Vendors Rally While Windows Sleeps 321
Anti-Globalism sends along a PCWorld article outlining two technologies from Intel and Dell that do an end run around Windows. "Dell, Intel and their partners announced last week new technologies that represent major leaps forward for mobility. The companies seem to have discovered the secret to making such bold leaps: Cut Microsoft out of the deal. One technology involves enabling users to gain instant access to a laptop's e-mail, browser and other basic functionality — without booting Windows at all. The second technology enables an Internet-based message to wake a Windows PC from sleep mode. These new technologies are perfect metaphors for what's happening in the industry... Windows is asleep while Microsoft's own partners give users what they really want."
Wow! Wake On Lan! (Score:2, Insightful)
OMG, 1996 called, it wants its story back.
Re:Wow! Wake On Lan! (Score:4, Interesting)
"The Intel-JaJah combination will enable you to dump your landline phone and use a PC-based VoIP phone without leaving your PC on all the time"
They're missing out on a great opportunity (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They're missing out on a great opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
We'll get the next version of Windows a year early!
There was a delay in the release of Vista... and look how buggy it is. Now you want them to release it much earlier? I say, let them take all the time they need!
Re:They're missing out on a great opportunity (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, come on. It was PERFECT on the original release date; they took those extra years to add all the bugs they could think of! OF COURSE we want the next version early!
Who does number two work for? (Score:3, Funny)
Put microsoft's hand in warm water while they're at it. We'll get the next version of Windows a year early!
I think you might be confusing output ports #1 and #2.
WTF is this shit? (Score:2, Insightful)
Wake on LAN is ancient.
Dual booting is ancient.
Re:WTF is this shit? (Score:5, Informative)
Fuck it, I'll reply to myself.
"Microsoft has been pushing Remote Desktop and its communications software for years. But apparently it never occurred to anyone in Redmond that people might want to leave their PCs in sleep mode, then have them turn on for remote access or VoIP calls."
Remote Desktop supports wake on LAN.
When you try to connect, it tries to wake the machine up. If the machine has wake on lan enabled, and you don't have any NAT issues, it'll work.
Microsoft Challenge? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know, seeing as how the submitter calls himself "Anti-Globalism" (with a link to his website) and he includes some stupid, Slashdot-pandering quip in the summary about how "Windows is asleep", I'd say this person has engineered this story so kdawson would pick it up (thinking it would be perfect for the Slashdot crowd) and promote his own website.
Slashdot, you have been gamed.
Here's a strategy for Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
One strategy for Microsoft in order to counter this trend is to modify its Windows OS license in a way that specifically prohibits this kind of set-up.
This way, a laptop will have to run a non Windows OS in order to be participant in DELL's "DELL Latitude On" or INTEL's "Intel Remote Wake."
I know this is not illegal.
Re:Here's a strategy for Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Well yeah, but I'm sure Dell wouldn't just open wide and swallow that. And a licensing clause like that sounds like a good target for more anti-trust lawsuits, which the EU seems to relish.
Re:Here's a strategy for Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
I know this is not illegal.
This is the exact type of behavior MS was convicted of a decade ago.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe not in the USA with their tame Department Of Justice (but even there, a repeat offender might eventually be hit with harsher sanctions).
For the EU, however, this might be a reason for the next fine, this time exceeding a billion...
Vista just isn't good with normal laptops yet (Score:5, Interesting)
It takes way too many resources. Maybe 3 years down the line, but Microsoft really dropped the ball by ignoring the reality of the fastest growing segment in computer sales.
Because of this, Apple is having great sales on the high/upper-mid-end with it's very nice line notebooks and Linux is getting a start on the lower end.
Without Vista, I don't think it would have been possible for Linux to get a foothold.
The year of Linux on the Desktop is distant, but thanks to Microsoft, the Year of Linux on the notebook looks like it's becoming reality sooner rather than later.
And the way a distro like Ubuntu evolves so quickly from year to year, I think it's a mistake that MS can't afford to do again.
In a few years, we'll see that MS was the one who dropped the ball to allow the competition the elbow room to come in.
It's also making things worse by having so many different versions and while it's debatable that Vista should have been wholly 64bit (definitely by Windows 7), MS doesn't even have the decency to provide 32/64bit on the same disc but is trying to grab every nickel it can from it's customers who chose one or the other (many discs don't qualify from alternative media).
