Not to mention, dancing bunnies subverts any security system put in place, that the end user is allowed to modify.
Malware: "Please modify your SELinux policies to allow the Dancing Bunnies to run." User: *modifies policies*
Short of an antimalware program alerting the user that the dancing bunnies are actually malware, nothing will stop the user from installing the dancing bunnies. NOTHING.
ARM11 launched in 2002. That's a pretty major one...
(And, Acorn as a personal computer manufacturer died in 1998. They were using the DEC StrongARM, which predates the ARM9 and ARM10 - the StrongARM was used in place of the ARM8 that was still under development, and the ARM9 borrowed ideas from the StrongARM.)
I don't believe Microsoft pays to do ports of Windows.
IIRC, ports of Windows to non-x86 architectures are paid for by the processor maker. (That's why Windows 2000 for Alpha was cancelled, Compaq didn't want to pay for it any more.)
ARM's said they need a port of Windows, too, and there's rumors out there that there's a team at MS porting Windows to ARM... made up of ARM employees.
Except netbooks didn't take off until Windows ran on them. Then, you got a real ultraportable that did everything your desktop did, for $300-400.
This is true that MS can't effectively subvert the Linux smartbook, but the average person would have to buy a Linux smartbook in spite of Linux. (We won't talk about WinCE smartbooks, other than my saying that MS can't effectively subvert the Linux smartbook.)
Basically, it's a really, really long battle to get smartbooks adopted, simply because Linux isn't Windows or even Mac OS.
My prediction: The Linux zealots will buy them and say that they're insanely popular, the RISC OS community will buy them and port RISC OS to them, and then they'll disappear.
IMO, yes, because Nokia was selling a censorware product for Iran to use as their main censorship system, not requiring Nokia to censor their products to do business in Iran.
The problem is, for a home computer, you are your own sysadmin.
And then the dancing bunnies problem comes into play.
User: "Oooh, I can download this to see dancing bunnies." *downloads and executes malware* Malware: *tries to install* OS: "Malware needs root access to install. Please enter your root password." (Windows version of this would be "Cancel or Allow.") User: *enters root password* Malware: *infects system* OS: *pwned* User: *pwned*
Could also be an issue with loading CSS - I actually get that a lot on Opera if the Opera session has been running for a while (think weeks) and used heavily.
Well, if the site will load in IE 5.5 and doesn't need any ActiveX components, it's not Windows-specific - it'll work on Solaris/SPARC or HP-UX/PA-RISC as well.:P
Then in that case, maybe more software is needed... and not just yes/no prompts, but questions relating to the dosage.
"What is the patient's age in months?" "What is the patient's weight?" "What is being scanned?" "You currently have the machine set for X dose, 8 times the maximum allowed dose for this procedure. Please verify the desired dosage." "You have requested that a patient of Y months age and Z weight, undergoing A procedure, should recieve X dose. To perform this action, you will require a second user to verify the action. Please contact another authorized user to use the key override."
And, have it never store a default or previous dosage.
There's still room for real, mechanical interlocks. Maybe a radiation-sensitive fuse that, when exceeding a "this will definitely injure" level, blows?
The architecture supports 64-bit addressing, but existing x86-64 CPUs only have a 48-bit virtual address space, and a 40-bit physical address space.
By the time that becomes an issue, of course, the implementation will change, and nobody will notice, because nobody will think to shove more than 1 TiB RAM in an old Core i7 box. (And, for that matter, memory controller limitations mean that you're not getting anywhere near that much in there anyway - my main machine has a chipset that doesn't even support any more than 32-bit addressing, for that matter, despite supporting some EM64T CPUs. That's been true for quite a while, of course - I don't know of a single i386 that can actually run 4 GiB RAM, yet they all (well, all the DXes) can address it.)
OK, if you want to remove the extra software, go into the factory restore software, and uncheck all of the checkboxes.
The way Lenovo's software works is, it goes through three passes - it installs an image of a clean OS with all packages in a directory, then reboots, installs the drivers, reboots again, then installs the desired packages, then runs sysprep and reboots again.
