Yeah, for the standby power, of just the chip. The chipset is still a hog, and that lower standby power doesn't matter if you can't keep it in standby long enough. The chip still draws way more power than the ARM chips when it's running. The ATOM at 2 watts plus multiple watt chipset has a long way to go to get down to the 300 milliwatts or less that the whole Cortex A8 SoC runs at. It'll be interesting, but I don't see how they'll do it. It kind of seems like a me too, now that ARM have been able to drive up performance so far into ATOM territory. A me too from Intel is kind of amusing actually.
Exactly. This wasn't really possible before since the performance of the low power chips just wasn't high enough to do a broad enough range of tasks. But it really is within reach now. All of the necessary components are small enough, it would really just take some packaging and somebody decent behind it. Heck the current smartphones basically are this, just minus the HDMI and keyboard/mouse sockets. Actually the touchscreen on the smartphone could be the trackpad, so you'd just need a decent keyboard. Then if micro projectors ever make it that would really be something sweet.
Nobody's stopping you from making an Atom device with those components (though it will take more power right now, it'll be vastly faster than the Cortex A8, and you won't have to recompile or use highly specialized toolkits, which is a huge Intel advantage).
Actually, go check the benchmarks and power draws on the chips and chipsets again. The Atom is most certainly not vastly faster than the Cortex A8 (particularly for equivalent clock and number of cores), and while Intel may be able to work the power draw down from the tens of watts that the chip + chipset + graphics require right now, that's a much harder task than what ARM has to do putting together the quad core Cortex A9 package that already has extremely low power graphics, etc. Though you do have it that the Atom doesn't require a recompile/port which is an Intel advantage.
The current atoms run about 2 watts, way too much for a smartphone even if they are able to cut that in half, and that's not even counting the power hog chipsets needed for the atom that require 5-12+ watts. By comparison the current cortex A8 packages with video etc that are able to do 1080p are able to make it under the 300 milliwatt line smartphone manufacturers are looking for.
And even better, if you're talking about Intel's chips two generations out, then consider the Cortex A9 quad core chips that are claiming to be ready to go and at reasonable power consumption in the same time frame if not sooner than Intel's offering. That article is actually claiming dual core Cortex A9 phones within a year that use about the same power as current chips with much better performance.
So as noted it looks like ARM is going to have a much easier time scaling up performance at the smartphone power draw level than Intel is going to have getting anywhere near it. And the Cortex A9 will probably spank the Atom. The race should benefit everyone though. Maybe we'll actually get some decent performing netbook, laptop, and desktop chips out of it that run on extremely low power.
The current atoms run about 2 watts, way too much for a smartphone even if they are able to cut that in half, and that's not even counting the power hog chipsets needed for the atom that require 5-12+ watts. By comparison the current cortex A8 packages with video etc that are able to do 1080p are able to make it under the 300 milliwatt line smartphone manufacturers are looking for.
And even better, if you're talking about Intel's chips two generations out, then consider the Cortex A9 quad core chips that are claiming to be ready to go and at reasonable power consumption in the same time frame if not sooner than Intel's offering. That article is actually claiming dual core Cortex A9 phones within a year that use about the same power as current chips with much better performance.
So as noted it looks like ARM is going to have a much easier time scaling up performance at the smartphone power draw level than Intel is going to have getting anywhere near it. And the Cortex A9 will probably spank the Atom. The race should benefit everyone though. Maybe we'll actually get some decent performing netbook, laptop, and desktop chips out of it that run on extremely low power.
Who said anything about dethroning or matching performance at the high end? ARM will probably never be able to beat what X86 can do at the top end, but the point is the large majority of what most people need to do isn't very far away from the top end of what ARM chips can do right now if it isn't already completely covered. So it's not about dethroning, it's about creating a new market and in those terms ARM has already won in many ways. There are already an order of magnitude more ARM chips out there. The question is just integrating some good higher end systems together, maybe raising the top end a bit, and making them cheap. 50-100% more performance would do a lot considering that current high end ARM systems can already run usable desktop systems. If you can get a $50 or less computer together that can run wordprocessing, a spreadsheet, and basic desktop apps, then you're really on the verge of opening up a new market. Add long battery life that ARM already has and you can solve much of the digital divide problems in the developing or even third world. That's not really that farfetched price wise at the current rate.