Correction (Score:5, Funny)
Apple is having decent sales in the overpriced, zealot segment.
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"Without Vista, anti-trust law suits and billions of dollars in fines, I don't think it would have been possible for Linux to get a foothold."
--there, fixed it for you.
Re:Vista just isn't good with normal laptops yet (Score:4, Informative)
Really? Linux on the laptop is growing? Just based on non scientific study but i'm in a lot of airports across the United States. I can count on the one hand the laptops I've seen that are running Linux this year, 2. I do see a growing a number of Macs, but I am hearing more and more of the Vista startup sound on Laptops as the year goes on.
If this growth in Linux laptops are growing, I haven't seen them
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Sorry call BS with that.
I have a Dell XPS M1330 running Vista Ultimate, and its been flawless and has been for 9 months now.
It has dedicated graphics and 3GB of RAM and it has more then enough resources spare to do all of my work.
At times I have had to host visualised servers on it running exchange and domain controllers while performing server migrations and Vista has performed admirably while balancing resources with the Virtual OS's and running my mail and other programs I usually run.
I do have a lot of
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It has dedicated graphics and 3GB of RAM and it has more then enough resources spare to do all of my work.
That *isn't* a normal notebook. That is a high-medium to high performance notebook. For everyone else they are lucky to get 2 GB of RAM and a dual-core CPU. Of course Vista will run on it, but XP or Linux is going to run like 10 times better on the thing.
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.
I dislike echoing one of my own recent comments.
That said:
The Dual Core 4 GB RAM 32 Bit Vista Premium laptop at Walmart.com is $850. Acer 16" Aspire 6920-6508 Laptop PC w/ Intel Core 2 Duo Processor [walmart.com]
The 64 Bit Dual Core Vista Premium laptop with 4 GB RAM is $1000.
The 64 Bit Dual Core Vista Premium laptop with Blu-Ray and N
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.
--- which buys you a 7" screen, an 800 MHz Celeron, 512 MB RAM and 4 GB flash. Asus Eee PC 4G Surf [amazon.com]
Walmart.com lists an Acer Linpus Linux netbook - but no Eepc. The problem is the next step up - the $500 laptop - where OEM Linux runs out of gas.
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Um I'm been bargain hunting lately for a laptop and 3-4GB dual core laptops are what you get for $400-$800 these days.
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As long as I'm not doing anything that's running the hardware into the ground I get about 2.5 to 3 hours off a full charge, thats with a 6 Cell battery and I've been meaning to upgrade that to a 9 cell.
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both 32 and 64bit on a single disc.
Re:Vista just isn't good with normal laptops yet (Score:5, Informative)
Depends what you mean by a normal laptop. For example, I've got a Toshiba Satellite Pro with a Core2Duo 1.66 GHz, 2 GB RAM and a 250 GB HDD. I'm run both Vista Business and Ubuntu 8.04 on this thing and noticed the following:
* Both systems support standby/hibernation properly, but Vista is quicker to resume from either mode. Ubuntu does hibernate quicker though.
* Vista actually lasts longer on battery than Ubuntu. I don't have values, merely observations based on the same kind of work (eg. browsing, email, etc). Probably helps that Vista fully supports multiple power-saving features that either aren't enabled in Ubuntu or aren't up to the same level of maturity as in Windows.
* Ubuntu suffers from a "bug" whereby many hard drives will spin down after several seconds of non-use, which kinda reduces the lifespan Vista doesn't have this issue, although it's hard to determine if that's only because the drive is always flashing every so often.
* Both systems are zippy enough when configured well, although Vista takes absolutely forever to start from a cold boot which is why standby/hibernation is a must with it.
Because I much prefer the software selection and functionality of most Windows software compared to Linux variants, I'm sticking with Vista as my primary on this machine, but Linux is certainly getting better for laptops.
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* Ubuntu suffers from a "bug" whereby many hard drives will spin down after several seconds of non-use, which kinda reduces the lifespan Vista doesn't have this issue, although it's hard to determine if that's only because the drive is always flashing every so often.
I just love finding "bugs" in software based on observations of the tiny blinky lights!
Linux is more power-hungry out of the box (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux is known to be more power-hungry than Windows; I noticed the same on my computers.