As for the "pressing on the bottom right corner of the machine" thing... are you resting your finger on the TrackPoint? I've never heard of that problem before, and I bet it's coincidental that you're going for the bottom right corner. Don't rest your finger on it, and if you do, give it 3 seconds to re-center.
The docking stations... ok, I'll give you weird crashes caused by some of them.
And, yes, the actual plastic on ThinkPads of late is incredibly cheap, but the chassis is magnesium, just like the plastic MacBooks, and the only plastic on a non-R-series is the LCD bezel, the keyboard bezel, and the palmrest.
True, but for processing power, it'll still compete with CULV, and nothing more than that. Yes, it'll be a pretty formidable competitor, with the power consumption that ARM's been talking about.
If you want more processing power than that, though, there's not a faster ARM to throw at the problem, so it's out of the running.
Atom 330 has an 8 W TDP and 9.3 W peak power consumption.
Atom N270 has a 2.5 W TDP and 3 W peak power consumption. Multiply by two, that's still 3 watts less heat to deal with (and over a larger area,) and 3.3 W less power consumption.
Also, Intel refuses to sell Atom 330s for laptop applications.
Well, a netmainframe would be small and relatively cheap... so I think IBM did one a while back. Well, it was a bit DIY, but...
IBM PS/2 P75 (486-based luggable) plus an IBM Personal/370 Adapter/A... equals a portable mainframe running OS/2 on the x86 side, emulating all the mainframe I/O, with a real mainframe processor accessible via a 3270 emulator on OS/2.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention, dancing bunnies subverts any security system put in place, that the end user is allowed to modify.
Malware: "Please modify your SELinux policies to allow the Dancing Bunnies to run."
User: *modifies policies*
Short of an antimalware program alerting the user that the dancing bunnies are actually malware, nothing will stop the user from installing the dancing bunnies. NOTHING.
ARM11 launched in 2002. That's a pretty major one...
(And, Acorn as a personal computer manufacturer died in 1998. They were using the DEC StrongARM, which predates the ARM9 and ARM10 - the StrongARM was used in place of the ARM8 that was still under development, and the ARM9 borrowed ideas from the StrongARM.)
Although, there is something else.
I don't believe Microsoft pays to do ports of Windows.
IIRC, ports of Windows to non-x86 architectures are paid for by the processor maker. (That's why Windows 2000 for Alpha was cancelled, Compaq didn't want to pay for it any more.)
ARM's said they need a port of Windows, too, and there's rumors out there that there's a team at MS porting Windows to ARM... made up of ARM employees.
Except netbooks didn't take off until Windows ran on them. Then, you got a real ultraportable that did everything your desktop did, for $300-400.
This is true that MS can't effectively subvert the Linux smartbook, but the average person would have to buy a Linux smartbook in spite of Linux. (We won't talk about WinCE smartbooks, other than my saying that MS can't effectively subvert the Linux smartbook.)
Basically, it's a really, really long battle to get smartbooks adopted, simply because Linux isn't Windows or even Mac OS.
My prediction: The Linux zealots will buy them and say that they're insanely popular, the RISC OS community will buy them and port RISC OS to them, and then they'll disappear.
It's impractical for home users to hire a full-time sysadmin, though.
To use the car analogy, requiring home users to have a sysadmin to use a computer is like requiring car owners to have a chauffeur.
IMO, yes, because Nokia was selling a censorware product for Iran to use as their main censorship system, not requiring Nokia to censor their products to do business in Iran.
The problem is, for a home computer, you are your own sysadmin.
And then the dancing bunnies problem comes into play.
User: "Oooh, I can download this to see dancing bunnies." *downloads and executes malware*
Malware: *tries to install*
OS: "Malware needs root access to install. Please enter your root password." (Windows version of this would be "Cancel or Allow.")
User: *enters root password*
Malware: *infects system*
OS: *pwned*
User: *pwned*
Except for helping Iran with censorship. Minor details.
It's just an ordinary Atom netbook, with a special software load. There's a few different versions of the D250, I'm typing this on an XP-only version.
There is MorphOS for the Mac Mini G4...
(Different OS, and I don't know the difference between the different Amiga OSes, other than they're made by different companies.)
