Freakonomics explained in perfectly using a mere three words: Wade vs Roe
A slice of society that was parenting kids more of which grew into crime than of other slices was SUDDENLY given an out on unwanted pregnancies. 15-20 years later, crime SUDDENLY drops.
Less unprepared mothers went through with their pregnancies.
A good chunk of the next generation that was responsible for crime was never born.
Conduct the same study in any developed country other than the USA (or it's mentality look-alike, Canada). Try any European country, Australia or NZ, Japan or other Asian countries. Preferably, try several.
THEN Draw your game use vs violence correlations, and see if what's making US kids violent is games, or a mentality that doesn't equip them with the tools required to cope with mature content.
THEN we'll talk. How I love it when American lobbyist groups oversimplify an issue so an uninformed public can be made even more misinformed. Go America.
Don't confuse questionable functionality with a non-trivial install due to lack of a floppy drive. 2 totally different things.
Once you get XP running, there is nothing questionable about its functionality. Your SATA controller will work just fine.
That said, I'm more on your camp than the Vista nay-sayers.
1. If someone sold you a vista computer with under 1GB of RAM, then it's not vista's fault. It's either your fault for being an uninformed consumer and buying an underspecced computer for the software AND the OEM's fault for giving you a dysfunctional product (kinda like a car dealer who sells you a car with 3 proper wheels and a fourth semi-functional slim-spare - that is not how the car was designed to work, and labeling the car model "slow" because of it is inappropriate).
In fact, I've found vista works MUCH better with at least 1.5GB, as any modern OS, vista not excluded, can use an extra 512MB-1GB of RAM that never officially gets used for caching. If vista core uses 700MB, and your apps use at least 300MB, 1GB leaves you with no significant memory cache, affecting the responsiveness of the OS.
RAM costs jack. If you want vista to work as designed, shell out another 50$ and plug some ram in.
2. Re DRM - Vista poses POTENTIAL media-related pain in the undisclosed future. Linux poses EXISTING pain today in getting all your media types to work properly. If that's what your choice of OS is revolving around, I'll take the POTENTIAL pain today, and once that realizes itself, THEN I'll make the switch to Linux. Admittedly, I have different considerations for my own kit, hence am typing this off a gentoo box.
3. There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG with Vista.
a. Yes, it's a bigger RAM hog than it's predecessors. So was XP, so was 98, so was KDE3 and KDE2, so is everything in the industry. Yay. b. The whole "needing a powerhouse GPU" argument is utter shite. Just like its predecessor, it runs fine without aero, and even a pissy i945 chip satisfies aero. c. Yes, it's introduced some changes in driver models (in the grand scheme of things, >95% of the driver model stayed the same). Give it a bit of time to mature. XP, to those with the short memories was MUCH MUCH WORSE, and it's doing perfectly fine nowadays. d. The only reason people treat vista as a failure was because a whole bunch of MS marketing idiots and some analysts that believed them predicted people will replace everything the moment vista came out, like with XP. XP replaced a dysfunctional system. Vista isn't replacing a dysfunctional system. XP gave stability to the corporate that was using 9x. While vista brings nearly zero value at additional cost to the corporate world. If you single out only the Win2K-based businesses at the time, THEY DIDN'T FLOCK TO XP EITHER. Hence with Vista, the upgrade path for corps was to steer around it as it makes no financial sense, and the upgrade path for home users is along the lines of "when my xp box expires" rather than "NOW!". Hence no consumers flocking, just the natural trickle of people replacing their expired kit once every so and so years. Which is exactly what is happening.
Does this mark Vista as a failure? fuck no. It's just situated differently than XP was, offers different types of benefits to different slices of the market than XP. Were one to adjust expectations to the realities of the market, I think Vista is swimming quite well, is maturing fast where it needs to do so (albeit with a few things it is not there yet), and will easily replace XP once machines with 512MB of ram will go the way of the machines-with-128MB-RAM-running-XP (that was quite "slow" - "broken" more like it - too, by the way. BROKEN != SLOW ), and all Vista kit will start getting sold with ample RAM like XP kit is sold today.
I think you've missed out on #0 though: DE was an RPG. A REAL RPG, not some wannabe with two and a half RPG elements a-la NOLF or Bioshock. Not only did it have XP and a level-up system, it had an extremely developed weapon customization system. AND, it was PERFECTLY balanced and tuned.
DE:IW was a DISASTER in this respect. The leveling system had you reach the peak of your profficiency on the second level of the game and was as balanced as a scale with me on one side and a cathedral on the other.
Weapon customization was bastardized and crippled into oblivion. And one of the MOST IMPORTANT aspects of RPG's - resource management (in shooter RPG's, that's mostly ammo), was simply removed and replaced with a "universal ammo" (which never runs out, hence "neverending universal ammo") under the assumption that the player couldn't be bothered with the challenging game, and is nothing but a potato-brain redneck that wants guns to be shooting.
It wasn't an RPG. It wasn't even a shooter with RPG elements. For what it claimed to be, it was dumbed-down. For what it actually was - a vanilla shooter a-la quake and doom - it was not a very good one.
Advice to DE3 devs: GO BACK AND HAVE A VERY HARD THINK ABOUT WHAT MADE THE ORIGINAL SO GOOD.
The Short: REWARD THE PLAYER FOR BEING SMART, (rather than bringing down the level of the game to the lowest common denominator of gamers who couldn't be bothered by anything except running an outlined path so as to complete the main plot in as little time as possible, shooting stuff while doing so.)
The Long: DE1 It was BALANCED WELL. What people like is not getting the ubercustomizedweapon as soon as possible (level 2) in the game. They like going through the process of upgrading it (through lots of things that are hard to find and require combinations of skill-use, creativity, hard-to-get money, role-playing and NPC interaction and player perception to attain) and gradually specializing in it using XP that is, you guessed it, hard to obtain as well.
Most importantly, make hard-to-find stashes have LUCRATIVE stuff, not trivial "health packs" or upgrades for a weapon nobody needs anyway cuz a weapon can only accept two altogether, and they're already being used). Reward the player not for having bought your game (putting everything worthwhile to be found in the game in his path, without even the possibility of side-stepping it), but reward the player for TRYING HARD.
DE1 was built so well, I replayed it 4 times, and I kept finding new secret niches and caches I haven't found on previous times I've played.
Alternatively, assume the general casual-gaming console public is who you are building the game for, that the public can't have any not-completely in-your-face-easy challenges imposed on it lest it be scared away, turn your game into Yet Another Typical Shooter, and try to squeeze six more sales from the piece of art you bastardized by greed (like was done last time).
But from us people who actually facilitated the rise of the first game into the top games ever and allowed you to make it into a franchise, PLEASE, PRETTY PRETTY PLEASE,
They're not a silver bullet, and shouldn't be treated as such, but it's a crucial piece that both directly addresses some of the causes of aging, and significantly complements our biomolecular toolbox, which in turn we are and will be using to solve a miriad of other problems.
Discrete security vulnerabilities of each system aside, Vista has one major security advantage - it implements a work-as-user-with-sudo model rather than work-as-root for standalone installations. Read: major money-saving seat-belt for home user, and a "nothing to see here, move along" for anyone who is already working using restricted policies using XP, or prior same. It's not that XP etc couldn't do this, it's that it wasn't convenient enough to throw into the face of a person who does not have an IT department to manage stuff for him. Now it is.
So, big business is skipping Vista. No big surprise there - no benefit. Home users will be getting it.
