Now I know they're lying and that I could stretch the life by totally dimming the screen, but I doubt they would claim twice the battery life.
Oh, it isn't even rare that manufacturers claim inflated runtimes for batteries. Many times they are reported of ideal conditions, like having screen dimmed down and the machine just idling. I'm not saying that your Linux might still not be wasting power.
On a related note, I've noticed that generally positive reviews get more "x people found this helpful" points than negative ones. Like if there's one black sheep of a comment which points the actual suckitude of the product, all the praise is more likely to overcome it. Maybe some collective altruism thing... Or, maybe people like to hear "nice things".
One nice example is the problem with some laptops that you have to close the lid twice to make a machine suspend under Linux. This is due to an ACPI bug where the lid status remains in state "closed" on resume. Linux power management wants the transition to be exactly "open" -> "closed" for suspend, in Windows simply a lid event with state "closed" is enough.
If you are skilled, you can also hack the ACPI DSDT and inject the new one on boot.:)
I dunno, man. There's clearly been some improvements lately. A netbook (N270, GMA950) can now play full-screen 480p YouTube quite smoothly. You can see though that it is barely coping, and there might be a slowdown every now and then if the system is occupied with other tasks. But frankly, it's pretty good.
Just because someone spent a lot of time and effort working on something doesn't mean it's GOOD. I can spend all day every day for 5 years trying to paint the New York skyline, but that doesn't mean that the resulting picture will be any good.
Well, why wouldn't it? The results surely would improve by practice...
But yeah, I know what you mean. Development time alone is probably a bad unit of measurement in quality.
Don't worry, we heard you.:) So, what's the next big thing?
Someone above posted this idea, what do you think about it?
Instead of making a CPU from hundreds of TTL gates, build a personal supercomputer from hundreds of ARM processors and custom operating system to effectively use that power for virtual reality or physics simulations.
The ability to use your IGP when processing is low and transparently switching to your dedicated GPU once it gets high enough would be nice to.
By the way I did a bit googling and there now seems to be some support for Nvidia Optimus technology under Linux called Bumblebee. Apparently it can even run tasks simultaneously on the two GPUs. Quite interesting...
I think the volume control in laptops got worse as the analog wheel was replaced with Fn keys. Maybe they now want that things happen in the "digital domain". Still, it's not a good paradigm for that purpose - too inaccurate and a pain to use.
(A proper headphone amplifier would be nice too. I believe that even the elite laptops have the basic weak output.)
Errm... to put this in perspective, I seem to recall that I looked it up and a 2.4GHz P4 actually benchmarks as significantly slower than the 1.6GHz Atom processor in the netbook I'm currently typing this on. Also, while you can get some speedup from using less bloated software, you'll still be browsing 2011-era websites with all their own nasty bloat...
According to the processor comparison tool at hwbot.org, the 2.4GHz P4 seems to be twice as fast as an Atom N270. But I dunno...
Linux is great on the desktop, but when you sleep/resume cycle it 10 times, strange things start to happen. Also when moving around and connecting weird USB thingies.
I have similar experiences. I like Linux as much as the next guy, but there is still lots of fragile stuff, especially on laptops. Many times something weird (or simply nothing) happens and I have to go digging through the logs for the cause. Lots of unimplemented stuff here and there, too.
They should leave windows on the laptops. The reason that they can switch to Linux is that the OS is mostly irrelevant for the end user. So it makes sense to use the OS that's best for the hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
RapidShare links are my current choice.
Because that would be like putting a sports car in a tractor competition.
Then how can you do almost anything?
Oh, it isn't even rare that manufacturers claim inflated runtimes for batteries. Many times they are reported of ideal conditions, like having screen dimmed down and the machine just idling. I'm not saying that your Linux might still not be wasting power.
Yeah, I just commented on this phenomenom too. :)
On a related note, I've noticed that generally positive reviews get more "x people found this helpful" points than negative ones. Like if there's one black sheep of a comment which points the actual suckitude of the product, all the praise is more likely to overcome it. Maybe some collective altruism thing... Or, maybe people like to hear "nice things".
One nice example is the problem with some laptops that you have to close the lid twice to make a machine suspend under Linux. This is due to an ACPI bug where the lid status remains in state "closed" on resume. Linux power management wants the transition to be exactly "open" -> "closed" for suspend, in Windows simply a lid event with state "closed" is enough.
If you are skilled, you can also hack the ACPI DSDT and inject the new one on boot. :)
And /bin/true is 29kB. :) A program whose only purpose is to return "1". Some binary bloat there...
I dunno, man. There's clearly been some improvements lately. A netbook (N270, GMA950) can now play full-screen 480p YouTube quite smoothly. You can see though that it is barely coping, and there might be a slowdown every now and then if the system is occupied with other tasks. But frankly, it's pretty good.
With some of those LED tealights I've seen a warning that says you shouldn't light them with a match.
Or have the release date as the version number, like 2011.06.22.
Just because someone spent a lot of time and effort working on something doesn't mean it's GOOD. I can spend all day every day for 5 years trying to paint the New York skyline, but that doesn't mean that the resulting picture will be any good.
Well, why wouldn't it? The results surely would improve by practice...
But yeah, I know what you mean. Development time alone is probably a bad unit of measurement in quality.
Don't worry, we heard you. :) So, what's the next big thing?
Someone above posted this idea, what do you think about it?
In America, IT powers electricity!
The ability to use your IGP when processing is low and transparently switching to your dedicated GPU once it gets high enough would be nice to.
By the way I did a bit googling and there now seems to be some support for Nvidia Optimus technology under Linux called Bumblebee. Apparently it can even run tasks simultaneously on the two GPUs. Quite interesting...
I think the volume control in laptops got worse as the analog wheel was replaced with Fn keys. Maybe they now want that things happen in the "digital domain". Still, it's not a good paradigm for that purpose - too inaccurate and a pain to use. (A proper headphone amplifier would be nice too. I believe that even the elite laptops have the basic weak output.)
Or show a more or less public friend list, in full names.
The x86 CPU architecture would be a good candidate too.
Errm... to put this in perspective, I seem to recall that I looked it up and a 2.4GHz P4 actually benchmarks as significantly slower than the 1.6GHz Atom processor in the netbook I'm currently typing this on. Also, while you can get some speedup from using less bloated software, you'll still be browsing 2011-era websites with all their own nasty bloat...
According to the processor comparison tool at hwbot.org, the 2.4GHz P4 seems to be twice as fast as an Atom N270. But I dunno...
6.22.
Linux is great on the desktop, but when you sleep/resume cycle it 10 times, strange things start to happen. Also when moving around and connecting weird USB thingies.
I have similar experiences. I like Linux as much as the next guy, but there is still lots of fragile stuff, especially on laptops. Many times something weird (or simply nothing) happens and I have to go digging through the logs for the cause. Lots of unimplemented stuff here and there, too.
They should leave windows on the laptops. The reason that they can switch to Linux is that the OS is mostly irrelevant for the end user. So it makes sense to use the OS that's best for the hardware.
Remember that it was a cost issue too.
This is actually a great idea. Windows also should have some kind of "third party repositories" in the update system.
Too bad I don't need those versions. Since XP came out I started migrating away from windows.
I did the same thing, although 7 was good enough so I came back. Now I run both Windows and Ubuntu.
What's the deal with Slashdot still using the Bill Gates Borg icon to represent Microsoft? That icon is so dated on both levels these days.
Well, it's from when Microsoft started. Imagine if there was an icon for aviation - a picture of Wright brothers' early gear would suit fine.
True.