And they'll gladly sell you an older version that's light weight if there's a market of legitimately cheap PCs.
(Typing this on a shiny new netbook with XP Home.)
Except, IIRC, the conspirators weren't (at least publicly) known until they SAID they did it.
So it wasn't a conspiracy theory, it was proven.
Could also be an issue with loading CSS - I actually get that a lot on Opera if the Opera session has been running for a while (think weeks) and used heavily.
Well, if the site will load in IE 5.5 and doesn't need any ActiveX components, it's not Windows-specific - it'll work on Solaris/SPARC or HP-UX/PA-RISC as well. :P
The only thing I fire up IE for nowadays is Flash content - Flash video has some GPU acceleration, but only in IE.
Then in that case, maybe more software is needed... and not just yes/no prompts, but questions relating to the dosage.
"What is the patient's age in months?"
"What is the patient's weight?"
"What is being scanned?"
"You currently have the machine set for X dose, 8 times the maximum allowed dose for this procedure. Please verify the desired dosage."
"You have requested that a patient of Y months age and Z weight, undergoing A procedure, should recieve X dose. To perform this action, you will require a second user to verify the action. Please contact another authorized user to use the key override."
And, have it never store a default or previous dosage.
There's still room for real, mechanical interlocks. Maybe a radiation-sensitive fuse that, when exceeding a "this will definitely injure" level, blows?
Actually, x86-64 is doing something like that.
The architecture supports 64-bit addressing, but existing x86-64 CPUs only have a 48-bit virtual address space, and a 40-bit physical address space.
By the time that becomes an issue, of course, the implementation will change, and nobody will notice, because nobody will think to shove more than 1 TiB RAM in an old Core i7 box. (And, for that matter, memory controller limitations mean that you're not getting anywhere near that much in there anyway - my main machine has a chipset that doesn't even support any more than 32-bit addressing, for that matter, despite supporting some EM64T CPUs. That's been true for quite a while, of course - I don't know of a single i386 that can actually run 4 GiB RAM, yet they all (well, all the DXes) can address it.)
OK, if you want to remove the extra software, go into the factory restore software, and uncheck all of the checkboxes.
The way Lenovo's software works is, it goes through three passes - it installs an image of a clean OS with all packages in a directory, then reboots, installs the drivers, reboots again, then installs the desired packages, then runs sysprep and reboots again.
As for the "pressing on the bottom right corner of the machine" thing... are you resting your finger on the TrackPoint? I've never heard of that problem before, and I bet it's coincidental that you're going for the bottom right corner. Don't rest your finger on it, and if you do, give it 3 seconds to re-center.
The docking stations... ok, I'll give you weird crashes caused by some of them.
And, yes, the actual plastic on ThinkPads of late is incredibly cheap, but the chassis is magnesium, just like the plastic MacBooks, and the only plastic on a non-R-series is the LCD bezel, the keyboard bezel, and the palmrest.
Sounds like he can't log in as non-root in runlevel 1.
But, Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get a text terminal, then log in as yourself there.
True, but for processing power, it'll still compete with CULV, and nothing more than that. Yes, it'll be a pretty formidable competitor, with the power consumption that ARM's been talking about.
If you want more processing power than that, though, there's not a faster ARM to throw at the problem, so it's out of the running.
The N270 also has hyperthreading, so the only thing you lose is 64-bit.
The quad-core ARMs will be competing with dual Atoms and the CULV (Core 2-based low-voltage low-cost) chips. Not the latest and greatest.
Atom 330 has an 8 W TDP and 9.3 W peak power consumption.
Atom N270 has a 2.5 W TDP and 3 W peak power consumption. Multiply by two, that's still 3 watts less heat to deal with (and over a larger area,) and 3.3 W less power consumption.
Also, Intel refuses to sell Atom 330s for laptop applications.
Well, a netmainframe would be small and relatively cheap... so I think IBM did one a while back. Well, it was a bit DIY, but...
IBM PS/2 P75 (486-based luggable) plus an IBM Personal/370 Adapter/A... equals a portable mainframe running OS/2 on the x86 side, emulating all the mainframe I/O, with a real mainframe processor accessible via a 3270 emulator on OS/2.