That said, I wouldn't be holding out for Windows 7.0 to be either slimmer, leaner and meaner than Vista, or more compatible. I'll put money it will be more of the same. They won't build it from the groud (err... from the XP) up. They'll continue going from where they are with Vista.
Like XP, it will become mature with time, and businesses who need new rollouts, can stomach 512MB RAM per box more than an XP box would demand and are not directly affected by the ever-decreasing set of Vista's maturity issues, will use Vista rather than XP for deployments.
How do we expect insurance companies to handle this? What about the "two publics"?
On one hand, doomsayers here are saying insurance companies can choose to not insure someone with certain genes or charge them insane amounts. Scary, but the solution is obvious - [1] force insurance companies to ensure ANYONE [2] legally define and enforce a ceiling rate they can charge, regardless of how bad your genes look.
I can already hear privacy advocates screaming and yelling "why give them our genes in the first place"? That's a moot point for two reasons - 1. It's a losing battle. Eventually, our genes (or those of our relatives) will be accessible. 2. Hiding our genes in general os shooting ourselves in the foot. Some (and I belong to this group, hence will use "we") may WANT their genes to be publicly available, much like I want source to be available. So products, offerings, solutions to problems and industry can spring due to their availability.
The most obvious reason not to hide our genes, however, is simple: people who have non-fucked genes will want to, they will pay a lower premium. Money talks.
Here is how it will most likely evolve from what we have today:
We pay today default premium X. I will assume charging >X is not financially feasible due to competition, and that X is the sweet spot.
Insurance companies will offer a genetic evaluation kit. It allows one to PRIVATELY evaluate himself, and submit the results to the insurance companies if his genes are ok, thereby halving his premium to 0.5X.
After a period of adoption, let's say several years, The percentage of "fucked genes" individuals in the default pool will be much higher, as many of the "ok genes" individuals have opted to pay less by letting their genes be known to the insurance company. The insurance expenses associated with maintaining the default pool will go up, causing X to go up to 2X, causing more and more people to abandon that pool.
At some point government regulation kicks in, and sets a government-controlled ceiling rate for the default rate (much like they control minimum wage).
Since the default rate is now at 2X, the insurance companies set the "ok genes" rate back from 0.5X to X, as it allows them to both maintain their incentive for people to abandon the default-paying group and share their genes, as well as allowing them to charge as much as the market allows - X.
It may be 0.9X (as the minority that costs the most is covering its expenses through a higher rate and possible government subsidation, hence making the competition-induced sweet-spot lower than when this included many expensive cases to treat).
I predict this will happen, as this is where the incentives are today. Note that the primary driving force here is consumer "greed", not insurance companies. People will want to pay that lower premium, even if crappy prophets such as myself predict that once the "fucked genes" people were isolated in the default group, everyone's rates will go back to what they were before (except the defaulters that will pay more). People will FLOCK once lower rates are offered, because people are damn well motivated by paying less.
Insurance companies WILL know our genes and it's a losing battle.
Think it through. Share your opinion. It's something that requires thought and debate NOW.
Pardon, but do you have any clue how the SIM card in your phone or the data stripe on your credit card are partitioned? Do you care, regardless of how important a phone or a credit card is to you? no. It's a black box. It does its job. Does that make you any more clueless? no. Simply uninterested in the workings of a particular bit of technology. Just as you can point to things those people are disinterested in figuring out in a higher level of detail, I can find a similar number of things you would be disinterested in too.
I'm a sysadmin/coder who studies biochemistry. Chances are you can't explain how, say, a simple battery or perhaps a fuel cell works on a biochemical level. I can. So? Am I better than you? less clueless than you? What can I infer about you from this? Nothing really. Chances are I know stuff you don't, you know stuff I don't, and the users you bash know shit neither of us does.
From your wild proclamations about users you really want to feel smarter than, I can, however, infer about you quite a bit.
Frankly, I can see where he is going. I'll take the less popular approach to this, and fuck the karma.
The tech industry has an undercurrent of applied improvement, here, now, making a better world etc etc. A sort of distant extension of the seventies hippie culture. Make a difference, make a change.
Intel may not be mother-googla-teresa, but the specialized applied science they funded over the years led to orders upon orders upon orders of magnitude of increase in the computational power available to mankind, and served as an enabling technology to a lot of good things that happened to a lot of people. More importantly, the profits from this venture were used to push this wheelbarrow further and further and further down. Intel is not the only one. Forget startups. Forget flag bearers a-la google. Any and every fat-cat in the tech industry is doing it. IBM. HP. Sun. Sandisk. It's hardwired into the way business in the industry is done.
What he is complaining about, if my understanding serves me right, is not how they do the nuts and bolts of their job. He's not claiming he can do a better one, at that. It is the choice of just running with a working product ad-infinum (say, selling a 486 for 20 years rather improve and improve and end up with a "core 2"), putting dividends over a supposed responsibility a business may (or may not) have towards choosing to pursue products that improve the world alongside fill its coffers. Legally, no such responsibility exists. Morally - some people recon otherwise. More such people lead and steer technology giants than big-pharma giants. And that's what he's upset about.
To a lesser extent, he is also ramming the prioritization of theoretical science (the NIH grant-receiving scientists) over applied science. Controversial as that may be, especially to scientist purists, in the medical field and once applied to vast populations that imminently have people who suffer from anything and everything, he has a point there too. Theoretical science is important, but he recons, and I agree, public money should follow and applied-science-first priority list.
Be technological advance in medical science coin, speculative investment (theoretical science) should be a background investment, whereas applied science should be critical primary income. Anyone who says otherwise is merely a hypocrite who has yet to get a loved one succumb to a nasty condition medical progress could have prevented. Every dog has his day, and at the end of the day we're all human, as are our loved ones.
I resell miniITX/nanoITX kit. A slower fanless C7/1.2GHz runs XP perfectly fine. A 1.5GHz will run it even finer. With 512MB? Give me a break. The guy has pro'lly heard about Via cpus from someone who knows even less, and has probably never seen the words EPIA, eden, luke, miniITX/nanoITX mentioned anywhere either.
It will even run vista quite happily, with the reservation of needing at least a gig of ram, and that the embedded GPU on via platforms - Unichrome chipsets of all sorts - do NOT support Aero. Other than that, run Vista on it to your heart's content.
In fact, its outright useless for gaming. Forget WoW. You'd have trouble running a 1999-era game on it. Still, for that tiny niche market of three joes who don't game, this is a totally sweet PC. And for a few more dollars, they can get XP up and running on it.
I don't think anyone other than delusional fanboys and marketers who bought into their own hype see Vista as a "failure".
Not being able to run on slower computers does not qualify as a failure, because slower computers are not sold in stores, or constitute niche product at best.
It's a next generation of NT. It's bigger on resources. It offers stuff XP didn't (UAC - aka sudo) It offers improved UI. It will get tweaked, bugfixed, servicepacked, upgraded etc.
Unlike the days of the 98 -> XP switch, the switch now isn't from something miserably inferior, so the whole upgrade is nice-to-have rather than a must-have, and most people I know relegate it to when their current machine ends its life and they buy a new one, rather than running to a store and buying a copy now (which is what some marketing idiots thought would happen).
In the grand scheme of things, the expectation of people hoarding to replace their existing sufficient rigs is what marked vista as a "failure". It didn't fail. It will sell just fine, whenever people go to a store and actually *need* a new machine, a machine which, in turn, will run Vista just fine. Rest assured this will happen. It just won't neccesarily happen at a rate some corporate executives in MS and elsewhere would like. Tough noogies for them.
