple and Google get more negative comments on Slashdot over the last few months (or the last couple of years in Apple's case). This story makes me wonder if a part of the Slashdot community will take sides in some sort of Google vs. Apple drama. Apple does seem to have a way of getting people to defend them against criticism, both real and imagined... I guess the reactions to your comment (including mine) seem to indicate Google has a similar following here on Slashdot!
Btw, taken the way it was intended, your OP is funny.
It is still possible to use GV as a phone card on an iPhone, since that requires no app.
The functionality that is being prevented is transparently using your GV account instead of just dialing the destination number.
Phone cards are enough of a pain in the ass that most people won't use them unless the savings are substantial. However, if you write an app that takes away the pain, many more people are likely to use it. If I were AT&T, that's what I'd be worried about, rather than the fraction of users that are willing to dial two numbers to make one call.
It is true that AT&T get to bill for local minutes with a Google Voice call, but it does bear noting that subscribers using Google Voice do avoid a carrier's long distance charges by using the service.
AT&T will still make some money from Google Voice users on the iPhone, but perhaps not as much, so it is in their best interest to have the app removed from the App Store. Of course, the FCC exists in part to prevent behaviour like this, where progress is prevented because the new model is less profitable to some incumbent corporation, but AT&T may feel that FCC fines are the cost of doing business.
If they did ask Apple to pull the plug on GV, and the action were not reversed by FCC mandate, the potential financial gain may greatly outweigh any fine the FCC could slap on them.
How would Apple be liable to be sued for any of these things? Any of these are possible when using a PC, but you don't see Microsoft, Apple, Canonical, Red Hat, etc. being sued for bad apps.
In this case, Apple is distributing the application.
It's possible the same would apply for Red Hat, if something made it into their Red Hat Network update channel that destroyed data, or caused a major loss of uptime for a large percentage of their customers.
This may not even be worth replying to, but in the example you give, you are depriving the store of that pack of gum.
There is a difference between taking something from someone (i.e. you have one more of that thing, and the person from whom you took it has one less) and copying something under copyright without authorization (i.e. you have one more of that thing).
Neither of these are legal, but the distinction is still important, as is that between murder and man slaughter.
One could argue that in the latter case, the author has been deprived of a sale, much like the RIAA and the BSA argue that every pirated piece of music or software is a lost sale; however, this reasoning is flawed, as has been discussed at great length elsewhere on Slashdot. Often if the person who pirated it had had to buy it to get it, they would not have.
It seems unlikely to me that any single person, or even small group of people, would have the capability to remove all copies of this code, binary and source, from the company's information infrastructure.
Is it possible that they have suspended use of this code because they fear that someone analyzing it could profit from the trades it would have made?
The difference between MS bundling IE and Apple bundling Safari is that Apple does not have a monopoly in the OS market to abuse, so it is not antitrust for them to bundle a browser with their OS.
The difference between MS bundling IE and Ubuntu including Firefox is even more obvious: while the above statement also holds true for Canonical and Firefox, Canonical does not even own both the OS and the browser, so there can be no antitrust in Ubuntu including the browser with the OS.
Sorry if I was unclear (but I don't think I was, since it's not like Apple sells physical music media) - let me amend that:
Apple is killing everyone else in the digital music space.
And by "everyone else" I mean everyone else who sells music in digital form, or DRM for said music, or devices which play said music.
I'm not saying anything about the value of Apple's products, or their contribution to the world of music. I was observing that companies (Apple included) support standards when is benefits them, and not otherwise.
Apple uses open standards when they are the underdog in a particular area. This is to their advantage. Microsoft also uses open standards when they are the underdog in an area.
iTunes + iPod are killing everyone else in the music space. This is why DLNA is a standard that is supported by everyone but Apple. What other factor could get both Sony and Microsoft behind a standard?
When you're on top, you create as many barriers to change as you can. When you're on the bottom, you try to rally the troops to dethrone whoever happens to be on top. This is life.
You're not the only one, but I'm leaning more toward "fight back" than "get out of computing".
We may not feel as if there's much we can do right now, but, as they say, every little bit helps, and if this stuff goes the way the corps want it to, we'll all be saying "We didn't ought to have trusted the buggers" in 15 years.
I'm at the very least not going to buy this hardware, and I'm going to tell people why not.
oic... my mistake. I didn't know it used IE to render that stuff. Actually, I'd forgotten about that part of the app altogether, since I've never used it.
I'm glad you pointed out the distinction between fixing a bug and preventing someone to exploit it using a particular piece of software, but I thought I should in turn point out that Google Desktop does not "embed IE" - I use it fine with firefox. It's just an app that runs locally intercepting google queries by ANY web browser and modifying the data google sends back to you, adding the "Desktop" link to the main page, for example, and performing local hard drive searches.
It does not embed any html renderer - it doesn't render html at all. It is an application that uses html and javascript to present a GUI, and then the browser does the rendering just like it does for any other page. Google Desktop is just another website to the browser.
...is the Windows base code so hosed it can't be economically upgraded?
This would explain it, and satisfy the predictions of many OSS advocates, that central management of something as complex as a modern operating system just doesn't scale.
