I very happily run FF 7.01 on Ubuntu (11.04). It's snappy, fairly light - well, in comparison with previous releases.
On W7, however, it's dog slow, eventually becoming unresponsive enough that I have to open task manager and kill it. I've eased the problem lately by running Chrome. It runs much faster than FF (on W7, not on Ubuntu, curiously), but I sure would like to be able to have the same responsiveness of FF on both platforms.
True about the touchscreens, my A43 has a resistive screen and got a lot of negative reviews for it, but I love being able to use a stylus for precise control.
My cheap-as-stale-donuts Android tablet (flytouch, sold as an apad) has a resistive screen and frankly, I think I prefer it to capacitive. The resistive screen is good enough to use my finger to scroll, etc., but really precise using a stylus. I take a lot of notes using Genial Writing and a stylus, though, so YMMV. If you haven't checked out that app, I highly recommend it.
I got one when they came out and actually liked it.
It was handy getting news, sports and weather on the watch.
But it was expensive, you needed a subscription and the battery had trouble getting through the day. I wouldn't mind seeing an update of this form factor at all. Hopefully they've got the battery performance figured out, although I doubt it, considering its screen tech. But the price will probably be about what the SmartWatch was a decade ago - not cheap enough, and you'll still need some sort of subscription (ie. cell contract) if you want any connectivity.
Just like Google then. And actually Bing users tend to be from more wealthier demographics than most Google users, so it does make business sense to them.
If true, you should have no trouble backing up that claim with some verifiable data.
Like them or hate them, apple and the ipod revolutionized the tech world.
I would go further and say that it wasn't the iPod player itself, rather it was the infrastructure built up around it that was revolutionary. At the time there were plenty of capable mp3 players out there, but none had the setup to buy music so easily.
Well; I don't want to ping on your example too much, but your average R.V. costs the entire life savings of someone at age 55.
Which is back to my comment: most people can't do that.
Just start looking up income and average savings at certain ages to see why.
But then again, there are many retirees who own their homes outright. Even if they choose not to sell, their home can still provide income. Savings aren't the only option.
If I ever retire, it'll be because I'm sick, not because I've decided not to work any more.
It is noteworthy that most retirements are because people cannot work any more.
I wonder how old people actually are that say they'll work as long as they can.
I know several people retirement or near-retirement aged people (I'm 50, so it's sometimes on my mind too), and most of them can't wait to retire.
Retirement isn't about feeling less productive. In a lot of cases, it's about getting to do things that simply couldn't be done while working. I have one relative that, once retired, went and bought an RV and is now travelling the continent with his wife seeing places they'd always dreamed of visiting, but didn't have the time to do during their careers.
It would totally change the basic paradigms of work. I know my (previous) boss resented having to pay for his employees to stay up-to-date on new tech, I can't imagine what corps will think when people potentially are working for them for a century. And I cannot imagine what it would do for promotion stagnancy.
I doubt that'll be a problem unless there's a huge structural change in how the world does business. I can't think of any companies off the top of my head that have solidly been around for a hundred years. People get laid off or quite already when there's a merger/buyout/etc. Most people stay in a job for 5 years or less before moving on to another company, which would involve some sort of training anyway.
There's really no such thing as a company looking out for its employees any more. It's now up to the employee or contractor to look out for him/herself.
I can't think of any time, at least in the last ten yea o so, that I couldn't set my in-room safe to my own password. Granted, its usually only 4 numbers long, but it's still my password.
I could mess around with ad-blockers and flash blockers etc, but frankly it just ain't that big a deal to me.
I'll offer up my own experience with ads. I've used some form of Linux and Firefox to browse websites for a few years now almost exclusively. When My last netbook died, I went out and bought another with W7 installed. I decided to just try W7 and IE for a couple days as it was installed - no ad blockers.
I have to say, it was an absolutely horrible experience. The ads weren't flashy/blinky as I had remembered them from long ago, but they were really distracting, interspersed throughout any web page I was viewing. I probably wouldn't have had such a problem with the ads had they been either consistently at the top or bottom of the page, or along the side where they wouldn't get in the way. Unfortunately, that's not how most websites are designed.
Once you've gotten used to not seeing obnoxiousness on a web page, it's really hard to accept it again. I've shown a few people how to add an ad blocker to their web browser and I've never heard a single complaint from any of them regarding any missing ads. On the other hand, I have heard complaints from some of these people regarding ads on their work computers after experiencing no ads on their home computers.
...
Past 8 years or so (I'm in my late 20s) I refuse to explain or debate anything with anyone, unless the person has done something impressive/showed their intelligence/etc. Just not worth the effort to dumb everything down.