Back to a car analogy - when Toyota pumps out a new model - most people who use a car as a means to an end don't run to replace theirs. They wait until the natural lifecycle of their vehicle ends (whether as an allotted number of years, or the mechanical expiry of the vehicle), then they go out and get a new car. Same applies to Vista nowadays, and the fact that everyone didn't drop what they were doing and immediately buy a new product upon its arrival marks neither the Toyota nor Vista as a failure.
In short, enough fanboy hyperbole. 5 years from now, you'll be loving vista and bitching about the next big MS thing.
That is the outright stupidest and lamest approach to security I have yet heard.
If anything, it (and the smart educators among the geeks) teaches users to stay within their userspace. I'm a sysadmin. I use Vista on my laptop due to my needs from it. I run with UAC on. I typically encounter less than a single confirmation dialog a week. Why? because I work entirely in my userspace.
If you're a system software developer, yes, you have a good case for disabling it. But Joe average? he has a big chunk of money he spends on a tech who routinely fixes his computer at stake. UAC saves him that money if he realises it's a seatbelt and learns how to use it rather than not bothering to put it on.
Disabling UAC to get rid of the dialogs is like disabling a server monitoring/alerting system because it is making noise. That is NOT the solution. The solution is identifying and eliminating the broken shit you're doing that's causing the noise, so the system is allowed to properly do its job.
And if your software insists on writing user shit in program files (for which Vista has a hidden workaround, placing these files in a hidden directory inside your user profile, sidestepping compatibility issues with a big slice of old bad software), just upgrade or replace the software. If it can't work in an unprivileged NT environment, it's the software vendor you blame for writing crap software. Privileged NT envieonments have been around for a decade now.
Vista is perfectly fine on modern hardware. I run it on anything ranging from northwood P4's, through 1.7GHz dothans to an E6300, two T5600's and an L7500 CPU. If you don't have enough 3D oomph in your system to support aero properly, disable it. Any 3D chipset except Via Unichrome from the last 5 years will pull it totally smoothly. It requires less 3D capability than a game from 1999.
The only resource Vista hogs significanly more than XP is RAM. It hogs an entire 50$-worth more of it. Big Whoop. Like that wasn't the case when comparing XP to 98, 98 to 95, or a modern KDE implementation to some archaic linux running KDE1. RAM usage expands. Who cares?
Like GP said - don't go installing vista on old kit, same as you'd not install XP on a Pentium 1.
For modern hardware that can spare some RAM, it's not a bad option. It offers some ups alongside some downs when lined up next to both Ubuntu and XP, and is really a matter of what matters to you more.
If you're claiming MS is a monopoly because it can "bend the market" by not selling XP, that's plain bull. Toyota doesn't sell old models either. As a company you have full freedom to decide what products to market and what products to retire.
If you're claiming it because there's no OSless laptops in stores, that's a whole different ballgame, and I'd tend to agree with you.
I've made the switch to Vista too, and my conclusions are similar to yours. It doesn't go slow, given its fed 50$ more worth of RAM than XP would need (50$, big whoop), stuff is a bit different which took me the better part of a week to get used to, IMHO in most cases for the better, giving capability above what XP used to give (tablet features, power profiles, built-in process monitoring, excellent prog-files/start-menu search, built into the start menu ala katapult etc).
I'm a UNIX sysadmin by trade (I run windows on my lappie because I need OneNote), and I can't figure out all the idiots who bash UAC either. It's a security model for crying out loud. It's good. A hell of a lot better than not having one. Don't like it? Disable it and do everything as root. It's your bloody funeral. It breaks your shit? Bitch to the idiot who wrote software that saves files and reg data outside where you are supposed to stray as a user. My KDE desktop in the office bugs me about root-requiring changes by asking me for a password in exactly the same manner.
Explorer popups? Don't use explorer. Use firefox, like you would on Ubuntu.
Bottom line - Vista has some quirks, as did everything before it, all versions and flavours of linux not excluded.
Your point is smack on, regarding these opinion articles which find the learning curve for a linux desktop preferable to the learning curve of a slightly tweaked windows interface.
It's just a mountain of hyperbole, some odd bits of software improperly written to stray outside your permission space that need coaxing, upgrading, running as root or replacing, and generally more sheer anti-microsoft sentiment than their products really warrant.
Yes, it could be due to P2P. But it could also be other things. How about "1 billion lost due to a record industry that alienated itself to the public"?
Dude, re: Gaming You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
All you have to do is pull it out of your mac spiel for everything you're saying to be absolutely correct. Gaming doesn't fit in with what you're talking about. It's a whole different niche, with a whole different public, where macs are seriously inferior (compatibilitywise, performance is mostly bottlenecked at graphics cards, and the same cards are offered to both PC and MAC worlds) and thereby used only by gaming mac zealots or people who only own a mac and aren't bothered by the limited selection. And the record studio public you mention is irrelevant to gaming.
The equivalent of a medeival farmer's meal including stale bread, some simple vegetables, perhaps a bit of cooked fish and some ancient bit of dried meat will do 90% of your dietary needs at a nutrition sufficiency one hasn't even dreamed of. It's because nowadays we choose and consume upwards of the full contents of an entire supermarket trolley per week, without even thinking twice about it. Munchies, Soft Drinks, Multitudes of once-exotic fruit and vegetables, spices, an entire zoo in packaged meat form. The ease with which we satisfy between 10-20 practically redundant desires for various foods is payed for by throwing huge amounts of food at them. Optimze that even slightly and you'll have a huge impact on convincing yourself what a human really needs.
Did it occur to your narrow-minded brain that unlike your media tells you, shit ain't black and white? That everything on a market with a disadvantage ALWAYS has an advantage too (otherwise it wouldn't be on the market.. Doh). Did it occur to you that your own personal preferences aside, some of us may actually PREFER THINGS DIFFERENTLY, PREFERRING to decode MP3's, have a robust PIM idling in the background, millions of desktop colors, have an evolved level of safety in document editing that wasn't around in Lotus123 and still use pine at will?
Let me just say this: I hang around ~1GHz Via-based CPUs a lot. If you can't build a Joe-Intenet-Office box, using either windows or linux, around the equivalent of a P3-733 with 512MB RAM without resorting to DR-DOS and Lotus123, you're a shite tech whose mind became set at some distant technological era and epoch ago, and who failed to cope with technology since. Dude, ungrow up.
The new breed of NanoITX and PicoITX (specifically via kit as it's way cheaper than anything intel I've seen, sole exception being the yet unavailable Eee), offer almost exactly what we're both aiming at. It's not a UMPC at all - having no screen - but it's tiny, cheap, XP-capable and you can just hang it on a wall or put it on a shelf, then hook it up to a 7''-12'' touch panel someplace convenient. UMPCs will offer something similar with inability to detach screen from machine, but at a solid 50, maybe even 30% of the price of the above.
Uses? Ye Olde Kitchen Box, A MediaCenter, an Automotive box, a box to control audio and offer what's on a file server in a room which otherwise has no TV (can be done with a really small touch screen on a wall, or from a laptop with VNC/RDP over Wifi...), a PC for your 4-year-old, etc.