Also good points, but the smart phone market is probably only moving up in processor performance desired too, at least for a segment of it. With a higher performing but still very low power draw ARM chip in a mobile computing platform it could be game changing. While some people have smart phones, it really could open up computing to the next several hundred million people if done right. 45 engineer years or tens of millions doesn't sound out of order to stay ahead of that type of opportunity.
Yeah I'm really tempted to get one of those, but the major drawback to me is that they take so little RAM. If it could take 2 GB or so, then it would be really compelling. I realize that would kill it's power efficiency, but it would still be less than a tenth of what my current P4 desktop draws and probably in the same range of performance. But 256 makes a full Gnome dekstop with all the goodies that come with that less feasible, and I really like Gnome for the accessibility framework it has.
According to the IDG article they are specifically claiming that it will work on all frequencies used around the world. Not sure how they plan to do that, but that's the claim.
But that doesn't really matter, because you'll see that Asus is already backing off from Qualcom's announcement and claiming, "no, no, we haven't been pressured by MS or Intel not to release this device that would be an obvious hit." Man a device that can run for 8-9 hours with 3G connectivity? Sign me up. The only thing I'd want more is even more battery power. I don't care about it being thicker and heavier, but give me 24 hours of battery life so I can really be away from power and I think they'd have a game changer. That or a high powered ARM UMPC without a screen that I can plug my own portable keyboard into and monitor if I want. That would really rule since the battery life could rock.
See the thing is that the sort of memory you get in a cellphone is a lot slower than the stuff you get in a desktop because the power budget is so much less. If you want to run desktop applications or emulate an x86 that will really bite you.
All interesting information you added, but for a netbook platform where the battery is an order of magnitude larger than a cellphone, what makes you think they can't put in a different memory controller with a wider bus to run regular sodimms? You'd still get all the power savings from the lower power chip and no active cooling, but without the performance hit you refer to.
As much as I despise Scientology, I don't see why their cult should be singled out for direct criticisms in the opening paragraphs of the article, (e.g "cult that financially defrauds and abuses its members").
While this may be true, other cults (oh ok "religions", whats the difference) that do the same thing are being described in completely different way, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints This is supposed to be an encyclopedia article, not a newspaper editorial so I think the tone and content of the opening 4 paragraphs I think do need some changes. I am afraid to make them though cause I might get banned from the site.
The reason they are singled out for that type of description is there is an enormous amount of evidence to support the description. Church leaders have lied cheated and stolen to support their agenda. The organization has a longstanding harrassment policy against it's detractors. They are extremely good at abusing the legal system to their ends and mostly getting away with it. Other groups most certainly do not come anywhere near the level of abuse that the COS does. Besides that, I don't see the description you refer to in an article right now.
Its a platform release. For developers and integrators. They want a release too, you know:)
End users are not the only reason to release software.
That's not a problem at all. Just give it a number that reflects what you want it to be. Say perhaps 1.9.0. Everybody knows what that means without explanation. People will even assume it has most or all the functionality of 2.0.0 but without the misleading assumption that it is ready for end users. Then those that want to try it and use it can, and those that don't want some thing for devs only don't need to bother.
Your choice of OS is yours, but I think you'll find Ubuntu easier with a couple small tips.
1) For your TV card, if it is supported mythtv should work well for you. I saw a lot of dependencies, but that's not really a problem, it's just like a large app install in windows, but done automatically for you.
2) For flash and java, all you have to install is the ubuntu-restricted-extras package and that is all set up for you automatically.