Windows XP works about 40min longer than openSuse11 on the same machine, using default settings.
Here is some reading material:
- http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/ [lesswatts.org]
- there was a white paper written by folk from Intel, I don't remember where I found it, but it could be somewhere here: http://oss.intel.com/en-us/casestudies/ [intel.com]
You need to switch to a tickless kernel, and tinker with powertop - that should improve things.
Note that in my case, none of the powertop tricks had any impact - I was surprised to see that no matter what I did, the estimated time would always be 1h45min. This is still an experiment in progress, so don't count this feedback as 100% certain.
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Define "normal laptop". My ex bought what I consider to be a mid-price laptop (around £700) which shipped with Vista Home Premium, and it works perfectly. Plenty responsive enough and no issues that either of us has seen.
It's also making things worse by having so many different versions
There are two versions that the vast majority of people will be exposed to, Home Basic and Home Premium. Yes, business users will also have to choose from Ultimate and Business, but if you go out to buy a PC from a shop
Three Cheers for Appliance Based Computing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Three Cheers for Appliance Based Computing (Score:5, Interesting)
Now it's "I just need web and email.".
Next month it'll be "Sound would be nice.".
Then you'll be bitching "Damn we need support for youtube and flickr up in this bitch.".
Then you'll say "Can we get a fucking IM client and some printer support? It's 2010!".
Ultra mobile / webtop / nettop / netbook / whatever is retarded.
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Hopefully if this gets popular then more apps will be made Web Based. As many already are You can currently IM over the web and you just need Flash. Nothing to much to ask for by 2010.
Re:Three Cheers for Appliance Based Computing (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want all of that in your long-life Windows laptop, then get yourself a $22 SDHC card and install Ubuntu on it with all the extras. I've tried it. Boots in 3 seconds. No moving parts. Snappy fast and low power if you set it up to turn off your HDD - or better yet, pull that out - you won't need it.
FUD about netbooks (Score:3, Insightful)
> Next month it'll be "Sound would be nice.".
> Then you'll be bitching "Damn we need support for youtube and flickr up in this bitch.".
> Then you'll say "Can we get a fucking IM client and some printer support? It's 2010!".
> Ultra mobile / webtop / nettop / netbook / whatever is retarded.
Helloooo, Mcfly!
This Dell thing is kinda retarded but netbooks aren't. An ASUS EEEPC has sound, it ships with a version of mplayer that looks nice and has pretty broad codec support. Firefox has the flash plug
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"This Dell thing" is not kinda retarded. It's really kinda cool. A long life laptop inside your laptop with Instant on. And it runs Linux. The way SDHC cards are running these days you could socket or solder a 16GB flash drive inside the notebook and install and OS on it, or use it for files. That way a lot of the hardware that burns juice can be turned off unless you need it. Brilliant! Why would you need to wait 7 minutes for Vista to get ready when all you want to do is something trivial like play
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> A long life laptop inside your laptop with Instant on.
That's kinda retarded, and an indication of just how broken x86 is. But now that market forces are demanding lower power/longer battery life this seperate SoC is a stopgap measure at best.
What is needed is for Intel/AMD/Via to start taking power management serious. Give CPU's the ability to completely shutdown unneeded sections, the second core, the SSE, etc. Take clock reduction to the max. Be able to take a clock from 2GHz down to 200MHz with
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I don't know MS can't come up with refinements to make the computer "just work", but most of the time email and web are all I need. If someone can make that work at the push of a button, I'll probably use it a lot and so will my parents and grandparents.
To get my parents and grandparents onboard, the computer would need to do more than "just work".
It would literally need to be stupid simple.
Minimal UI with descriptive text instead of icons.
No assumptions that they understand how the UI works or should work.
No right-clicking the mouse (hello Macintosh)
etc etc etc.
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I already do. I push the button to turn on my Monitor.
Easy as that!
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Nothing new under the Sun, I guess.
Re:Three Cheers for Appliance Based Computing (Score:5, Insightful)
A long time ago, and by internet standards, I mean in pre-historic times, there was a computer called the Lisp Machine, designed and built at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. We're talking mid-1980s here. That's more than TWO DECADES AGO. Your cell phone would run circles around a LispM.