The reason I was talking about expandability was not to make the 400$ UMPC/equivalent into a big strong GigaWattUberH4x0RGameBox, but to complement it to allow it to fill a wider variety of tasks which the initial 300$/400$ configuration doesn't allow. For those pricetags, they're typically offered with an absolute minimum amount of everything, with an additional GB or flash or 256MB of RAM nearly doubling the price. That philosophy culminates in how the iphone is built, which is with soldered flash and no expansion slot. Ye 1000$ tiny (by laptop standards) X60 thinkpad OTOH, on top of =8 hrs battery, can be fed TWO miniPCI cards and TWO SODIMM ram sticks, plus SD, PCMCIA and a USIM.. Ya Mama!. I could settle for less, but it's that kind of freedom that would lead to me buying more of them for "novel" (quotes because I've been doing this shit a decade ago with whatever was underhand anyway) uses, and the market for some of them would move (or, as in the case of MediaPCs, continue moving) from complete niche to mainstream.
That said, I'm not holding my breath for the OLPC, as its deliberately limited expandability would give me very little compared to other UMPCs that are going to be offered in the near future, and very much holding my breath for things like the Asus Eee and Via-based equivalents.
What say I hook up with Asus a "Buy an OLPC for a kid in Africa and get an Eeee" program?;-)
The mac mafia can blow me. There's things that macs do well, and there's things that they don't. PC's can edit video too. We say macs are preferable because it is nicer to do on a mac. And just like you can run photoshop or premiere on a PC, you can run some games on a mac. If you go through more than two games in a year, however, and don't want to be specifically choosing them off a somewhat narrow mac compatibility list, XP is the 99.9% compatible platforms for games, macs (maybe) coming in as a distant second. Recommending a mac for gaming is bad religion-driven advice, aimed to cynically use your "geek" status to bolster the ranks of your religion rather than do good to whoever is being advised.
Now, back to the topic: 1. I *import and resell* miniITX and nanoITX kit. You're preaching to the quire. I know damn well what a supposedly "underpowered" box can do, be you running gentoo, OpenBSD, or even woe and behold, Vista.
2. UMPC's are still immature, especially and specifically the sub-400$ ones. I'm VERY MUCH looking to some ultracheap yet seriously expandable platforms and reasonably powered (a 1GHz C7 or an 800MHz dothan is VERY reasonable).
Thing is, one can get VERY cheap biggest and fastest: [a] CF cards [b] miniPCI wireless cards [c] SODIMM RAM any size you care to want [d] miniPCI Wireless cellular cards on ebay.
I want UMPCs where you can plug a mountain of the above, plus a USIM.
Now, to my point: I claim this is a FASLE STATEMENT: If average joe doesn't need power [gaming/video/other-crunching], one such UMPC is all he needs. NOT the reasoning: because it has too little CPU/RAM/Disk (most can be upgraded most of the time anyway if he REALLY wants Vista) The reasoning: [a] Joe may not want to have a desktop monitor, may want to stay productive on the go, and may still want a humane resolution to be looking at. That spells bye-bye 8'' screen, bye-bye UMPC pricetag, aka bye-bye UMPC, enter 12'' ultraportables and bigger which spell what-we-already-have, and if you want SERIOUS resolution (Thinkpad X6* Tablet or Toshiba M200 do SXGA+), you have to cough up some serious dough.
Moral: SCREENS COST BIG MONEY, and are pro'lly the BIG influence behind the price drop from ultraportables to UMPCs.
[b] Joe may not want a one hour battery. Small UMPC form factor is nice and cute, but the power consumption of that redesigned-into-a-laptop miniITX or Intel rig is the same as what the bigger ultraportables (or bigger bricks) have. So you have to fit a battery, sized for bigger laptops, on this little thingamajig, to get reasonable off-the-grid time. They don't do that. They give you a smaller battery which lasts less. Joe may not want that.
[c]... Multiple connectivity (without USB spaghetti hanging out of your machine?) Dual miniPCI slots? Do =400$ boxes have these?
When is the UMPC/"underpowered"-rig enough? 1. When used as a DTR, in conjunction with external substitutes for everything it lacks (USB, monitors..) 2. When used somewhere where resolution and battery are not a factor (Mediacenter PC can do just fine with 800x600. CarPC can do ok with 640x480). 3. When used to run samba, asterisk and rtorrent at home, or maybe pfSense, and all you need (^H^H^H^Hwant) is a console.
My Point: There's more offered by "Overpowered-coal-driven-battle-cruiser" laptops than what UMPCs can provide on more fronts than one, too many to make a one-size-fits-all proclamation that they're all Joe needs. That's a falsity. Circumstantially, it can sometimes be right, but it's not anywhere near a generic recommendation.
As always pending a recommendation, It can't be professionally answered without asking what the user actually needs, and that varies.
The OLPC wasn't the issue of what I was saying. I didn't say the OLPC is too heavy. The GP said people don't need what's being sold today as it's overpowered, and that dirt-cheap stuff can do just as fine, and I countered, saying that whereas above-dirt-cheap stuff is indeed overpowered cpuwise, it nevertheless offers value to casual users through other things dirt-cheap-stuff doesn't.
OLPC is a niche (very large niche, mind you) product that would have relatively limited use to most westernets, compared to anything that was built for first-world-dwellers to begin with. The new breed of UMPC's, things based off Via's reference UMPC design, The Asus Eee and its intel-based brethren, stuff that will run via's MobileITX platform, that stuff is indeed cool. And when it will expand a bit, offer some serious variety, and someone figures there's a market for something that underpowered with an oversized battery and an SXGA+ screen, THAT is when things'll get interesting.
First, if you go about recommending peoeple build their game rigs around macs, I hope they have the sense to tell you you're talking shit. Video editing - maybe, and picassa looks exactly the same on windows and mac, which is what most people nowadays are happy to use rather than face Photoshop's steep learning-curve and/or price.
Second, I too am a sysadmin, and I too use my lappie for things that can be done by a 700MHz P3 like RDP and SSH.
HOWEVER, and this is where you're off the mark by a mile, the big difference between a P3 and the L7500 Core2Duo I'm writing this on now is the fact that the latter consumes WAY LESS power, and offers me insane (by P3 standards) battery life (Thinkpad X60t, before you ask).
Your computer needs don't sum up with the CPU&GPU either. Last year I was laptopless and cashless for a while, and borrowed a Dell lappie from work for several months. Let me tell you something. You won't get work done on 800x600, and my recent move to an SXGA+ (1400*1050) screen DID make a hell of a lot of difference in my ability to get shit done. These won't come standard on Asus EeePC, nor will you find them on entry-level laptop machines.
You're right in that CPU SPEED is not a factor. You're wrong that for someone who wants to do non-CPU-intensive stuff like office work or internet browsing needs the dirt-cheapest lappie he can find. His parameters are different, yes, but they're not non-existent.
And I haven't even mentioned a word about *carrying* (for those that actually take their machine with them) around a frigging battle cruiser, which is what cheap typically amounts to.
To quote myself, I said "giving very reasonable frame rates with either all or practically all the graphics bells and whistles turned on". STALKER had to have one of the heaviest GPU resource consuming options bumped to keep frame-rates in the 20-30 range (which is what I consider playable for single-player games, and where I prefer eyecandy to the frames. multiplayer would go the other way) STALKER also displayed some warping on the side screens, showing it was not designed nor QA'd for unconventionally wide resolutions, which in this day and age is a shame.
Slashdot Mirror
Freakonomics explained in perfectly using a mere three words:
Wade vs Roe
A slice of society that was parenting kids more of which grew into crime than of other slices was SUDDENLY given an out on unwanted pregnancies. 15-20 years later, crime SUDDENLY drops.
Less unprepared mothers went through with their pregnancies.
A good chunk of the next generation that was responsible for crime was never born.
Conduct the same study in any developed country other than the USA (or it's mentality look-alike, Canada).