3) As for Openoffice.org being slow for you, I don't know what to tell you except I'm on an old P4 and it runs fine here. Maybe Version 3.0 will work better, it certainly is an improvement.
4) Perhaps you should try the new Ubuntu 9.04, it's a bit more polished than 8.10 and farther ahead than previous versions in many ways.
5) Lastly http://ubuntuforums.org/ is a really helpful place. Where you can ask simple questions and not get yelled at.
By non profit rules in the US, non profits are required to use gifts that are earmarked for a specific purpose for that purpose or otherwise not accept the gift. So if you want to help the cause, but encourage the use of Linux, say so in your donation that Linux or non MS operating systems must be used. Then they must return your money if they don't follow your wishes.
Small earmarked gifts are a pain for charities to handle and do create overhead so it's best not to do it lightly, but for an important cause and to help prevent subverting the cause by outside organizations it may be worth it.
People are not going to put up with their hardware refusing to do what should easily be able to do as long as there is an alternative that will do everything else too.
That is technically true however what MS and those pushing DRM are doing is working as hard as they can to make sure there are no available alternatives that will do everything else too. That's what the whole trusted computing thing is about. Trusted for them, so that you can't do what you would like to do with your computer. Consider the case of Blu-ray. The content companies have made absolutely sure there is no non drm alternative for that and for that reason only MS with their built in DRM system is allowed to have Blu-ray on their platform. Luckily most people don't care about Blu-ray, but they have laid the foundation with the trusted media path crap built into the operating system and the hardware.
Convenience is king, and DRM is becoming increasingly restrictive and annoying.
But if the media companies get their way DRM is the only way you will be able to get any of their content and lack of their content is annoying to people as well.
But you are correct and that is why it is so important to work for software and hardware freedom and open standards.
You've hit the nail on the head, and if anyone would like the spot to politely complain to, it seems to be the blog of one of the interoperability engineers. It was linked directly from the PR announcement linked in the previous slashdot article.
He tests odf text only and it seems to make it look like it works fairly well, though he does point out the errors that should be fixable by MS. Of course he may be picking and choosing things to test just as he is not even bothering to pick even one spreadsheet to test since his job is still basically PR as you mentioned. Make it look like they are doing something and be able to claim interoperability without actually having any.
It will be interesting to see if this predicted new wave of ARM-based netbooks really comes to market, and whether they really have a decent price-to-performance ratio. If so, it would be great, because Windows doesn't run on ARM, and if the price gets down to $100-200, there's really no room for profit for MS even if they did make an ARM version of Windows. But so far, the history of netbooks has all been bait and switch. They keep saying they're going to have them at price x, but they're always really at price 2x. Performance is still a problem, too. I'd hate for people to get the impression that Linux is slow and crappy, simply because netbooks are underpowered to run Firefox/js/flash.
Unfortunately it looks like the same poor configuration and quality trends that you mentioned will continue for ARM netbooks. Add that to the fact that Linux ARM isn't 100% polished for the desktop (think Flash, how many packages fail to build successfully, etc) and there will be glitches with the first ARM netbooks. Hopefully it won't be so poorly done overall that Linux gets a really bad rap. We all know ARM netbooks are a huge opportunity, but it takes a well executed plan to take advantage of it.
A little bit of better context is supplied by this Computerworld article. While Apple's Q2 sales of Macs fell 3%, that is during a time when the overall PC industry declined 7%. So that's actually doing fairly well. And Apple didn't just post a hardly to be mentioned net profit, instead their profit jumped 15%. That's doing really well in a poor economy.
But you're right, MS has such a large lead they could screw up for a long time and still be ahead. And I would be no happier than the next guy to see Apple in a position of total dominance in the PC industry. Luckily with the rise of open source and free software, that is not likely to happen. But continuing to work for important freedoms is the only way to keep abusive dominance from happening.
Is there any anti-trust factors to this? Oracle, being a dominant database player, and buying up the biggest open source database?