One of the amazing things about LispMs is that they came up really, really quickly, despite having very large and slow disk drives. They did this by essentially performing a full boot and then saving that precise memory image (including all peripheral state) to a special part of the disk called a band. This is not unlike the modern laptops' suspend-to-disk feature, except that bands were pretty static. The intent was that you set up your machine just so, and then wrote what you felt was the canonical startup state to the band. Then, every time the machine started, the band loaded in from disk, and POOF! was ready to go.
It was a radical departure, and one that, unfortunately, was not learned by the industry. I would *love* to have my laptop use bands. Save-to-disk is nice and all, but since laptop hardware (and Linux support for it) is so f-ing flaky, it's far better to have a feature to boot quickly to a known-good state.
What's the relevance here? LispMs were as fast to boot as you'd expect for a computational appliance. OMFG if I have to boot my current Linux desktop or Windows laptop it takes eons to come up, and that's with hardware that's probably three orders of magnitude faster. Our modern machines should be in a known, operable state in under a second, and the only reason they aren't is poor engineering / pressure from Microsoft.
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... and the only reason they aren't is poor engineering / pressure from Microsoft.
If there's anyone from Transmeta here, they can attest to this. One of my former roommates worked there, and had horrible tales about getting their hardware to boot quickly. Funny thing about these stories were they always concluded with either (a) we found a bug in Microsoft's startup code that was making things run K times slower than they should have or (b) Microsoft specifies that this part of the booting sequence can't be made any faster than X seconds.
Thirdly, ... (Score:2)
The second technology enables an Internet-based message to wake a Windows PC from sleep mode.
Intel and Dell declined to discuss a rumored third technology, where by after the second has awakened your PC, an virus is installed.
In the jungle... (Score:3, Funny)
The Ballmer sleeps tonight...
Somebody continue...
Useful links for more info (Score:2, Informative)
PC World has a decent summary of Intel Remote Wake Technology.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/149863/2008/08/.html [pcworld.com]
Then there's also the actual Intel site
http://www.intel.com/technology/chipset/remotewake.htm [intel.com]
why is this a problem, or news? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not news, it's fark^H^H^H^Hslashdot.com? Oh, and I know, please tell me about all the things RedHat comes with...except:
1)those extras aren't forced, they're easy to remove (unless they're gnome...), and they're all OSS
2)you're missing the point. The point is that the OS shouldn't be expected to provide EVERYTHING. It's not a problem when IBM modifies RedHat to work with their LPARs, and it's not news when someone makes a Windows appliance without Windows. That's supposed to happen, on a regular basis.
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Did slashdot report when Netware 2.0 came out in 1985 and provided an easy way to do filesharing in MSDOS?
Yes they did, but I can't find it. For some strange reason I can't retrieve Slashdot articles that are older than 10 years or so.
Sideshow anybody? (Score:2)
Isn't Sideshow pretty much exactly what ON was supposed to do except it's attached to the main screen?
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Isn't Sideshow pretty much exactly what ON was supposed to do except it's attached to the main screen?
Actually Sideshow is designed to work with a small secondary screen [engadget.com]. As for why it never generated interest for the mobile user/traveler: Imagine having a device that you could use to just browse the web and use email, turned on almost instantly and was very portable! Better still, imagine making calls through it!
I'm wondering when I can dispense with the laptop completely and just use some sort of flexible/unfolding display attached to the mobile phone, along with a travel keyboard and mouse, at least for
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Sideshow is designed for small screens, however there is nothing which would prevent you from using a full screen except for increased power consumption for the backlight.
I'm just saying that it's not like Microsoft is ignoring the "Instant On Sub Computer" concept. It's just that Dell is deciding to make their own implementation.
What users really want... (Score:4, Funny)
Bender: black jack... and hookers. In fact - forget the black jack!
And don't get me started on the phrase "do an end run around Windows" when it clearly should be "reach around" - at least that's the only way *I* can enjoy my Microsoft products. :-)
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Grab Windows by the Ballmer? I hope that gives you mental imagery that causes you to kill yourself for mentioning reach arounds, enjoyment, and Windows in a single line.
"Windows is asleep" (Score:2)
Slow news day eh? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have an ancient machine that plays CD/DVD in 5 seconds without booting - it's called a DVD player.