Try any European country, Australia or NZ, Japan or other Asian countries. Preferably, try several.
THEN Draw your game use vs violence correlations, and see if what's making US kids violent is games, or a mentality that doesn't equip them with the tools required to cope with mature content.
THEN we'll talk. How I love it when American lobbyist groups oversimplify an issue so an uninformed public can be made even more misinformed. Go America.
Don't confuse questionable functionality with a non-trivial install due to lack of a floppy drive. 2 totally different things.
Once you get XP running, there is nothing questionable about its functionality. Your SATA controller will work just fine.
That said, I'm more on your camp than the Vista nay-sayers.
1. If someone sold you a vista computer with under 1GB of RAM, then it's not vista's fault. It's either your fault for being an uninformed consumer and buying an underspecced computer for the software AND the OEM's fault for giving you a dysfunctional product (kinda like a car dealer who sells you a car with 3 proper wheels and a fourth semi-functional slim-spare - that is not how the car was designed to work, and labeling the car model "slow" because of it is inappropriate).
In fact, I've found vista works MUCH better with at least 1.5GB, as any modern OS, vista not excluded, can use an extra 512MB-1GB of RAM that never officially gets used for caching. If vista core uses 700MB, and your apps use at least 300MB, 1GB leaves you with no significant memory cache, affecting the responsiveness of the OS.
RAM costs jack. If you want vista to work as designed, shell out another 50$ and plug some ram in.
2. Re DRM - Vista poses POTENTIAL media-related pain in the undisclosed future. Linux poses EXISTING pain today in getting all your media types to work properly. If that's what your choice of OS is revolving around, I'll take the POTENTIAL pain today, and once that realizes itself, THEN I'll make the switch to Linux. Admittedly, I have different considerations for my own kit, hence am typing this off a gentoo box.
3. There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG with Vista.
a. Yes, it's a bigger RAM hog than it's predecessors. So was XP, so was 98, so was KDE3 and KDE2, so is everything in the industry. Yay.
b. The whole "needing a powerhouse GPU" argument is utter shite. Just like its predecessor, it runs fine without aero, and even a pissy i945 chip satisfies aero.
c. Yes, it's introduced some changes in driver models (in the grand scheme of things, >95% of the driver model stayed the same). Give it a bit of time to mature. XP, to those with the short memories was MUCH MUCH WORSE, and it's doing perfectly fine nowadays.
d. The only reason people treat vista as a failure was because a whole bunch of MS marketing idiots and some analysts that believed them predicted people will replace everything the moment vista came out, like with XP.
XP replaced a dysfunctional system. Vista isn't replacing a dysfunctional system. XP gave stability to the corporate that was using 9x. While vista brings nearly zero value at additional cost to the corporate world. If you single out only the Win2K-based businesses at the time, THEY DIDN'T FLOCK TO XP EITHER.
Hence with Vista, the upgrade path for corps was to steer around it as it makes no financial sense, and the upgrade path for home users is along the lines of "when my xp box expires" rather than "NOW!". Hence no consumers flocking, just the natural trickle of people replacing their expired kit once every so and so years. Which is exactly what is happening.
Does this mark Vista as a failure? fuck no. It's just situated differently than XP was, offers different types of benefits to different slices of the market than XP. Were one to adjust expectations to the realities of the market, I think Vista is swimming quite well, is maturing fast where it needs to do so (albeit with a few things it is not there yet), and will easily replace XP once machines with 512MB of ram will go the way of the machines-with-128MB-RAM-running-XP (that was quite "slow" - "broken" more like it - too, by the way. BROKEN != SLOW ), and all Vista kit will start getting sold with ample RAM like XP kit is sold today.
3. Tablet entry interface. Vista's two generations ahead of the tablet XP.
and lest we forget
4. SUDO for home users.
Agreed on #4.
I think you've missed out on #0 though:
DE was an RPG. A REAL RPG, not some wannabe with two and a half RPG elements a-la NOLF or Bioshock. Not only did it have XP and a level-up system, it had an extremely developed weapon customization system. AND, it was PERFECTLY balanced and tuned.
DE:IW was a DISASTER in this respect. The leveling system had you reach the peak of your profficiency on the second level of the game and was as balanced as a scale with me on one side and a cathedral on the other.
Weapon customization was bastardized and crippled into oblivion. And one of the MOST IMPORTANT aspects of RPG's - resource management (in shooter RPG's, that's mostly ammo), was simply removed and replaced with a "universal ammo" (which never runs out, hence "neverending universal ammo") under the assumption that the player couldn't be bothered with the challenging game, and is nothing but a potato-brain redneck that wants guns to be shooting.
It wasn't an RPG. It wasn't even a shooter with RPG elements. For what it claimed to be, it was dumbed-down. For what it actually was - a vanilla shooter a-la quake and doom - it was not a very good one.
Advice to DE3 devs:
GO BACK AND HAVE A VERY HARD THINK ABOUT WHAT MADE THE ORIGINAL SO GOOD.
The Short:
REWARD THE PLAYER FOR BEING SMART,
(rather than bringing down the level of the game to the lowest common denominator of gamers who couldn't be bothered by anything except running an outlined path so as to complete the main plot in as little time as possible, shooting stuff while doing so.)
The Long: DE1 It was BALANCED WELL. What people like is not getting the ubercustomizedweapon as soon as possible (level 2) in the game. They like going through the process of upgrading it (through lots of things that are hard to find and require combinations of skill-use, creativity, hard-to-get money, role-playing and NPC interaction and player perception to attain) and gradually specializing in it using XP that is, you guessed it, hard to obtain as well.
Most importantly, make hard-to-find stashes have LUCRATIVE stuff, not trivial "health packs" or upgrades for a weapon nobody needs anyway cuz a weapon can only accept two altogether, and they're already being used). Reward the player not for having bought your game (putting everything worthwhile to be found in the game in his path, without even the possibility of side-stepping it), but reward the player for TRYING HARD.
DE1 was built so well, I replayed it 4 times, and I kept finding new secret niches and caches I haven't found on previous times I've played.
Alternatively, assume the general casual-gaming console public is who you are building the game for, that the public can't have any not-completely in-your-face-easy challenges imposed on it lest it be scared away, turn your game into Yet Another Typical Shooter, and try to squeeze six more sales from the piece of art you bastardized by greed (like was done last time).
But from us people who actually facilitated the rise of the first game into the top games ever and allowed you to make it into a franchise, PLEASE, PRETTY PRETTY PLEASE,
DON'T.
This is actually a very valid point.
Stem Cells play an important part in the closest thing we have to an engineering roadmap to cure aging.
They're not a silver bullet, and shouldn't be treated as such, but it's a crucial piece that both directly addresses some of the causes of aging, and significantly complements our biomolecular toolbox, which in turn we are and will be using to solve a miriad of other problems.
Smack on.
Discrete security vulnerabilities of each system aside, Vista has one major security advantage - it implements a work-as-user-with-sudo model rather than work-as-root for standalone installations.
Read: major money-saving seat-belt for home user, and a "nothing to see here, move along" for anyone who is already working using restricted policies using XP, or prior same. It's not that XP etc couldn't do this, it's that it wasn't convenient enough to throw into the face of a person who does not have an IT department to manage stuff for him. Now it is.
So, big business is skipping Vista. No big surprise there - no benefit.
Home users will be getting it.
That said, I wouldn't be holding out for Windows 7.0 to be either slimmer, leaner and meaner than Vista, or more compatible. I'll put money it will be more of the same. They won't build it from the groud (err... from the XP) up. They'll continue going from where they are with Vista.
