Thanks for the warnings about the crappy processor in the HP 2133.
When HP release a 2160 based upon the N280 chip, then I think you will have a perfect netbook. HP have managed to squeeze a 10" display into the same sized case as the current 8.9" as well, and they're promising a 1366x768 16:9 display for that. Do you have a link with more information on that? (specs, when it's likely to be released etc) It does indeed sound like my ideal netbook.
A 10 inch display and a hard drive in a machine the size of an EEE 900 is pretty damn impressive (I don't remember the EEE 900 having much border round the screen as it is).
yet smaller than the 10" models, which seem a tad too big and don't offer any extra screen resolution for it. This is one of my pet peeves why the hell does noone (that i'm aware of, correct me if i'm wrong) do a 10 inch model with a 1280x800 screen? there is a 9 inch with a 1280x800 screen from HP but that seems to be pushing the pixel size down a little too much plus I want the HDD that 10 inch models generally offer.
Currently, if your need to run Java 6 on PPC, your only chance is installing a PPC Linux (not sure about BSD) and run IBM Java on it. It probablly is your best bet for the moment.
The good news is that openjdk with the patches from icedtea does run on powerpc and afaict work is progressing reasonablly well on getting a FOSS JIT written for it.
to clarify my previous post i'm talking about xorg under linux, I decided I didn't particualarly like OSX so the machine spends most of it's time running linux.
Maybe it's something apple did but i've found xorg on my intel macbook to be far from ideal. Google earth will take it down every time and every so often it falls over for no obvious reason.
And once it falls over it takes a reboot to make it work again.
As opposed to Debian, which is ready when it's, you know, ready. No matter how many years that takes;) Afaict debian lenny will probablly release sometime in febuary or march. The release team have said that the main blocker for release was the release of D-I rc2 which has just been released.
The woody to sarge cycle was a fuckup. They had thier longest release cycle ever just as major improvements to the usability of linux on the desktop (like X autoconfiguration) were coming in. But now they seem to have got thier release cycles under control at just under 2 years (22 months for etch, probablly arround 23 for lenny)
IMO vistas launch WAS a clusterfuck due to three main reaons * it performed badly * driver quality was shit * there was lots of comaptibility problems with old hardware and software
For the first issue afaict MS has been hard at work on trying to deal with the worst of it first in vista SP1 and now in windows 7. The hardware market is also advancing in performance which will help.
The other two are being gradually improved upon as hardware and software vendors get thier act together. Since 7 is a relatively minor change from vista it shouldn't impact too badly on progress in this regard.
one affect of windows seven will probablly be to tighten the screws on those who want XP with a new machine.
IIRC * XP pro OEM allowed downgrades to 2K pro and no further * vista buisness and ultimate OEM allow downgrade to XP pro and no further
Assuming this continues with windows 7 then once vista OEM licenses become unavailible and whitebox vista copies/retail XP copies run out the only way to legally run XP on your new machines will be through volume licensing.
With the screws tightened on small buisnesses as well as consumers, hardware vendors having to support win7 as well as vista and XP coming to the end of it's security update lifetime I suspect XP will slowly fade out.
Unreasonable search and seizure. It is in the Constitution. Afaict the current free services from google make no gaurantees that your data will stay in your own country of origin. I don't imagine this one will be any different.
I would imagine the windows server, tx cal and citrix licenses needed for a citrix soloution will probablly cost more than the licenses needed to run windows on the desktop
Application licensing costs will depend on who the app vendors licensing schemes interact with such a setup.
Both of Intel's Mini-ITX desktop boards with the Atom have the CPU passively cooled. However, they have a fan for the chipset The fact that the highest power chip in the "atom soloution" is not the processor is kind of crazy but also fairly irrelevent. The important fact is that one of the chips in the soloution is using enough power to be a pain to cool without a fan.