(I'm the 146 IQ anon above)
At some point, even with your now twice-cited high IQ, you'll learn (one hopes) that it takes more than an IQ to teach. The giveaway is in phrases such as "I refuse to explain or debate anything with anyone" and "Just not worth the effort to dumb everything down." And maybe at some point you'll learn that intelligence distilled into a single number isn't really all that indicative of a person's capabilities.
But as it stands right now, all you've managed to do is demonstrate your belief that you are somehow better than other - dare I say - most people.
You don't learn in school. School is about socialization and indoctrination.
I see this parroted often, and I think it's misguided.
School can and does teach - there are lots of teachers out there that are passionate about teaching and really want their students to learn. Yes, there are also those teachers that don't care.
Of course no kid is ever going to get to prodigy level in the US school system, but if a teacher's done his/her job, the seed will have been planted for that potential prodigy to continue learning through his/her life.
If anything, it's the "school only indoctrinates you" mantra that holds kids back.
My phone has 32GB of memory and I'm considering replacing it with one that has 64GB. Cry moar about your 1GB of ram and stop holding the rest of the world back with your cheap ass.
Oh good grief. Your phone does NOT have 32G of memory. It has 32G of storage.
The Russinovich/Ionescu book "Windows Internals" has some pretty good sections that talk about how Windows memory management really works, if you're curious about it -- it would likely be enlightening about some of the misunderstands that people have about Windows.
I will fully admit to not knowing the internals of memory management. But I can say without a doubt that W7 definitely takes more of a performance hit than Ubuntu with the same programs. Thunderbird and Firefox bring the machine to a crawl in W7, while they don't in Ubuntu. Memory management is the only reasonable cause I can think of. It certainly not the processor - it's an Atom 570 dual core running at 1.66GHz. Add a third largish program (Media Monkey in my case) and W7 becomes unresponsive - REALLY unresponsive.
I don't get this behavior at all under Ubuntu, with more programs running, Granted, Ubuntu makes it slightly easier for me to see how memory is being used - probably because I'm a bit more familiar with it - by showing me buffers/cache. So as a layperson, I come to the conclusion that it's memory management.
I find it difficult to believe that people are buying new machines with less than 4 gig of ram. Memory was cheap by the time Win7 came out - cheap enough to load a new machine with 4 gig, anyway.
I don't think I've ever seen a NETBOOK on display in a store (which is what I'm talking about here) have anything more than 2G of memory. Most ship with 1G.
It's been a long time since I've dealt with Windows other than XP in a VM, and even that is rare.
My old Asus netbook recently died, so I was forced to go out and buy another. I bought an Aspire One loaded with W7S. I really wanted to like W7. Really. I liked the interface. But damn, it was really slow and memory hungry. With no pgms running, it was taking up about 560-580M of memory, compared to Ubuntu (11.04) taking 260-270M with no pgms running.
I really couldn't have more than two programs running in W7 without hitting 900M memory use. Granted, they were big pgms - Thunderbird and Firefox, both latest versions. But contrast that with Ubuntu where I ran TB, FF, Pidgin, Hotot, Tobmoy, LibreOffice and Rhythmbox all at the same time and never go above the 850M mark in memory use (at least not yet).
This release of Ubuntu has its own set of problems (Compiz, anyone?), but I much prefer it to W7. If MS can get Window's memory usage down I'd be more inclined to use the latest version.
"Some people prefer the portability of a 7" tablet."
Until they try to read their first educational or technical book on it. Then they hate it.
7" is great for novels and recreational reading, it's utter crap for technical manuals, documents, magazines, and Textbooks. I have an iPad and a KindleDX and those are far,far,FAR, superior to any 7" reader made for any document that is not a paperback novel.
I personally want a 12" reader that has a 8.5" X11" screen.
I think that most people looking at a 7 inch tablet aren't doing so to be able to read technical documents. Students looking for something for educational materials, maybe. I have a cheap 7 inch android tablet that (so far) has been able to handle pretty much every course book I've thrown at it, though - illustrations and diagrams included. I don't use the standard PDF reader (utter crap). I use QuickOffice. It seems to handle huge PDFs much better than anything else I've seen for android.
In any case, I think the target audience for these 7 inchers are people that want to read ebooks bought through Amazon's store, do a little email, browse a few web pages. People looking for something that can handle A4 formatted PDFs, probably not so much.
I didn't have a problem with Flash, until I moved to Ubuntu. Now I can see the attraction of an open standard where stuff works out of the box (yes, even on a 64 bit OS - imagine that, I have more than 3 gigs of ram) rather than dealing with pain, glitches and crashes.