Seriously, HP had PCs that can do that 2-3 years ago. Oracle worked on a DB server that can run without booting into Windows OS more than 5 years ago. On new mobile phones you can open up your email within 5 seconds. Stop giving free press to Intel and Dell until they have the real guts to get away from Windows entirely.
Been done before... (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds like Asus ExpressGate (Score:3, Insightful)
My new Asus P5Q Pro has a feature called ExpressGate that lets you boot a thin BIOS OS (Linux?) with Firefox, Email, etc. The installer runs from Windows, and it may or may not use data from the hard disk, but you enable/disable the feature in the BIOS.
"...give users what they really want"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Similar technology is already used on mobile phones, they can be remotely reprogrammed to pretend that they're switched off while they're recording and transmitting your conversation.
We don't live in a 1984 world yet, but the usual greedy Megacorps are trying to patent the required technology already...
So why do I need the REST of the laptop? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm left asking, "What's the windows processor for, once I have a low power, light Linux system which boots in a flash?" I know I'm not currently the norm, but I think I'm more and more the norm. You don't have to add much to the system they're describing to make it everything I want in a laptop. (Not a desktop replacement laptop, but an ultra-portable take-with-me device.)
Subverting the OS isn't the Answer (Score:4, Interesting)
New Technology (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, my laptop already uses technology that allows this, and it allows more than "basic functionality". This stunning new technology is called "Linux".
Dell Media Direct (Score:3, Informative)
Before Latitude ON, there was Dell MediaDirect [dell.com], a Windows XP Embedded [microsoft.com] partition that booted in about 10 seconds.
The only user focused difference between the 2 that I see, is that MediaDirect is/was positioned as a way to access your files - and Latitude ON is positioned as a way to access the Internet.
Technically, the whole "embed an ARM PC into an x86 PC" may be a better idea than the convoluted MBR and partitioning schemes MediaDirect employed [goodells.net] - but it's certainly more expensive as well.
Then, as mentioned, there's Windows Sideshow [wikipedia.org], which even Dell is prototyping [sideshowdevices.com]. SideShow [microsoft.com] is more ambitious than Latitude ON, encompassing everything from sinlge line text displays to show system stats, to ARM based Windows Mobile devices to check email, play media files, etc. So far, it's failed to gain much traction in the marketplace - but, I think that it's still too early to call it dead.
If you take a look at some of the prototype developments [ricavision.com] in the SideShow remote computer spaces, I think you'll agree that all the functionality of Latitude ON is there - it's just a seperate device instead of being housed in the same case as a laptop.
So - it's not like Microsoft isn't aware or working on this market, Dell and Co. just decided to go their own way. Big deal - happens all the time. While MediaDirect used XP Embedded, other manafacturers were using Linux based OS's. Wake me up in 2 or 3+ years when the market has settled down, and we can declare a winner.
It's the BIOS, not windows (Score:4, Informative)
You could at least read the summary, it's a BIOS that runs Linux without booting windows.
Re:It's the BIOS, not windows (Score:5, Informative)
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[gently nods head in respect tinged with envy]
Re:It's the BIOS, not windows (Score:5, Interesting)
You both must be new here.
It doesn't matter if it's in the BIOS, or uses a second processor.
What matters is that it allows your laptop to "just work" rather than having to wait for the bloated monstrosity that is Windows to become usable (or as usable as it gets).
I was delighted to find that my old Compaq laptop allowed you to run on the CD player to listen to music without booting up the machine at all. This looks like an extension of that philosophy. I can imagine having a laptop that would never be fully booted except to run some "legacy" program. It only took us what, 20+ years to get here!
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Well if you're never fully going to boot into the regular x86 OS you're wasting your money on a perfectly good hard drive, PC RAM, x86 CPU and mobile graphics card that sit in your laptop unused when only using the UMPC mode.
However I must agree that a web/mail appliance mode that just works sounds like a nice thing.
Re:It's the BIOS, not windows (Score:5, Informative)
Dell is the only one who puts an extra CPU in there to run the Linux BIOS image so all that hardware you mentioned, except the hard drive, is fully used by the Linux image on the other systems.
It seems strange that Dell would put in a 2nd CPU but it does make it drop dead easy to design this way. There are tons of ARM based SoCs to pick from and pretty much all of them have Linux BSPs.