Right now, nobody's making money selling a web browser that competes with the one that comes with Windows. And they probablly never will, that ship has sailed long ago. Even if MS were to stop bundling with all of the top 4 web browsers free (as in beer) and OEMs and ISPs likely to provide at least one of said free browsers it's going to be pretty difficult for any payware offering to compete.
The problem is there is a limit to things like how small/low res you can make the screen and still have something people would consider a laptop, netbooks are getting pretty close to that limit IMO. You may be able to skimp a bit on the processor but really how much cheaper is what OLPC was using than the celerons in the cheap netbooks.
Plus they were trying to make the thing very rugged and child-proof.
But IMO the most important issue was by refusing to release it on the general market (except as part of G1G1 which was a rather expensive way to get a machine) they stopped themselves from ever building up the volume needed to produce the things at a low price. Electronics manufacturing has HUGE economies of scale.
vfat is the name of a driver in win3.x and win9x not the name of a filesystem.
If you meant fat with long filenames then those are going to be used by any modern version of windows on any variant of FAT.
If you meant fat16 that isn't really suitable for 4GB drives ( 64KB is a stupidly big cluster size and not all implementation can handle it properly afaict )
though according to intel it can "only" go go 48GB which while high compared to desktop boards is low compared to the FBDIMM based intel boards which can apparently go to 128GB and DDR2 based amd opteron boards which can go to 64GB.
The problem with that is of course that mirroring simply mirrors problems on the primary drive to the secondary drive. So you end up with two working drives with broken data on it. I think the answer to that is it depends on what you are storing.
If you are storing files that never change (e.g. completed projects, recordings of TV shows, porn, software installers etc) then you can just have your backup script copy only newly added files.
A similar thing can be done for subversion repositries, you can use svnsync to copy accross the new commits without risking copying corruption to older commits.
OTOH if you are storing large work in progress files or a large database backup becomes much tricker because your backup set can get much larger than your working set with a reasonable backup strategy.
I'd wager that it's more compatible than NTFS, though. Afaict exFAT is compatible with vista SP1+, XP SP2+ with a hotfix (that few are likely to have installed) and CE 6.0 .
Afaict NTFS is compatibile with the whole NT line of windows (though apparently vista doesn't like to boot from partitions that have been touched by NT4 for some reason which caused some fun for resize tools) and with linux through NTFS-3g.
I'd wager that systems that support NTFS but not exFAT (XP without the hotfix, vista pre-sp1, previous versions of the NT line and linux with NTFS-3G) are more common than systems that support exFAT but not NTFS (just CE 6.0 afaict).
Starter is aimed at extracting a little money rather than none out of third world hellholes, it's not really relavent to the discussion of windows in it's main markets.
Afaict the main reason for the existance of home basic was to allow MS to increase the price of the main home edition of windows (they were already starting to do this with XP MCE) while still having something very cheap for OEMs to throw on the real POS boxes.
I don't think customer confusion is a big deal here. Remember few consumer buy windows directly. They buy complete PCs with windows included and the PC vendors are already segmenting the market. PC vendors do generally know which is appropriate (home basic for shit boxes that will be crap whatever edition the OEM loads on them, home premium for the more decent stuff, buisness for machines aimed at buisness customers).
Do they? my experiance has been in the kind of shops where you get salesmen you get PCs prebuilt with the configuration including the windows edition already been decided by the manufacturer.
You only get the choice if you buy from somewhere that builds to order like dell or a local whitebox vendor.
I guess they might try and sell a seperate upgrade copy but I imagine that would cost more than most people are willing to pay.
Afaict with vista you COULDN'T upgrade from home basic to buisness so your only upgrade option if you wanted to get the buisness features without buying a full copy and reinstalling was ultimate.
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Thanks for the warnings about the crappy processor in the HP 2133.
When HP release a 2160 based upon the N280 chip, then I think you will have a perfect netbook. HP have managed to squeeze a 10" display into the same sized case as the current 8.9" as well, and they're promising a 1366x768 16:9 display for that.