Actually, I'm, finding that Flash (10.3, at least) is finally running acceptably well on Ubuntu. In the last 3 weeks, I've had Flash crash on me (in the browser) once, and Firefox had it sandboxed, so the rest of the system continued on fine.
Frankly, Compiz is a much bigger problem these days.
Interestingly, I just set up an Ubuntu 11.04 (previously 10.04) with FF 6.02. With the same addons as I had in FF 4, it's WAY faster and uses close to a third less memory than FF4. If they're claiming that FF7 will reduce memory even more, I'm definitely going to check it out.
until they learn that Apple's secret isn't "marketing".
Apple is quite happy for you to continue to rattle away about iSheep and marketing because as long as you do, you will NEVER threaten their market share. So, yeah, have fun with that.
I sense anger in your post. Why is that? There was no anger, nor me bleating on about iSheep, etc. in my initial post.
The fact is, Apple DOES do a great job at marketing. I've not seen anywhere near the amount of marketing for any other tablet currently on the market, and there are a few.
My point was that it's going to take a huge company with lots of cash, as well as other assets (read media to consume and a ready-made market to sell that media) to get anywhere close to the iPad's current position. And if any company is in a position to do that, it's probably Amazon.
Like everyone says: There is no *tablet* market, there's an *iPad* market....
I'm not so sure. There's an "iPad market" because Apple has done a fantastic job of marketing it. The long line of failed android tablets you refer to are still out there being sold, though.
All it'll take is a big enough company to put some serious marketing (and aggressive pricing) into their android tablet. Then you'll start to see more than just iPads in Starbucks. As it stands now, android is capable of doing everything iOS does on the same or lower hardware.\
If there's a company that could do it, it would probably be Amazon. They're big enough, and they have a large catalog of all sorts of media to back up whatever they come up with.
Slashdot Mirror
I very happily run FF 7.01 on Ubuntu (11.04). It's snappy, fairly light - well, in comparison with previous releases.
On W7, however, it's dog slow, eventually becoming unresponsive enough that I have to open task manager and kill it. I've eased the problem lately by running Chrome. It runs much faster than FF (on W7, not on Ubuntu, curiously), but I sure would like to be able to have the same responsiveness of FF on both platforms.
True about the touchscreens, my A43 has a resistive screen and got a lot of negative reviews for it, but I love being able to use a stylus for precise control.
My cheap-as-stale-donuts Android tablet (flytouch, sold as an apad) has a resistive screen and frankly, I think I prefer it to capacitive. The resistive screen is good enough to use my finger to scroll, etc., but really precise using a stylus. I take a lot of notes using Genial Writing and a stylus, though, so YMMV. If you haven't checked out that app, I highly recommend it.
It was handy getting news, sports and weather on the watch.
But it was expensive, you needed a subscription and the battery had trouble getting through the day. I wouldn't mind seeing an update of this form factor at all. Hopefully they've got the battery performance figured out, although I doubt it, considering its screen tech. But the price will probably be about what the SmartWatch was a decade ago - not cheap enough, and you'll still need some sort of subscription (ie. cell contract) if you want any connectivity.
Just like Google then. And actually Bing users tend to be from more wealthier demographics than most Google users, so it does make business sense to them.
If true, you should have no trouble backing up that claim with some verifiable data.
Go on... we're waiting.
Like them or hate them, apple and the ipod revolutionized the tech world.
I would go further and say that it wasn't the iPod player itself, rather it was the infrastructure built up around it that was revolutionary. At the time there were plenty of capable mp3 players out there, but none had the setup to buy music so easily.
The very people that make and tell us we can't live without their technology keep their children away from it. Who would have ever thought that? :-)
What makes you think that those "very people" make and tell us we can't live without technology? Just because it's near Silicon Valley?
I don't know the statistics, but I'm willing to bet that there are a lot of people in the region that don't work in technology at all.
Well; I don't want to ping on your example too much, but your average R.V. costs the entire life savings of someone at age 55.
Which is back to my comment: most people can't do that.
Just start looking up income and average savings at certain ages to see why.
But then again, there are many retirees who own their homes outright. Even if they choose not to sell, their home can still provide income. Savings aren't the only option.
If I ever retire, it'll be because I'm sick, not because I've decided not to work any more.
It is noteworthy that most retirements are because people cannot work any more.
I wonder how old people actually are that say they'll work as long as they can.
I know several people retirement or near-retirement aged people (I'm 50, so it's sometimes on my mind too), and most of them can't wait to retire.
