Intel Atom: Did Pandora Choose The Wrong Cpu?


i find it funny that people are bashing vista and at the same time criticising people for wanting to run legacy apps.

the issue is not that vista does not have new features. it does, and there are many of them. but there are some issues, notably:

1. many features, most notably a newer and smarter file system, that were promised some years ago are still not there
2. for most users, xp still does what it needs to.
3. hollywood approved, aka "defective by design"

obviously #2 is a dealbreaker. but you know what? outside of business, "most" people are part of botnets. i'm happy to see these people being forced to upgrade. we're one step closer to having most people's desktops not running as root without a firewall. so uac's annoying? let 'em cry.

vista requires more metal, sure. so has every new release of windows. the great thing about this time around is that there are some very mature linux distros out there, that ordinary people can install. and having to wait for drivers is not microsoft's fault, unless you're waiting for 64 bit and they refused to sign them or something. on 32-bit afaik the vendor can release whatever they want. but usually the hardware is stamped out as cheaply as possible and barely supported. last year the vendors had some actual work to do. some of them did it, some of them showed just how cheap/lazy they are.

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i do not enjoy defending microsoft. they do terrible things, like impeding the progress of the xo...poisoning the iso...destroying decent companies by stealing code..spreading fud about linux & foss because that code isn't available for stealing...funding sco to do the same. but just because somebody's second cousin's friend-of-friend said vista was gay or whatever, doesn't mean that it's not a decent product. like everything else, it has its downsides, and it's up the individual whether there's value in the upgrades.
 
rokdcasbah said:
and having to wait for drivers is not microsoft's fault, unless you're waiting for 64 bit and they refused to sign them or something. on 32-bit afaik the vendor can release whatever they want.
Is this true? I was under the understanding that as a result of your point #3, unsigned drivers were not allowed in Vista. This was one of the big complaints.
 
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shmuck said:
rokdcasbah said:
and having to wait for drivers is not microsoft's fault, unless you're waiting for 64 bit and they refused to sign them or something. on 32-bit afaik the vendor can release whatever they want.
Is this true? I was under the understanding that as a result of your point #3, unsigned drivers were not allowed in Vista. This was one of the big complaints.


actually...i had read that somewhere, but now that i'm trying to look it up, i'm not finding it anywhere. you could be right about that. in any case, it is possible to disable driver signature checks at startup, i don't know about doing it automatically though.

this page's "#2" seems to confirm what i had thought about x64 driver signing, but it still doesn't say it explicitly.
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1426/vista_...sion_x64_vs_x86

i'm pretty off-topic here, aren't i? :D
 
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Blah said:
QUOTE(sephiroth111 (paraphrased for clarity) @ Apr 29 2008, 06:33 PM)

Linux is part 16bit and runs on DOS.
What the hell are you smokin', boy?


the hell are you smoking. linux and dos are two separate OSes. the way you took that, and the way it was intended was FAR different.

as for running on 16 bit? yeah, it does. it also runs on just about anything with a CPU. from 8bit to 64 bit. hell, so long as it can process data, it can probably run linux. that's just the way it's made.


Laurent said:
sephiroth111 said:
(linux is excluded. While i think X.org should be rewritten from the ground up using completely 32/64bit code and take advantage of new graphical/ CPU developments because the X libs are a mess, that's beside the point.)

Where exactly is there non 32/64 bit clean code in X?
I used X on a 64 bit Alpha workstation 15 years ago and it worked fine.

X is perfectly adequate for 2d window management. Perhaps not for embedded devices :)
I meant more things like DRI that were kinda tacked on lately. last i checked, using the X api was something akin to swimming in swamp. It's possible, but its hard and just why?

and yes, X is great for what it does, but it's also built on code that is (in some places) 20ish years old. while that itself isn't a big issue on its own but I'm not so sure that all the code is absolutely optimized... Then again, most of us are running linux on 'higher end' hardware (ix86, PPC, etc) than a 15 year old alpha station, so it's probably a nonissue of bloated code.
though there are optimized builds of X, like NanoX which are designed to run on very specific hardware. It also cuts X down to about 2mb compiled.
 
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What I mean is nothing of linux requires a IA-16 compatible processor.

But yeah, X probably could use a new implementation from scratch...but who has the time for that?
 
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