Not likely since MySQL is by definition open source. No matter who owns the company that supported some of it's development, it's still open source and you and I can still fork the code and keep improving it.
Aside from that, I find this all very sad. Sun was one of the Unix innvators from the earliest days. Even when they grow large, they still seemed like a "cool company." Healey used to personally answer emails I would send him. Oracle seems to be the antithesis of this; major, corporate, gouging, monster... One can only hope that some of Sun's culture and products will survive.
Indeed Sun really made some great quality products (albeit really expensive too). As another astute poster pointed out Sun has great quality products but has been poorly run while Oracle is very well run with poor quality products. With any luck Oracle will see this and learn something so they can make the right choices and come out a much better company with better products. It's not terribly likely. The culture clash is likely to be too great and the talented engineers will most likely be stifled in the new company.
If you can show me a laptop that can handle -40C to 85C, high levels of humidity, draws no more than 5W of power, needs no fans for cooling, and reasonably gracefully handles transients associated with lightning strikes for less than $1500, I'll gladly buy it.
Ok, I'll bite. What hardware do you buy that meets all those requirements? You've mentioned everything but that.
So far I just named you six potential, and major, issues right off the top of my head. None of these are "trust" related (as far as MS products are concerned).
Other issue, that is more MS concerned, patches. 300,000 testers in limited environments is not as good as 3MM investors in enterprise environments. Now you have malicious hackers you need to concern yourself with who are looking for vulnerabilities and implementing them.
Just because companies held off on Vista does not mean they will not upgrade to 7. It isn't a lack of trust with MS it is a lack of trust in a new product and most companies avoid getting the latest and greatest of ANY product until it has the equivelant of an SP1
What you're completely missing is that Windows 7 basically is Vista SP2 and doesn't add anything significantly new from the perspective of the 6 items you listed. That means companies have had years to plan for those and are still saying no thanks in large numbers after they said no thanks to Vista. Perhaps this commonly accepted wisdom of waiting for SP1 will come back to bite MS in the butt and if they hadn't tried to sweep things under the rug with a rename they might have been better off.
Yes, this is new. This is companies holding out on two releases of Windows for a significant time and in larger and larger numbers. Of course a small number of companies still run Windows 2000 or even older, it's a very small percentage compared to the data in this survey. Windows 7 really adds nothing significantly new to Vista, it's basically Vista SP2, but MS is rushing it out in order to get a new name on it to try to sweep all the bad PR from Vista under the rug. What this data is showing is that the strategy may not work as intended. While the article didn't specifically give the numbers of respondents that are planning to wait on 7 that had skipped Vista, based on how high the numbers are for those that are planning to wait for a significant amount of time on Vista, and how low the adoption rates of Vista have been, it is clear there are more companies than ever that are holding off on MS's products and more of them than before are skipping one of MS's releases and holding off on the next one. This survey with a large number of responses and thus more validity than your average junk survey is the first to confirm what many people had been suspecting.
Okay, but if all you want to do is turn the DVD into an.iso image of the DVD, what do you need ripping software for?
For the 'shrink' part in the name is a big part. Getting a dual layer dvd to fit on a single layer backup medium. Then presumably some people want to watch encrypted disks on linux so you need some software that can handle that as well, also I find the PUOs highly annoying, so I typically remove those. You need other software to do the last two, dvdshrink only handles the shrinking part, but it does that at good quality. That's what ripping software is for, and when I'm done I still want an iso that I can backup so my original disk doesn't get scratched to oblivion.
Oh, and quick tip. If you're going to be snarky, make sure you know what you're talking about first.
That doesn't look like a bad option, and as of version 2.8 of the free version that just does DVD to divx, it does indeed work great in Wine. http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=4309 and I tested version 2.9 that is available for download on the website now.
You have to buy the $29.99 version to get the features you mentioned, going to portable players etc. They say the full version works on Wine as well.