On the Central vs. Distributed Management of a Complex System issue, I am reminded of Communism vs. Capitalism, except in this way MS is commie and OSS is capitalist, marketing FUD notwithstanding. Maybe this is the point at which their development model starts to drag them so far behind the competition that they realize they have to change something.
Or maybe they're the China of the software world and can somehow just keep on truckin'.
In my experience the only thing inherently slow in laptops is the hard drive, which would explain your experience of things being fine once they're loaded. I think this is partly because laptops come with slower hard drives (in terms of RPM), but also laptop hard drives tend to spin down the much more aggressively than desktops to save battery power, and to load something you have to wait not only for a slow-spinning to read, but also to spin up in the first place.
If all the components were slower in a laptop you'd notice a performance hit all the time, not just when you're paging or loading an app.
My guess is that if they implement something in XUL that runs on top of firefox's UI engine their codebase will be completely separate, so it looks like product:firefox::application:operating system.
Their code will be running on an unmodified firefox and thus they can license it any way they want.
Yes, a main reason that our particular organized system (earth) does not decay toward randomness is because of the sun's energy input. But even this is just a temporary reprieve from the omnipresent laws of thermodynamics, as the order in one small corner of the larger system (the universe) increases at the expense of greatly decreased order in the rest of that system as a whole. Any "energy input" is just order moving from one section to another, and a temporary evasion of the tendency towards decay of an organized system.
So yes, organized systems do always tend toward decay (if your time span is long enough (i.e. including the death of our sun), or your scope large enough(i.e. including the sun itself)), and yes, that tendency is governed by the laws of thermodynamics.
I also don't see how this smacks of creationism, especially when you consider that given the best theory we currently have for the origin of the universe, the universe started out in a highly ordered state. Couldn't there be some of that order left, gathered up in our little corner of space and time?
Of course, I'm genuinely interested to hear your views on what other causes there might be for the decay of order in organized system.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a MBP 5.1, one with both the on-board and discrete Nvidia cards. OS X switches between them depending on whether it is going for power savings or performance.
The drivers for Windows XP and Linux do not seem to have this ability. When I'm doing nothing but surfing, I get about 4.5 hours of battery life in OS X, but only about 2.1 hours in Linux (Ubuntu Jaunty) and Windows XP.
I always assumed it was the inability of XP and Linux to switch to the on-board graphics card.
A couple of days ago I installed FF 3.5 in Jaunty manually, alongside FF 3.0, because Ubuntu had not yet updated their repositories with FF 3.5.
I believe that at the moment, if you are running Ubuntu, you won't have FF 3.5 unless you've manually installed it from mozilla.org, or you are using a PPA.
One more data point: runs very smoothly on MBP 5.1 in Firefox.
Oops, sorry - I mistook it for some knee-jerk anti-Google sentiment, and wanted to know what you had to say on the matter! Glad I asked instead of responding with some knee-jerk anti-anti-Google sentiment. ;)
It's been interesting watching Apple and Google get more negative comments on Slashdot over the last few months (or the last couple of years in Apple's case). This story makes me wonder if a part of the Slashdot community will take sides in some sort of Google vs. Apple drama. Apple does seem to have a way of getting people to defend them against criticism, both real and imagined... I guess the reactions to your comment (including mine) seem to indicate Google has a similar following here on Slashdot!
Btw, taken the way it was intended, your OP is funny.
How so?
It is still possible to use GV as a phone card on an iPhone, since that requires no app.
The functionality that is being prevented is transparently using your GV account instead of just dialing the destination number.
Phone cards are enough of a pain in the ass that most people won't use them unless the savings are substantial. However, if you write an app that takes away the pain, many more people are likely to use it. If I were AT&T, that's what I'd be worried about, rather than the fraction of users that are willing to dial two numbers to make one call.
It is true that AT&T get to bill for local minutes with a Google Voice call, but it does bear noting that subscribers using Google Voice do avoid a carrier's long distance charges by using the service.
AT&T will still make some money from Google Voice users on the iPhone, but perhaps not as much, so it is in their best interest to have the app removed from the App Store. Of course, the FCC exists in part to prevent behaviour like this, where progress is prevented because the new model is less profitable to some incumbent corporation, but AT&T may feel that FCC fines are the cost of doing business.
If they did ask Apple to pull the plug on GV, and the action were not reversed by FCC mandate, the potential financial gain may greatly outweigh any fine the FCC could slap on them.
In this case, Apple is distributing the application. It's possible the same would apply for Red Hat, if something made it into their Red Hat Network update channel that destroyed data, or caused a major loss of uptime for a large percentage of their customers.
This may not even be worth replying to, but in the example you give, you are depriving the store of that pack of gum.
There is a difference between taking something from someone (i.e. you have one more of that thing, and the person from whom you took it has one less) and copying something under copyright without authorization (i.e. you have one more of that thing).
Neither of these are legal, but the distinction is still important, as is that between murder and man slaughter.
One could argue that in the latter case, the author has been deprived of a sale, much like the RIAA and the BSA argue that every pirated piece of music or software is a lost sale; however, this reasoning is flawed, as has been discussed at great length elsewhere on Slashdot. Often if the person who pirated it had had to buy it to get it, they would not have.