Do you have a link with more information on that? (specs, when it's likely to be released etc) It does indeed sound like my ideal netbook.
A 10 inch display and a hard drive in a machine the size of an EEE 900 is pretty damn impressive (I don't remember the EEE 900 having much border round the screen as it is).
yet smaller than the 10" models, which seem a tad too big and don't offer any extra screen resolution for it.
This is one of my pet peeves why the hell does noone (that i'm aware of, correct me if i'm wrong) do a 10 inch model with a 1280x800 screen? there is a 9 inch with a 1280x800 screen from HP but that seems to be pushing the pixel size down a little too much plus I want the HDD that 10 inch models generally offer.
Currently, if your need to run Java 6 on PPC, your only chance is installing a PPC Linux (not sure about BSD) and run IBM Java on it.
It probablly is your best bet for the moment.
The good news is that openjdk with the patches from icedtea does run on powerpc and afaict work is progressing reasonablly well on getting a FOSS JIT written for it.
to clarify my previous post i'm talking about xorg under linux, I decided I didn't particualarly like OSX so the machine spends most of it's time running linux.
Maybe it's something apple did but i've found xorg on my intel macbook to be far from ideal. Google earth will take it down every time and every so often it falls over for no obvious reason.
And once it falls over it takes a reboot to make it work again.
Last I checked XP hasn't left mainstream support yet, after that it still has another 5 years of extended support.
I very much doubt the activation servers will be turned off until after the end of extended support and probablly not for years afterwards.
As opposed to Debian, which is ready when it's, you know, ready. No matter how many years that takes ;)
Afaict debian lenny will probablly release sometime in febuary or march. The release team have said that the main blocker for release was the release of D-I rc2 which has just been released.
The woody to sarge cycle was a fuckup. They had thier longest release cycle ever just as major improvements to the usability of linux on the desktop (like X autoconfiguration) were coming in. But now they seem to have got thier release cycles under control at just under 2 years (22 months for etch, probablly arround 23 for lenny)
IMO vistas launch WAS a clusterfuck due to three main reaons
* it performed badly
* driver quality was shit
* there was lots of comaptibility problems with old hardware and software
For the first issue afaict MS has been hard at work on trying to deal with the worst of it first in vista SP1 and now in windows 7. The hardware market is also advancing in performance which will help.
The other two are being gradually improved upon as hardware and software vendors get thier act together. Since 7 is a relatively minor change from vista it shouldn't impact too badly on progress in this regard.
one affect of windows seven will probablly be to tighten the screws on those who want XP with a new machine.
IIRC
* XP pro OEM allowed downgrades to 2K pro and no further
* vista buisness and ultimate OEM allow downgrade to XP pro and no further
Assuming this continues with windows 7 then once vista OEM licenses become unavailible and whitebox vista copies/retail XP copies run out the only way to legally run XP on your new machines will be through volume licensing.
With the screws tightened on small buisnesses as well as consumers, hardware vendors having to support win7 as well as vista and XP coming to the end of it's security update lifetime I suspect XP will slowly fade out.
It looks like there is indeed a passive cooled atom board
http://www.mini-itx.com/reviews/atoms/default.asp?page=5
Unreasonable search and seizure. It is in the Constitution.
Afaict the current free services from google make no gaurantees that your data will stay in your own country of origin. I don't imagine this one will be any different.
I would imagine the windows server, tx cal and citrix licenses needed for a citrix soloution will probablly cost more than the licenses needed to run windows on the desktop
Application licensing costs will depend on who the app vendors licensing schemes interact with such a setup.
Both of Intel's Mini-ITX desktop boards with the Atom have the CPU passively cooled. However, they have a fan for the chipset
The fact that the highest power chip in the "atom soloution" is not the processor is kind of crazy but also fairly irrelevent. The important fact is that one of the chips in the soloution is using enough power to be a pain to cool without a fan.
Right now, nobody's making money selling a web browser that competes with the one that comes with Windows.