Good point. I didn't catch that the OP wanted to play files on a portable media player. Handbrake might be exactly what he wants then. And while you can take anything you want and put it in an iso, creating an iso that plays on the widest range of DVD players isn't trivial either.
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Yeah, for the standby power, of just the chip. The chipset is still a hog, and that lower standby power doesn't matter if you can't keep it in standby long enough. The chip still draws way more power than the ARM chips when it's running. The ATOM at 2 watts plus multiple watt chipset has a long way to go to get down to the 300 milliwatts or less that the whole Cortex A8 SoC runs at. It'll be interesting, but I don't see how they'll do it. It kind of seems like a me too, now that ARM have been able to drive up performance so far into ATOM territory. A me too from Intel is kind of amusing actually.
Exactly. This wasn't really possible before since the performance of the low power chips just wasn't high enough to do a broad enough range of tasks. But it really is within reach now. All of the necessary components are small enough, it would really just take some packaging and somebody decent behind it. Heck the current smartphones basically are this, just minus the HDMI and keyboard/mouse sockets. Actually the touchscreen on the smartphone could be the trackpad, so you'd just need a decent keyboard. Then if micro projectors ever make it that would really be something sweet.
Nobody's stopping you from making an Atom device with those components (though it will take more power right now, it'll be vastly faster than the Cortex A8, and you won't have to recompile or use highly specialized toolkits, which is a huge Intel advantage).
Actually, go check the benchmarks and power draws on the chips and chipsets again. The Atom is most certainly not vastly faster than the Cortex A8 (particularly for equivalent clock and number of cores), and while Intel may be able to work the power draw down from the tens of watts that the chip + chipset + graphics require right now, that's a much harder task than what ARM has to do putting together the quad core Cortex A9 package that already has extremely low power graphics, etc. Though you do have it that the Atom doesn't require a recompile/port which is an Intel advantage.
The current atoms run about 2 watts, way too much for a smartphone even if they are able to cut that in half, and that's not even counting the power hog chipsets needed for the atom that require 5-12+ watts. By comparison the current cortex A8 packages with video etc that are able to do 1080p are able to make it under the 300 milliwatt line smartphone manufacturers are looking for.
And even better, if you're talking about Intel's chips two generations out, then consider the Cortex A9 quad core chips that are claiming to be ready to go and at reasonable power consumption in the same time frame if not sooner than Intel's offering. That article is actually claiming dual core Cortex A9 phones within a year that use about the same power as current chips with much better performance.
So as noted it looks like ARM is going to have a much easier time scaling up performance at the smartphone power draw level than Intel is going to have getting anywhere near it. And the Cortex A9 will probably spank the Atom. The race should benefit everyone though. Maybe we'll actually get some decent performing netbook, laptop, and desktop chips out of it that run on extremely low power.
http://m.news.com/2166-12_3-10263278-64.html
http://www.liliputing.com/tag/arm-cortex-a9
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2341032,00.asp
Crap, missed the link the first time. A couple more for good measure.
The current atoms run about 2 watts, way too much for a smartphone even if they are able to cut that in half, and that's not even counting the power hog chipsets needed for the atom that require 5-12+ watts. By comparison the current cortex A8 packages with video etc that are able to do 1080p are able to make it under the 300 milliwatt line smartphone manufacturers are looking for.
And even better, if you're talking about Intel's chips two generations out, then consider the Cortex A9 quad core chips that are claiming to be ready to go and at reasonable power consumption in the same time frame if not sooner than Intel's offering. That article is actually claiming dual core Cortex A9 phones within a year that use about the same power as current chips with much better performance.
So as noted it looks like ARM is going to have a much easier time scaling up performance at the smartphone power draw level than Intel is going to have getting anywhere near it. And the Cortex A9 will probably spank the Atom. The race should benefit everyone though. Maybe we'll actually get some decent performing netbook, laptop, and desktop chips out of it that run on extremely low power.