LoB
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it seems odd because there is a CPU, memory, etc already there vi the x86 CPU and system. Couldn't they just run that CPU under clocked and without using the hard disk to vastly improve battery life?
myself, I've run a liveCD every now and then when on the road just to keep access to personal info away from insecure networks. This also brings up the thought that a WUBI based boot option which runs memory resident and shuts down the HD could be very much like what Dell and others are doing with the BIOS or ad
No, only I'm New Here (Score:5, Funny)
No, only I'm New Here
Re:No, only I'm New Here (Score:5, Funny)
What is the average amount of time in between times you can spring this joke?
-fragbait
Re:It's the BIOS, not windows (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't matter if it's in the BIOS, or uses a second processor.
It does matter that it uses a 2nd processor that is very power efficient. I haven't used a windows laptop in a while, but if you just wake your computer from sleep how long does it really take?
I think the real advantage of this is battery savings from running on an ARM processor.
From the article:
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ohhh boy. Cue the posters that scream "Linux is a kernel" :p
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Have you seen the recovery console? Or setup in Windows XP? That's pretty much the kernel, filesystems and a text mode UI. Actually NTLDR itself is an interesting beast - it's a stripped down single tasking kernel+read only filesystem that loads the real kernel off NTFS. It even supports normal SCSI miniport drivers. In fact in a hint of NT's Risc origins it's actually protected mode Bios extender underneath OSLOADER.EXE. On Risc, OSLOADER.EXE is used without the code to switch to protected mode and back to
Re:It's the BIOS, not windows (Score:5, Funny)
You could at least read the article, it's an ARM SoC that serves as a separate UMPC inside the laptop. Kind of like having a N810 inside your laptop if you will.
Didn't you get the memo? We don't RTFA. We simply skim TFS for keywords, and then post with an authoritative tone, as though we had not only read TFA, but had actually authored it AND examined the subject in a PhD thesis.
You must be new here...
Re:It's the BIOS, not windows (Score:5, Informative)
No, New Here already posted...
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=649601&cid=24653097 [slashdot.org]
Re:Sensationlist much? (Score:4, Funny)
This is retarded and sensational.
In other words, perfect front-page material. You must be new here.
Re:Sensationlist much? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, this is just another example of how a monopoly impedes progress.
The fact that industry is having to work around Microsoft's stranglehold instead of simply shifting to another vendor is a sad indictment of governments' handling of an abusive monopolist.
Microsoft should have been split at the original DoJ antitrust case. It still should.
Re:Sensationlist much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, provided they were:
Those constraints would allow fair competition. If Microsoft were then able to produce better browsers and media players than the competition, they'd deserve my money.
Re:Sensationlist much? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sensationlist much? (Score:5, Insightful)
More popular does not equal better
More popular does not equal easier
More popular does not equal simpler
More popular does not equal more advanced
A monopoly helps no-one except the company who is the monopoly
People use windows because most people use windows and no other reason!
Re:Sensationlist much? (Score:5, Informative)
Where the have you been all these years? Nothing stopping hardware OEMs from selling hardware with non-Windows OSes my ass. Jean-Louis Gassée found that one out when he first began to try pitching BeOS to hardware OEMs. He wrote an article [essential.org] on why PC manufacturers won't sell non-MS products (more info on this here [theregister.co.uk] and here [birdhouse.org]). The Windows monopoly is reinforced by anti-competitive agreements that Microsoft has with all of the major hardware OEMs. If one of these OEMs violates the agreement, they lose the OEM discount on all the other Windows PCs they sell, and consequently their Windows-based computers wind up costing much more than those vendors that decided to abide by the agreement. You can guess what that would mean to a major OEM.
In a way, this move by Dell is interesting since it shows to what lengths they've gone to avoid violating the contract. They could have used the same CPU to run the Linux firmware here, but no, they had to include a full ARM SoC to do the same instead. Granted, that has some advantages (given that the x86 CPU is much too overpowered and would eat the battery alive), but perhaps the agreements they have with Microsoft may also have something to do with it.
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Re:Great... (Score:5, Funny)
we can wake Windows remotely. This seems like a major security issue if not implemented correctly.
No kidding. Waking Windows locally is already a big enough security issue as it is!