Retirement isn't about feeling less productive. In a lot of cases, it's about getting to do things that simply couldn't be done while working. I have one relative that, once retired, went and bought an RV and is now travelling the continent with his wife seeing places they'd always dreamed of visiting, but didn't have the time to do during their careers.
It would totally change the basic paradigms of work. I know my (previous) boss resented having to pay for his employees to stay up-to-date on new tech, I can't imagine what corps will think when people potentially are working for them for a century. And I cannot imagine what it would do for promotion stagnancy.
I doubt that'll be a problem unless there's a huge structural change in how the world does business. I can't think of any companies off the top of my head that have solidly been around for a hundred years. People get laid off or quite already when there's a merger/buyout/etc. Most people stay in a job for 5 years or less before moving on to another company, which would involve some sort of training anyway.
There's really no such thing as a company looking out for its employees any more. It's now up to the employee or contractor to look out for him/herself.
I can't think of any time, at least in the last ten yea o so, that I couldn't set my in-room safe to my own password. Granted, its usually only 4 numbers long, but it's still my password.
I could mess around with ad-blockers and flash blockers etc, but frankly it just ain't that big a deal to me.
I'll offer up my own experience with ads. I've used some form of Linux and Firefox to browse websites for a few years now almost exclusively. When My last netbook died, I went out and bought another with W7 installed. I decided to just try W7 and IE for a couple days as it was installed - no ad blockers.
I have to say, it was an absolutely horrible experience. The ads weren't flashy/blinky as I had remembered them from long ago, but they were really distracting, interspersed throughout any web page I was viewing. I probably wouldn't have had such a problem with the ads had they been either consistently at the top or bottom of the page, or along the side where they wouldn't get in the way. Unfortunately, that's not how most websites are designed.
Once you've gotten used to not seeing obnoxiousness on a web page, it's really hard to accept it again. I've shown a few people how to add an ad blocker to their web browser and I've never heard a single complaint from any of them regarding any missing ads. On the other hand, I have heard complaints from some of these people regarding ads on their work computers after experiencing no ads on their home computers.
... Past 8 years or so (I'm in my late 20s) I refuse to explain or debate anything with anyone, unless the person has done something impressive/showed their intelligence/etc. Just not worth the effort to dumb everything down.
(I'm the 146 IQ anon above)
At some point, even with your now twice-cited high IQ, you'll learn (one hopes) that it takes more than an IQ to teach. The giveaway is in phrases such as "I refuse to explain or debate anything with anyone" and "Just not worth the effort to dumb everything down." And maybe at some point you'll learn that intelligence distilled into a single number isn't really all that indicative of a person's capabilities.
But as it stands right now, all you've managed to do is demonstrate your belief that you are somehow better than other - dare I say - most people.
You don't learn in school. School is about socialization and indoctrination.
I see this parroted often, and I think it's misguided.
School can and does teach - there are lots of teachers out there that are passionate about teaching and really want their students to learn. Yes, there are also those teachers that don't care.
Of course no kid is ever going to get to prodigy level in the US school system, but if a teacher's done his/her job, the seed will have been planted for that potential prodigy to continue learning through his/her life.
If anything, it's the "school only indoctrinates you" mantra that holds kids back.
My phone has 32GB of memory and I'm considering replacing it with one that has 64GB. Cry moar about your 1GB of ram and stop holding the rest of the world back with your cheap ass.
Oh good grief. Your phone does NOT have 32G of memory. It has 32G of storage.
The Russinovich/Ionescu book "Windows Internals" has some pretty good sections that talk about how Windows memory management really works, if you're curious about it -- it would likely be enlightening about some of the misunderstands that people have about Windows.
I will fully admit to not knowing the internals of memory management. But I can say without a doubt that W7 definitely takes more of a performance hit than Ubuntu with the same programs. Thunderbird and Firefox bring the machine to a crawl in W7, while they don't in Ubuntu. Memory management is the only reasonable cause I can think of. It certainly not the processor - it's an Atom 570 dual core running at 1.66GHz. Add a third largish program (Media Monkey in my case) and W7 becomes unresponsive - REALLY unresponsive.
I don't get this behavior at all under Ubuntu, with more programs running, Granted, Ubuntu makes it slightly easier for me to see how memory is being used - probably because I'm a bit more familiar with it - by showing me buffers/cache. So as a layperson, I come to the conclusion that it's memory management.
I find it difficult to believe that people are buying new machines with less than 4 gig of ram. Memory was cheap by the time Win7 came out - cheap enough to load a new machine with 4 gig, anyway.