Who said anything about dethroning or matching performance at the high end? ARM will probably never be able to beat what X86 can do at the top end, but the point is the large majority of what most people need to do isn't very far away from the top end of what ARM chips can do right now if it isn't already completely covered. So it's not about dethroning, it's about creating a new market and in those terms ARM has already won in many ways. There are already an order of magnitude more ARM chips out there. The question is just integrating some good higher end systems together, maybe raising the top end a bit, and making them cheap. 50-100% more performance would do a lot considering that current high end ARM systems can already run usable desktop systems. If you can get a $50 or less computer together that can run wordprocessing, a spreadsheet, and basic desktop apps, then you're really on the verge of opening up a new market. Add long battery life that ARM already has and you can solve much of the digital divide problems in the developing or even third world. That's not really that farfetched price wise at the current rate.
Also good points, but the smart phone market is probably only moving up in processor performance desired too, at least for a segment of it. With a higher performing but still very low power draw ARM chip in a mobile computing platform it could be game changing. While some people have smart phones, it really could open up computing to the next several hundred million people if done right. 45 engineer years or tens of millions doesn't sound out of order to stay ahead of that type of opportunity.
Yeah I'm really tempted to get one of those, but the major drawback to me is that they take so little RAM. If it could take 2 GB or so, then it would be really compelling. I realize that would kill it's power efficiency, but it would still be less than a tenth of what my current P4 desktop draws and probably in the same range of performance. But 256 makes a full Gnome dekstop with all the goodies that come with that less feasible, and I really like Gnome for the accessibility framework it has.
According to the IDG article they are specifically claiming that it will work on all frequencies used around the world. Not sure how they plan to do that, but that's the claim.
But that doesn't really matter, because you'll see that Asus is already backing off from Qualcom's announcement and claiming, "no, no, we haven't been pressured by MS or Intel not to release this device that would be an obvious hit." Man a device that can run for 8-9 hours with 3G connectivity? Sign me up. The only thing I'd want more is even more battery power. I don't care about it being thicker and heavier, but give me 24 hours of battery life so I can really be away from power and I think they'd have a game changer. That or a high powered ARM UMPC without a screen that I can plug my own portable keyboard into and monitor if I want. That would really rule since the battery life could rock.
See the thing is that the sort of memory you get in a cellphone is a lot slower than the stuff you get in a desktop because the power budget is so much less. If you want to run desktop applications or emulate an x86 that will really bite you.
All interesting information you added, but for a netbook platform where the battery is an order of magnitude larger than a cellphone, what makes you think they can't put in a different memory controller with a wider bus to run regular sodimms? You'd still get all the power savings from the lower power chip and no active cooling, but without the performance hit you refer to.
As much as I despise Scientology, I don't see why their cult should be singled out for direct criticisms in the opening paragraphs of the article, (e.g "cult that financially defrauds and abuses its members"). While this may be true, other cults (oh ok "religions", whats the difference) that do the same thing are being described in completely different way, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints This is supposed to be an encyclopedia article, not a newspaper editorial so I think the tone and content of the opening 4 paragraphs I think do need some changes. I am afraid to make them though cause I might get banned from the site.
The reason they are singled out for that type of description is there is an enormous amount of evidence to support the description. Church leaders have lied cheated and stolen to support their agenda. The organization has a longstanding harrassment policy against it's detractors. They are extremely good at abusing the legal system to their ends and mostly getting away with it. Other groups most certainly do not come anywhere near the level of abuse that the COS does. Besides that, I don't see the description you refer to in an article right now.
Its a platform release. For developers and integrators. They want a release too, you know :)
End users are not the only reason to release software.
That's not a problem at all. Just give it a number that reflects what you want it to be. Say perhaps 1.9.0. Everybody knows what that means without explanation. People will even assume it has most or all the functionality of 2.0.0 but without the misleading assumption that it is ready for end users. Then those that want to try it and use it can, and those that don't want some thing for devs only don't need to bother.