It seems unlikely to me that any single person, or even small group of people, would have the capability to remove all copies of this code, binary and source, from the company's information infrastructure.
Is it possible that they have suspended use of this code because they fear that someone analyzing it could profit from the trades it would have made?
The difference between MS bundling IE and Apple bundling Safari is that Apple does not have a monopoly in the OS market to abuse, so it is not antitrust for them to bundle a browser with their OS.
The difference between MS bundling IE and Ubuntu including Firefox is even more obvious: while the above statement also holds true for Canonical and Firefox, Canonical does not even own both the OS and the browser, so there can be no antitrust in Ubuntu including the browser with the OS.
"...not even the currently installed version."
How is an updater to do its job if it doesn't know what version of the product you have installed?
Sorry if I was unclear (but I don't think I was, since it's not like Apple sells physical music media) - let me amend that:
Apple is killing everyone else in the digital music space.
And by "everyone else" I mean everyone else who sells music in digital form, or DRM for said music, or devices which play said music.
I'm not saying anything about the value of Apple's products, or their contribution to the world of music. I was observing that companies (Apple included) support standards when is benefits them, and not otherwise.
Apple uses open standards when they are the underdog in a particular area. This is to their advantage. Microsoft also uses open standards when they are the underdog in an area.
iTunes + iPod are killing everyone else in the music space. This is why DLNA is a standard that is supported by everyone but Apple. What other factor could get both Sony and Microsoft behind a standard?
When you're on top, you create as many barriers to change as you can. When you're on the bottom, you try to rally the troops to dethrone whoever happens to be on top. This is life.
There is no such thing as "trusted" computing. No one trust anyone here.
Remind you of anything else? Maybe "Ministry of Truth"?
You're not the only one, but I'm leaning more toward "fight back" than "get out of computing".
We may not feel as if there's much we can do right now, but, as they say, every little bit helps, and if this stuff goes the way the corps want it to, we'll all be saying "We didn't ought to have trusted the buggers" in 15 years.
I'm at the very least not going to buy this hardware, and I'm going to tell people why not.
I've never run Berkely on Vi before. What does it do?
;)
oic... my mistake. I didn't know it used IE to render that stuff. Actually, I'd forgotten about that part of the app altogether, since I've never used it.
Thanks.
I'm glad you pointed out the distinction between fixing a bug and preventing someone to exploit it using a particular piece of software, but I thought I should in turn point out that Google Desktop does not "embed IE" - I use it fine with firefox. It's just an app that runs locally intercepting google queries by ANY web browser and modifying the data google sends back to you, adding the "Desktop" link to the main page, for example, and performing local hard drive searches.
It does not embed any html renderer - it doesn't render html at all. It is an application that uses html and javascript to present a GUI, and then the browser does the rendering just like it does for any other page. Google Desktop is just another website to the browser.
This would explain it, and satisfy the predictions of many OSS advocates, that central management of something as complex as a modern operating system just doesn't scale.
On the Central vs. Distributed Management of a Complex System issue, I am reminded of Communism vs. Capitalism, except in this way MS is commie and OSS is capitalist, marketing FUD notwithstanding. Maybe this is the point at which their development model starts to drag them so far behind the competition that they realize they have to change something.
Or maybe they're the China of the software world and can somehow just keep on truckin'.
It's more than a spelling mistake. Deep Impact is technically not a satellite, since it doesn't orbit anything.
:)
(Hope I spelled it right
Don't you mean "semi-annual"?
In my experience the only thing inherently slow in laptops is the hard drive, which would explain your experience of things being fine once they're loaded. I think this is partly because laptops come with slower hard drives (in terms of RPM), but also laptop hard drives tend to spin down the much more aggressively than desktops to save battery power, and to load something you have to wait not only for a slow-spinning to read, but also to spin up in the first place.
If all the components were slower in a laptop you'd notice a performance hit all the time, not just when you're paging or loading an app.
My guess is that if they implement something in XUL that runs on top of firefox's UI engine their codebase will be completely separate, so it looks like product:firefox::application:operating system.
Their code will be running on an unmodified firefox and thus they can license it any way they want.
Yes, a main reason that our particular organized system (earth) does not decay toward randomness is because of the sun's energy input. But even this is just a temporary reprieve from the omnipresent laws of thermodynamics, as the order in one small corner of the larger system (the universe) increases at the expense of greatly decreased order in the rest of that system as a whole. Any "energy input" is just order moving from one section to another, and a temporary evasion of the tendency towards decay of an organized system.
So yes, organized systems do always tend toward decay (if your time span is long enough (i.e. including the death of our sun), or your scope large enough(i.e. including the sun itself)), and yes, that tendency is governed by the laws of thermodynamics.
I also don't see how this smacks of creationism, especially when you consider that given the best theory we currently have for the origin of the universe, the universe started out in a highly ordered state. Couldn't there be some of that order left, gathered up in our little corner of space and time?
Of course, I'm genuinely interested to hear your views on what other causes there might be for the decay of order in organized system.
I see what you mean, but if so how does it save him so much reading time? He still has to mark the papers.