I don't think I've ever seen a NETBOOK on display in a store (which is what I'm talking about here) have anything more than 2G of memory. Most ship with 1G.
... it took up a nice 60Mb or RAM after tweaking.
That's why. It doesn't just use 60M out of the box without any tweaking.
My old Asus netbook recently died, so I was forced to go out and buy another. I bought an Aspire One loaded with W7S. I really wanted to like W7. Really. I liked the interface. But damn, it was really slow and memory hungry. With no pgms running, it was taking up about 560-580M of memory, compared to Ubuntu (11.04) taking 260-270M with no pgms running.
I really couldn't have more than two programs running in W7 without hitting 900M memory use. Granted, they were big pgms - Thunderbird and Firefox, both latest versions. But contrast that with Ubuntu where I ran TB, FF, Pidgin, Hotot, Tobmoy, LibreOffice and Rhythmbox all at the same time and never go above the 850M mark in memory use (at least not yet).
This release of Ubuntu has its own set of problems (Compiz, anyone?), but I much prefer it to W7. If MS can get Window's memory usage down I'd be more inclined to use the latest version.
The disconnect addon for Firefox seems to be working well for me.
"Some people prefer the portability of a 7" tablet."
Until they try to read their first educational or technical book on it. Then they hate it.
7" is great for novels and recreational reading, it's utter crap for technical manuals, documents, magazines, and Textbooks. I have an iPad and a KindleDX and those are far,far,FAR, superior to any 7" reader made for any document that is not a paperback novel.
I personally want a 12" reader that has a 8.5" X11" screen.
I think that most people looking at a 7 inch tablet aren't doing so to be able to read technical documents. Students looking for something for educational materials, maybe. I have a cheap 7 inch android tablet that (so far) has been able to handle pretty much every course book I've thrown at it, though - illustrations and diagrams included. I don't use the standard PDF reader (utter crap). I use QuickOffice. It seems to handle huge PDFs much better than anything else I've seen for android.
In any case, I think the target audience for these 7 inchers are people that want to read ebooks bought through Amazon's store, do a little email, browse a few web pages. People looking for something that can handle A4 formatted PDFs, probably not so much.
I didn't have a problem with Flash, until I moved to Ubuntu. Now I can see the attraction of an open standard where stuff works out of the box (yes, even on a 64 bit OS - imagine that, I have more than 3 gigs of ram) rather than dealing with pain, glitches and crashes.
Actually, I'm, finding that Flash (10.3, at least) is finally running acceptably well on Ubuntu. In the last 3 weeks, I've had Flash crash on me (in the browser) once, and Firefox had it sandboxed, so the rest of the system continued on fine.
Frankly, Compiz is a much bigger problem these days.
When did I miss Firefox 6?
Interestingly, I just set up an Ubuntu 11.04 (previously 10.04) with FF 6.02. With the same addons as I had in FF 4, it's WAY faster and uses close to a third less memory than FF4. If they're claiming that FF7 will reduce memory even more, I'm definitely going to check it out.
until they learn that Apple's secret isn't "marketing".
Apple is quite happy for you to continue to rattle away about iSheep and marketing because as long as you do, you will NEVER threaten their market share. So, yeah, have fun with that.
I sense anger in your post. Why is that? There was no anger, nor me bleating on about iSheep, etc. in my initial post.
The fact is, Apple DOES do a great job at marketing. I've not seen anywhere near the amount of marketing for any other tablet currently on the market, and there are a few.
My point was that it's going to take a huge company with lots of cash, as well as other assets (read media to consume and a ready-made market to sell that media) to get anywhere close to the iPad's current position. And if any company is in a position to do that, it's probably Amazon.
But that was a mighty fine knee-jerk there.
Like everyone says: There is no *tablet* market, there's an *iPad* market ....
I'm not so sure. There's an "iPad market" because Apple has done a fantastic job of marketing it. The long line of failed android tablets you refer to are still out there being sold, though.
All it'll take is a big enough company to put some serious marketing (and aggressive pricing) into their android tablet. Then you'll start to see more than just iPads in Starbucks. As it stands now, android is capable of doing everything iOS does on the same or lower hardware.\
If there's a company that could do it, it would probably be Amazon. They're big enough, and they have a large catalog of all sorts of media to back up whatever they come up with.
I heard they had a custom fork of Android that replaced all the Google services with their own. Their own app store, music service, etc.
As someone who owns a (really) low-end android tablet without the stock market app, I say good for them.
I've installed Amazon's appstore and music service, as well as their regular Kindle app. They all run quite nicely on low-end tablets.