Your choice of OS is yours, but I think you'll find Ubuntu easier with a couple small tips.
1) For your TV card, if it is supported mythtv should work well for you. I saw a lot of dependencies, but that's not really a problem, it's just like a large app install in windows, but done automatically for you.
2) For flash and java, all you have to install is the ubuntu-restricted-extras package and that is all set up for you automatically.
3) As for Openoffice.org being slow for you, I don't know what to tell you except I'm on an old P4 and it runs fine here. Maybe Version 3.0 will work better, it certainly is an improvement.
4) Perhaps you should try the new Ubuntu 9.04, it's a bit more polished than 8.10 and farther ahead than previous versions in many ways.
5) Lastly http://ubuntuforums.org/ is a really helpful place. Where you can ask simple questions and not get yelled at.
Small earmarked gifts are a pain for charities to handle and do create overhead so it's best not to do it lightly, but for an important cause and to help prevent subverting the cause by outside organizations it may be worth it.
People are not going to put up with their hardware refusing to do what should easily be able to do as long as there is an alternative that will do everything else too.
That is technically true however what MS and those pushing DRM are doing is working as hard as they can to make sure there are no available alternatives that will do everything else too. That's what the whole trusted computing thing is about. Trusted for them, so that you can't do what you would like to do with your computer. Consider the case of Blu-ray. The content companies have made absolutely sure there is no non drm alternative for that and for that reason only MS with their built in DRM system is allowed to have Blu-ray on their platform. Luckily most people don't care about Blu-ray, but they have laid the foundation with the trusted media path crap built into the operating system and the hardware.
Convenience is king, and DRM is becoming increasingly restrictive and annoying.
But if the media companies get their way DRM is the only way you will be able to get any of their content and lack of their content is annoying to people as well.
But you are correct and that is why it is so important to work for software and hardware freedom and open standards.
He tests odf text only and it seems to make it look like it works fairly well, though he does point out the errors that should be fixable by MS. Of course he may be picking and choosing things to test just as he is not even bothering to pick even one spreadsheet to test since his job is still basically PR as you mentioned. Make it look like they are doing something and be able to claim interoperability without actually having any.
It will be interesting to see if this predicted new wave of ARM-based netbooks really comes to market, and whether they really have a decent price-to-performance ratio. If so, it would be great, because Windows doesn't run on ARM, and if the price gets down to $100-200, there's really no room for profit for MS even if they did make an ARM version of Windows. But so far, the history of netbooks has all been bait and switch. They keep saying they're going to have them at price x, but they're always really at price 2x. Performance is still a problem, too. I'd hate for people to get the impression that Linux is slow and crappy, simply because netbooks are underpowered to run Firefox/js/flash.
Unfortunately it looks like the same poor configuration and quality trends that you mentioned will continue for ARM netbooks. Add that to the fact that Linux ARM isn't 100% polished for the desktop (think Flash, how many packages fail to build successfully, etc) and there will be glitches with the first ARM netbooks. Hopefully it won't be so poorly done overall that Linux gets a really bad rap. We all know ARM netbooks are a huge opportunity, but it takes a well executed plan to take advantage of it.
A little bit of better context is supplied by this Computerworld article. While Apple's Q2 sales of Macs fell 3%, that is during a time when the overall PC industry declined 7%. So that's actually doing fairly well. And Apple didn't just post a hardly to be mentioned net profit, instead their profit jumped 15%. That's doing really well in a poor economy.
But you're right, MS has such a large lead they could screw up for a long time and still be ahead. And I would be no happier than the next guy to see Apple in a position of total dominance in the PC industry. Luckily with the rise of open source and free software, that is not likely to happen. But continuing to work for important freedoms is the only way to keep abusive dominance from happening.
Is there any anti-trust factors to this? Oracle, being a dominant database player, and buying up the biggest open source database?