Like XP, it will become mature with time, and businesses who need new rollouts, can stomach 512MB RAM per box more than an XP box would demand and are not directly affected by the ever-decreasing set of Vista's maturity issues, will use Vista rather than XP for deployments.
How do we expect insurance companies to handle this? What about the "two publics"?
On one hand, doomsayers here are saying insurance companies can choose to not insure someone with certain genes or charge them insane amounts.
Scary, but the solution is obvious -
[1] force insurance companies to ensure ANYONE
[2] legally define and enforce a ceiling rate they can charge, regardless of how bad your genes look.
I can already hear privacy advocates screaming and yelling "why give them our genes in the first place"? That's a moot point for two reasons -
1. It's a losing battle. Eventually, our genes (or those of our relatives) will be accessible.
2. Hiding our genes in general os shooting ourselves in the foot. Some (and I belong to this group, hence will use "we") may WANT their genes to be publicly available, much like I want source to be available. So products, offerings, solutions to problems and industry can spring due to their availability.
The most obvious reason not to hide our genes, however, is simple: people who have non-fucked genes will want to, they will pay a lower premium. Money talks.
Here is how it will most likely evolve from what we have today:
We pay today default premium X. I will assume charging >X is not financially feasible due to competition, and that X is the sweet spot.
Insurance companies will offer a genetic evaluation kit. It allows one to PRIVATELY evaluate himself, and submit the results to the insurance companies if his genes are ok, thereby halving his premium to 0.5X.
After a period of adoption, let's say several years, The percentage of "fucked genes" individuals in the default pool will be much higher, as many of the "ok genes" individuals have opted to pay less by letting their genes be known to the insurance company. The insurance expenses associated with maintaining the default pool will go up, causing X to go up to 2X, causing more and more people to abandon that pool.
At some point government regulation kicks in, and sets a government-controlled ceiling rate for the default rate (much like they control minimum wage).
Since the default rate is now at 2X, the insurance companies set the "ok genes" rate back from 0.5X to X, as it allows them to both maintain their incentive for people to abandon the default-paying group and share their genes, as well as allowing them to charge as much as the market allows - X.
It may be 0.9X (as the minority that costs the most is covering its expenses through a higher rate and possible government subsidation, hence making the competition-induced sweet-spot lower than when this included many expensive cases to treat).
I predict this will happen, as this is where the incentives are today. Note that the primary driving force here is consumer "greed", not insurance companies. People will want to pay that lower premium, even if crappy prophets such as myself predict that once the "fucked genes" people were isolated in the default group, everyone's rates will go back to what they were before (except the defaulters that will pay more). People will FLOCK once lower rates are offered, because people are damn well motivated by paying less.
Insurance companies WILL know our genes and it's a losing battle.
Think it through. Share your opinion.
It's something that requires thought and debate NOW.
Pardon, but do you have any clue how the SIM card in your phone or the data stripe on your credit card are partitioned? Do you care, regardless of how important a phone or a credit card is to you? no. It's a black box. It does its job.
Does that make you any more clueless? no. Simply uninterested in the workings of a particular bit of technology. Just as you can point to things those people are disinterested in figuring out in a higher level of detail, I can find a similar number of things you would be disinterested in too.
I'm a sysadmin/coder who studies biochemistry. Chances are you can't explain how, say, a simple battery or perhaps a fuel cell works on a biochemical level. I can. So? Am I better than you? less clueless than you? What can I infer about you from this? Nothing really. Chances are I know stuff you don't, you know stuff I don't, and the users you bash know shit neither of us does.
From your wild proclamations about users you really want to feel smarter than, I can, however, infer about you quite a bit.
Be that the case, He'd have better luck putting his money where his mouth is, as Peter Thiel did.
Frankly, I can see where he is going. I'll take the less popular approach to this, and fuck the karma.
The tech industry has an undercurrent of applied improvement, here, now, making a better world etc etc. A sort of distant extension of the seventies hippie culture. Make a difference, make a change.
Intel may not be mother-googla-teresa, but the specialized applied science they funded over the years led to orders upon orders upon orders of magnitude of increase in the computational power available to mankind, and served as an enabling technology to a lot of good things that happened to a lot of people. More importantly, the profits from this venture were used to push this wheelbarrow further and further and further down.
Intel is not the only one. Forget startups. Forget flag bearers a-la google. Any and every fat-cat in the tech industry is doing it. IBM. HP. Sun. Sandisk. It's hardwired into the way business in the industry is done.
What he is complaining about, if my understanding serves me right, is not how they do the nuts and bolts of their job. He's not claiming he can do a better one, at that.
It is the choice of just running with a working product ad-infinum (say, selling a 486 for 20 years rather improve and improve and end up with a "core 2"), putting dividends over a supposed responsibility a business may (or may not) have towards choosing to pursue products that improve the world alongside fill its coffers. Legally, no such responsibility exists. Morally - some people recon otherwise. More such people lead and steer technology giants than big-pharma giants. And that's what he's upset about.
To a lesser extent, he is also ramming the prioritization of theoretical science (the NIH grant-receiving scientists) over applied science. Controversial as that may be, especially to scientist purists, in the medical field and once applied to vast populations that imminently have people who suffer from anything and everything, he has a point there too. Theoretical science is important, but he recons, and I agree, public money should follow and applied-science-first priority list.
Be technological advance in medical science coin, speculative investment (theoretical science) should be a background investment, whereas applied science should be critical primary income. Anyone who says otherwise is merely a hypocrite who has yet to get a loved one succumb to a nasty condition medical progress could have prevented. Every dog has his day, and at the end of the day we're all human, as are our loved ones.
Agreed, the author is a clueless idiot.
I resell miniITX/nanoITX kit. A slower fanless C7/1.2GHz runs XP perfectly fine. A 1.5GHz will run it even finer.
With 512MB? Give me a break. The guy has pro'lly heard about Via cpus from someone who knows even less, and has probably never seen the words EPIA, eden, luke, miniITX/nanoITX mentioned anywhere either.
It will even run vista quite happily, with the reservation of needing at least a gig of ram, and that the embedded GPU on via platforms - Unichrome chipsets of all sorts - do NOT support Aero. Other than that, run Vista on it to your heart's content.
In fact, its outright useless for gaming. Forget WoW. You'd have trouble running a 1999-era game on it.
Still, for that tiny niche market of three joes who don't game, this is a totally sweet PC. And for a few more dollars, they can get XP up and running on it.
I don't think anyone other than delusional fanboys and marketers who bought into their own hype see Vista as a "failure".
Not being able to run on slower computers does not qualify as a failure, because slower computers are not sold in stores, or constitute niche product at best.
It's a next generation of NT.
It's bigger on resources.
It offers stuff XP didn't (UAC - aka sudo)
It offers improved UI.
It will get tweaked, bugfixed, servicepacked, upgraded etc.
Unlike the days of the 98 -> XP switch, the switch now isn't from something miserably inferior, so the whole upgrade is nice-to-have rather than a must-have, and most people I know relegate it to when their current machine ends its life and they buy a new one, rather than running to a store and buying a copy now (which is what some marketing idiots thought would happen).
In the grand scheme of things, the expectation of people hoarding to replace their existing sufficient rigs is what marked vista as a "failure". It didn't fail. It will sell just fine, whenever people go to a store and actually *need* a new machine, a machine which, in turn, will run Vista just fine.