And they probablly never will, that ship has sailed long ago. Even if MS were to stop bundling with all of the top 4 web browsers free (as in beer) and OEMs and ISPs likely to provide at least one of said free browsers it's going to be pretty difficult for any payware offering to compete.
The problem is there is a limit to things like how small/low res you can make the screen and still have something people would consider a laptop, netbooks are getting pretty close to that limit IMO. You may be able to skimp a bit on the processor but really how much cheaper is what OLPC was using than the celerons in the cheap netbooks.
Plus they were trying to make the thing very rugged and child-proof.
But IMO the most important issue was by refusing to release it on the general market (except as part of G1G1 which was a rather expensive way to get a machine) they stopped themselves from ever building up the volume needed to produce the things at a low price. Electronics manufacturing has HUGE economies of scale.
vfat is the name of a driver in win3.x and win9x not the name of a filesystem.
If you meant fat with long filenames then those are going to be used by any modern version of windows on any variant of FAT.
If you meant fat16 that isn't really suitable for 4GB drives ( 64KB is a stupidly big cluster size and not all implementation can handle it properly afaict )
though according to intel it can "only" go go 48GB which while high compared to desktop boards is low compared to the FBDIMM based intel boards which can apparently go to 128GB and DDR2 based amd opteron boards which can go to 64GB.
The problem with that is of course that mirroring simply mirrors problems on the primary drive to the secondary drive. So you end up with two working drives with broken data on it.
I think the answer to that is it depends on what you are storing.
If you are storing files that never change (e.g. completed projects, recordings of TV shows, porn, software installers etc) then you can just have your backup script copy only newly added files.
A similar thing can be done for subversion repositries, you can use svnsync to copy accross the new commits without risking copying corruption to older commits.
OTOH if you are storing large work in progress files or a large database backup becomes much tricker because your backup set can get much larger than your working set with a reasonable backup strategy.
I'd wager that it's more compatible than NTFS, though.
Afaict exFAT is compatible with vista SP1+, XP SP2+ with a hotfix (that few are likely to have installed) and CE 6.0 .
Afaict NTFS is compatibile with the whole NT line of windows (though apparently vista doesn't like to boot from partitions that have been touched by NT4 for some reason which caused some fun for resize tools) and with linux through NTFS-3g.
I'd wager that systems that support NTFS but not exFAT (XP without the hotfix, vista pre-sp1, previous versions of the NT line and linux with NTFS-3G) are more common than systems that support exFAT but not NTFS (just CE 6.0 afaict).
Of course for the next few years the same will apply to exfat. XP is going to take quite some time to dissapear and doesn't support it by default.
IIRC the only reason the AIs stand any chance in starcraft multiplayers is that they cheat.
Starter is aimed at extracting a little money rather than none out of third world hellholes, it's not really relavent to the discussion of windows in it's main markets.
Afaict the main reason for the existance of home basic was to allow MS to increase the price of the main home edition of windows (they were already starting to do this with XP MCE) while still having something very cheap for OEMs to throw on the real POS boxes.
I don't think customer confusion is a big deal here. Remember few consumer buy windows directly. They buy complete PCs with windows included and the PC vendors are already segmenting the market. PC vendors do generally know which is appropriate (home basic for shit boxes that will be crap whatever edition the OEM loads on them, home premium for the more decent stuff, buisness for machines aimed at buisness customers).
Do they? my experiance has been in the kind of shops where you get salesmen you get PCs prebuilt with the configuration including the windows edition already been decided by the manufacturer.
You only get the choice if you buy from somewhere that builds to order like dell or a local whitebox vendor.
I guess they might try and sell a seperate upgrade copy but I imagine that would cost more than most people are willing to pay.
I don't see how it's any different from say studying the theory of chess
Afaict with vista you COULDN'T upgrade from home basic to buisness so your only upgrade option if you wanted to get the buisness features without buying a full copy and reinstalling was ultimate.