Not likely since MySQL is by definition open source. No matter who owns the company that supported some of it's development, it's still open source and you and I can still fork the code and keep improving it.
Aside from that, I find this all very sad. Sun was one of the Unix innvators from the earliest days. Even when they grow large, they still seemed like a "cool company." Healey used to personally answer emails I would send him. Oracle seems to be the antithesis of this; major, corporate, gouging, monster... One can only hope that some of Sun's culture and products will survive.
Indeed Sun really made some great quality products (albeit really expensive too). As another astute poster pointed out Sun has great quality products but has been poorly run while Oracle is very well run with poor quality products. With any luck Oracle will see this and learn something so they can make the right choices and come out a much better company with better products. It's not terribly likely. The culture clash is likely to be too great and the talented engineers will most likely be stifled in the new company.
If you can show me a laptop that can handle -40C to 85C, high levels of humidity, draws no more than 5W of power, needs no fans for cooling, and reasonably gracefully handles transients associated with lightning strikes for less than $1500, I'll gladly buy it.
Ok, I'll bite. What hardware do you buy that meets all those requirements? You've mentioned everything but that.
So far I just named you six potential, and major, issues right off the top of my head. None of these are "trust" related (as far as MS products are concerned). Other issue, that is more MS concerned, patches. 300,000 testers in limited environments is not as good as 3MM investors in enterprise environments. Now you have malicious hackers you need to concern yourself with who are looking for vulnerabilities and implementing them. Just because companies held off on Vista does not mean they will not upgrade to 7. It isn't a lack of trust with MS it is a lack of trust in a new product and most companies avoid getting the latest and greatest of ANY product until it has the equivelant of an SP1
What you're completely missing is that Windows 7 basically is Vista SP2 and doesn't add anything significantly new from the perspective of the 6 items you listed. That means companies have had years to plan for those and are still saying no thanks in large numbers after they said no thanks to Vista. Perhaps this commonly accepted wisdom of waiting for SP1 will come back to bite MS in the butt and if they hadn't tried to sweep things under the rug with a rename they might have been better off.
Yes, this is new. This is companies holding out on two releases of Windows for a significant time and in larger and larger numbers. Of course a small number of companies still run Windows 2000 or even older, it's a very small percentage compared to the data in this survey. Windows 7 really adds nothing significantly new to Vista, it's basically Vista SP2, but MS is rushing it out in order to get a new name on it to try to sweep all the bad PR from Vista under the rug. What this data is showing is that the strategy may not work as intended. While the article didn't specifically give the numbers of respondents that are planning to wait on 7 that had skipped Vista, based on how high the numbers are for those that are planning to wait for a significant amount of time on Vista, and how low the adoption rates of Vista have been, it is clear there are more companies than ever that are holding off on MS's products and more of them than before are skipping one of MS's releases and holding off on the next one. This survey with a large number of responses and thus more validity than your average junk survey is the first to confirm what many people had been suspecting.
Oh by the way, here's a single page link
Okay, but if all you want to do is turn the DVD into an .iso image of the DVD, what do you need ripping software for?
For the 'shrink' part in the name is a big part. Getting a dual layer dvd to fit on a single layer backup medium. Then presumably some people want to watch encrypted disks on linux so you need some software that can handle that as well, also I find the PUOs highly annoying, so I typically remove those. You need other software to do the last two, dvdshrink only handles the shrinking part, but it does that at good quality. That's what ripping software is for, and when I'm done I still want an iso that I can backup so my original disk doesn't get scratched to oblivion.
Oh, and quick tip. If you're going to be snarky, make sure you know what you're talking about first.
You have to buy the $29.99 version to get the features you mentioned, going to portable players etc. They say the full version works on Wine as well.
Good point. I didn't catch that the OP wanted to play files on a portable media player. Handbrake might be exactly what he wants then. And while you can take anything you want and put it in an iso, creating an iso that plays on the widest range of DVD players isn't trivial either.