Rest assured this will happen. It just won't neccesarily happen at a rate some corporate executives in MS and elsewhere would like. Tough noogies for them.
Back to a car analogy - when Toyota pumps out a new model - most people who use a car as a means to an end don't run to replace theirs. They wait until the natural lifecycle of their vehicle ends (whether as an allotted number of years, or the mechanical expiry of the vehicle), then they go out and get a new car. Same applies to Vista nowadays, and the fact that everyone didn't drop what they were doing and immediately buy a new product upon its arrival marks neither the Toyota nor Vista as a failure.
In short, enough fanboy hyperbole.
5 years from now, you'll be loving vista and bitching about the next big MS thing.
That is the outright stupidest and lamest approach to security I have yet heard.
If anything, it (and the smart educators among the geeks) teaches users to stay within their userspace.
I'm a sysadmin. I use Vista on my laptop due to my needs from it. I run with UAC on. I typically encounter less than a single confirmation dialog a week. Why? because I work entirely in my userspace.
If you're a system software developer, yes, you have a good case for disabling it. But Joe average? he has a big chunk of money he spends on a tech who routinely fixes his computer at stake. UAC saves him that money if he realises it's a seatbelt and learns how to use it rather than not bothering to put it on.
Disabling UAC to get rid of the dialogs is like disabling a server monitoring/alerting system because it is making noise. That is NOT the solution. The solution is identifying and eliminating the broken shit you're doing that's causing the noise, so the system is allowed to properly do its job.
And if your software insists on writing user shit in program files (for which Vista has a hidden workaround, placing these files in a hidden directory inside your user profile, sidestepping compatibility issues with a big slice of old bad software), just upgrade or replace the software. If it can't work in an unprivileged NT environment, it's the software vendor you blame for writing crap software. Privileged NT envieonments have been around for a decade now.
These alerts are there for a purpose.
More fanboy bullshit
Vista is perfectly fine on modern hardware. I run it on anything ranging from northwood P4's, through 1.7GHz dothans to an E6300, two T5600's and an L7500 CPU.
If you don't have enough 3D oomph in your system to support aero properly, disable it. Any 3D chipset except Via Unichrome from the last 5 years will pull it totally smoothly. It requires less 3D capability than a game from 1999.
The only resource Vista hogs significanly more than XP is RAM. It hogs an entire 50$-worth more of it. Big Whoop. Like that wasn't the case when comparing XP to 98, 98 to 95, or a modern KDE implementation to some archaic linux running KDE1. RAM usage expands. Who cares?
Like GP said - don't go installing vista on old kit, same as you'd not install XP on a Pentium 1.
For modern hardware that can spare some RAM, it's not a bad option. It offers some ups alongside some downs when lined up next to both Ubuntu and XP, and is really a matter of what matters to you more.
But on the snappiness front, it's perfectly fine.
I'm not sure which way this is going.
If you're claiming MS is a monopoly because it can "bend the market" by not selling XP, that's plain bull. Toyota doesn't sell old models either. As a company you have full freedom to decide what products to market and what products to retire.
If you're claiming it because there's no OSless laptops in stores, that's a whole different ballgame, and I'd tend to agree with you.
I've made the switch to Vista too, and my conclusions are similar to yours.
It doesn't go slow, given its fed 50$ more worth of RAM than XP would need (50$, big whoop), stuff is a bit different which took me the better part of a week to get used to, IMHO in most cases for the better, giving capability above what XP used to give (tablet features, power profiles, built-in process monitoring, excellent prog-files/start-menu search, built into the start menu ala katapult etc).
I'm a UNIX sysadmin by trade (I run windows on my lappie because I need OneNote), and I can't figure out all the idiots who bash UAC either. It's a security model for crying out loud. It's good. A hell of a lot better than not having one. Don't like it? Disable it and do everything as root. It's your bloody funeral. It breaks your shit? Bitch to the idiot who wrote software that saves files and reg data outside where you are supposed to stray as a user.
My KDE desktop in the office bugs me about root-requiring changes by asking me for a password in exactly the same manner.
Explorer popups? Don't use explorer. Use firefox, like you would on Ubuntu.
Bottom line - Vista has some quirks, as did everything before it, all versions and flavours of linux not excluded.
Your point is smack on, regarding these opinion articles which find the learning curve for a linux desktop preferable to the learning curve of a slightly tweaked windows interface.
It's just a mountain of hyperbole, some odd bits of software improperly written to stray outside your permission space that need coaxing, upgrading, running as root or replacing, and generally more sheer anti-microsoft sentiment than their products really warrant.
"I'm Barf, half-Dog and half-Man. I'm my own best friend!"
Yes, it could be due to P2P. But it could also be other things.
How about "1 billion lost due to a record industry that alienated itself to the public"?
Dude, re: Gaming
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
All you have to do is pull it out of your mac spiel for everything you're saying to be absolutely correct. Gaming doesn't fit in with what you're talking about. It's a whole different niche, with a whole different public, where macs are seriously inferior (compatibilitywise, performance is mostly bottlenecked at graphics cards, and the same cards are offered to both PC and MAC worlds) and thereby used only by gaming mac zealots or people who only own a mac and aren't bothered by the limited selection. And the record studio public you mention is irrelevant to gaming.
The equivalent of a medeival farmer's meal including stale bread, some simple vegetables, perhaps a bit of cooked fish and some ancient bit of dried meat will do 90% of your dietary needs at a nutrition sufficiency one hasn't even dreamed of. It's because nowadays we choose and consume upwards of the full contents of an entire supermarket trolley per week, without even thinking twice about it. Munchies, Soft Drinks, Multitudes of once-exotic fruit and vegetables, spices, an entire zoo in packaged meat form. The ease with which we satisfy between 10-20 practically redundant desires for various foods is payed for by throwing huge amounts of food at them. Optimze that even slightly and you'll have a huge impact on convincing yourself what a human really needs.
Did it occur to your narrow-minded brain that unlike your media tells you, shit ain't black and white? That everything on a market with a disadvantage ALWAYS has an advantage too (otherwise it wouldn't be on the market.. Doh). Did it occur to you that your own personal preferences aside, some of us may actually PREFER THINGS DIFFERENTLY, PREFERRING to decode MP3's, have a robust PIM idling in the background, millions of desktop colors, have an evolved level of safety in document editing that wasn't around in Lotus123 and still use pine at will?
Let me just say this: I hang around ~1GHz Via-based CPUs a lot. If you can't build a Joe-Intenet-Office box, using either windows or linux, around the equivalent of a P3-733 with 512MB RAM without resorting to DR-DOS and Lotus123, you're a shite tech whose mind became set at some distant technological era and epoch ago, and who failed to cope with technology since. Dude, ungrow up.
If that's your point, hey, I'm sold.
;-)
The new breed of NanoITX and PicoITX (specifically via kit as it's way cheaper than anything intel I've seen, sole exception being the yet unavailable Eee), offer almost exactly what we're both aiming at. It's not a UMPC at all - having no screen - but it's tiny, cheap, XP-capable and you can just hang it on a wall or put it on a shelf, then hook it up to a 7''-12'' touch panel someplace convenient. UMPCs will offer something similar with inability to detach screen from machine, but at a solid 50, maybe even 30% of the price of the above.
Uses? Ye Olde Kitchen Box, A MediaCenter, an Automotive box, a box to control audio and offer what's on a file server in a room which otherwise has no TV (can be done with a really small touch screen on a wall, or from a laptop with VNC/RDP over Wifi...), a PC for your 4-year-old, etc.