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Anything that's not implemented correctly is a major security issue...
Even when implemented correctly it can still be a major security issue, it just becomes an even bigger one when not done correctly. Some ideas (ActiveX?) should just not ever be implemented and implementing them poorly is just asking for trouble.
Re:New technologies (Score:5, Informative)
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The concept that a vendor could sidestep the restrictions imposed by Windows by using another OS is hardly new.
The idea of running a second OS on a laptop is hardly new. It's two computers in one box - that's not a new technology, that's space efficiency ;-)
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I hate the fact that they always generalize from what one person is doing to all slashdotters...
: P
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No, it's not. Don't just judge by the middling article. This really is new and it's part of a new trend from Intel to focus more on the needs of the person using the gadget, which they've been somewhat disassociated from in the past. It's really cool. Try it and see.
When did Microsoft become a hardware company? (Score:2, Insightful)
This posting is amazingly odd. It's claiming that these gigantic hardware companies are somehow magically avoiding Microsoft. But last time I checked... Microsoft was a software company.
MS doesn't put out hardware specs, they don't design laptops (or desktops), they aren't giving these companies dictates from on high, etc. Also... neither OSX nor Teh Lunix are driving this innovation... so how is this "Vendors Rally While Windows Sleeps"? Windows is software. So what does that have to do with somebody
Re:When did Microsoft become a hardware company? (Score:5, Informative)
Basically it's an instant-boot into something and instant-on can give a laptop some credibility where it didn't before, i.e In A Hurry. (Stop gloating you non-Windows users, this isn't about you!) Drag that work laptop to the airport and check your mail via the web before it's time to show the security guy the holes in your socks. Sometimes the web is all you need, or Skype, and some companies issue laptops for their consultants but not Blackberries or other decent PDA.
This gives you a chance to do something with a company-approved laptop SOE that doesn't involve waking the slow, cranky and belligerant dragon that is Vista or XP Pro. This Is A Good Thing. Oh, and you can push a button on the screen that boots Windows if you need to read the boss' Powerpoint. If you have the time, that is. Takes a while to wake the dragon.
The reason why they can do this is they are a specific hardware company (ASUS the example I know) who don't have to cater to all forms of hardware -- just their own. Full-cut OS' can't be that inflexible. So it's a quick little trip from the BIOS to a v.fast PDA screentop. Most of what I need is on that little thing, for the rest you press your OS button and load your standard desktop.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't get it. 99% (everyone except me) in our offices has cell phones capable of reading and writing emails, play WMA/MP3/whatever, surf the web and so on. All this with nice animated GUI. So why on earth would those guys want to take their laptops out of the bag and use it in uncomfortable position on those small airport chairs, when they could just grap their cell phones out of the front pocket? Beats me.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This gives you a chance to do something with a company-approved laptop SOE that doesn't involve waking the slow, cranky and belligerant dragon that is Vista or XP Pro.
Vista, sure it might take a while to get booted up, but XP Pro? Come now, this takes like 10 seconds on a decent machine.
In regards to the "business professional", most of the shops I've worked at require a VPN connection to access the Exchange servers to grab email.
Don't get me wrong, I see this being useful, but not very useful for the vast majority of laptop users who have to utilize a VPN. Blackberries and PDAs are the norm for quick email checks with everyone I know who really has to worry about such
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't believe Microsoft is sleeping - they were woken up by the development of the OLPC project. But their problem was that Windows needs so much memory to run. A Linux system could run under 1 Gigabyte of memory, Microsoft wanted at least 2 Gigabytes.
That has woken up the PC manufacturers who now have to compete against PDA's, Blackberry's , smart mobile phones and Eee-PC's. For most people, managing E-mail and surfing the web for You-tube videos is all they want from a PC. All that requires is some mult
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Windows... It can be put to sleep though.
Is this like putting it down?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yea, that's what I thought at first. "Hmm, sounds like that MediaDirect nonsense." But then I read TFA. And it's nothing like MediaDirect. Although the article is sketchy on details, what it sounds like is this:
Standard mode: Core 2 Duo processor booting Windows from hard drive.
Latitude ON mode: Atom processor booting from flash drive running Linux.
The system will have two separate processors, and the main selling point to this new mode is the battery life (est. at 19hours if you are running off the Ato