The reason I was talking about expandability was not to make the 400$ UMPC/equivalent into a big strong GigaWattUberH4x0RGameBox, but to complement it to allow it to fill a wider variety of tasks which the initial 300$/400$ configuration doesn't allow. For those pricetags, they're typically offered with an absolute minimum amount of everything, with an additional GB or flash or 256MB of RAM nearly doubling the price. That philosophy culminates in how the iphone is built, which is with soldered flash and no expansion slot. Ye 1000$ tiny (by laptop standards) X60 thinkpad OTOH, on top of =8 hrs battery, can be fed TWO miniPCI cards and TWO SODIMM ram sticks, plus SD, PCMCIA and a USIM.. Ya Mama!. I could settle for less, but it's that kind of freedom that would lead to me buying more of them for "novel" (quotes because I've been doing this shit a decade ago with whatever was underhand anyway) uses, and the market for some of them would move (or, as in the case of MediaPCs, continue moving) from complete niche to mainstream.
That said, I'm not holding my breath for the OLPC, as its deliberately limited expandability would give me very little compared to other UMPCs that are going to be offered in the near future, and very much holding my breath for things like the Asus Eee and Via-based equivalents.
What say I hook up with Asus a "Buy an OLPC for a kid in Africa and get an Eeee" program?
Ah, intelligent debate. Beautiful.
... Multiple connectivity (without USB spaghetti hanging out of your machine?) Dual miniPCI slots? Do =400$ boxes have these?
The mac mafia can blow me. There's things that macs do well, and there's things that they don't. PC's can edit video too. We say macs are preferable because it is nicer to do on a mac. And just like you can run photoshop or premiere on a PC, you can run some games on a mac. If you go through more than two games in a year, however, and don't want to be specifically choosing them off a somewhat narrow mac compatibility list, XP is the 99.9% compatible platforms for games, macs (maybe) coming in as a distant second. Recommending a mac for gaming is bad religion-driven advice, aimed to cynically use your "geek" status to bolster the ranks of your religion rather than do good to whoever is being advised.
Now, back to the topic:
1. I *import and resell* miniITX and nanoITX kit. You're preaching to the quire. I know damn well what a supposedly "underpowered" box can do, be you running gentoo, OpenBSD, or even woe and behold, Vista.
2. UMPC's are still immature, especially and specifically the sub-400$ ones. I'm VERY MUCH looking to some ultracheap yet seriously expandable platforms and reasonably powered (a 1GHz C7 or an 800MHz dothan is VERY reasonable).
Thing is, one can get VERY cheap biggest and fastest:
[a] CF cards
[b] miniPCI wireless cards
[c] SODIMM RAM any size you care to want
[d] miniPCI Wireless cellular cards
on ebay.
I want UMPCs where you can plug a mountain of the above, plus a USIM.
Now, to my point:
I claim this is a FASLE STATEMENT: If average joe doesn't need power [gaming/video/other-crunching], one such UMPC is all he needs.
NOT the reasoning: because it has too little CPU/RAM/Disk (most can be upgraded most of the time anyway if he REALLY wants Vista)
The reasoning:
[a] Joe may not want to have a desktop monitor, may want to stay productive on the go, and may still want a humane resolution to be looking at. That spells bye-bye 8'' screen, bye-bye UMPC pricetag, aka bye-bye UMPC, enter 12'' ultraportables and bigger which spell what-we-already-have, and if you want SERIOUS resolution (Thinkpad X6* Tablet or Toshiba M200 do SXGA+), you have to cough up some serious dough.
Moral: SCREENS COST BIG MONEY, and are pro'lly the BIG influence behind the price drop from ultraportables to UMPCs.
[b] Joe may not want a one hour battery. Small UMPC form factor is nice and cute, but the power consumption of that redesigned-into-a-laptop miniITX or Intel rig is the same as what the bigger ultraportables (or bigger bricks) have. So you have to fit a battery, sized for bigger laptops, on this little thingamajig, to get reasonable off-the-grid time. They don't do that. They give you a smaller battery which lasts less. Joe may not want that.
[c]
When is the UMPC/"underpowered"-rig enough?
1. When used as a DTR, in conjunction with external substitutes for everything it lacks (USB, monitors..)
2. When used somewhere where resolution and battery are not a factor (Mediacenter PC can do just fine with 800x600. CarPC can do ok with 640x480).
3. When used to run samba, asterisk and rtorrent at home, or maybe pfSense, and all you need (^H^H^H^Hwant) is a console.
My Point: There's more offered by "Overpowered-coal-driven-battle-cruiser" laptops than what UMPCs can provide on more fronts than one, too many to make a one-size-fits-all proclamation that they're all Joe needs. That's a falsity. Circumstantially, it can sometimes be right, but it's not anywhere near a generic recommendation.
As always pending a recommendation, It can't be professionally answered without asking what the user actually needs, and that varies.
The OLPC wasn't the issue of what I was saying. I didn't say the OLPC is too heavy. The GP said people don't need what's being sold today as it's overpowered, and that dirt-cheap stuff can do just as fine, and I countered, saying that whereas above-dirt-cheap stuff is indeed overpowered cpuwise, it nevertheless offers value to casual users through other things dirt-cheap-stuff doesn't.
OLPC is a niche (very large niche, mind you) product that would have relatively limited use to most westernets, compared to anything that was built for first-world-dwellers to begin with.
The new breed of UMPC's, things based off Via's reference UMPC design, The Asus Eee and its intel-based brethren, stuff that will run via's MobileITX platform, that stuff is indeed cool. And when it will expand a bit, offer some serious variety, and someone figures there's a market for something that underpowered with an oversized battery and an SXGA+ screen, THAT is when things'll get interesting.
I call bullshit.
First, if you go about recommending peoeple build their game rigs around macs, I hope they have the sense to tell you you're talking shit. Video editing - maybe, and picassa looks exactly the same on windows and mac, which is what most people nowadays are happy to use rather than face Photoshop's steep learning-curve and/or price.
Second, I too am a sysadmin, and I too use my lappie for things that can be done by a 700MHz P3 like RDP and SSH.
HOWEVER, and this is where you're off the mark by a mile, the big difference between a P3 and the L7500 Core2Duo I'm writing this on now is the fact that the latter consumes WAY LESS power, and offers me insane (by P3 standards) battery life (Thinkpad X60t, before you ask).
Your computer needs don't sum up with the CPU&GPU either. Last year I was laptopless and cashless for a while, and borrowed a Dell lappie from work for several months. Let me tell you something. You won't get work done on 800x600, and my recent move to an SXGA+ (1400*1050) screen DID make a hell of a lot of difference in my ability to get shit done. These won't come standard on Asus EeePC, nor will you find them on entry-level laptop machines.
You're right in that CPU SPEED is not a factor. You're wrong that for someone who wants to do non-CPU-intensive stuff like office work or internet browsing needs the dirt-cheapest lappie he can find. His parameters are different, yes, but they're not non-existent.
And I haven't even mentioned a word about *carrying* (for those that actually take their machine with them) around a frigging battle cruiser, which is what cheap typically amounts to.
To quote myself, I said "giving very reasonable frame rates with either all or practically all the graphics bells and whistles turned on".
STALKER had to have one of the heaviest GPU resource consuming options bumped to keep frame-rates in the 20-30 range (which is what I consider playable for single-player games, and where I prefer eyecandy to the frames. multiplayer would go the other way)
STALKER also displayed some warping on the side screens, showing it was not designed nor QA'd for unconventionally wide resolutions, which in this day and age is a shame.