Fires and Laptops and Batteries, Oh My!
,----[ Quote ]
| All this drama strikes me as rather funny. Personally, I can use all
| the multimedia features of the internet without any trouble using a
| relatively old laptop, one which isn't likely to burn down my house.
| The difference is, I?m using Linux.
|
| It appears that Mr. Waters has difficulty getting to the root of the
| problem; the real issue is the operating system. What if I were to tell
| you that it is possible to have a fully functional, modern desktop PC
| running off the same processor that is used in handhelds and other small
| portable (i.e., low power) devices? It's true; a company in Britain called
| Iyonix PC (www.iyonix.com) offers PCs using the Intel Xscale processor.
| It's intended for use with RISC OS, but also can be used with a variant
| of Debian Linux, a solid choice of modern operating system. With Debian
| and either KDE or GNOME, all the features that a modern user could want
| for office tasks, web browsing and potentially even streaming video are
| available, with a fraction of the normal power requirements. This fact
| simply is not well known.
|
| The dirty little secret of the PC industry is that most users don't need
| as much of the processing power and energy usage as they are presently
| consuming; the Windows / Intel cycle of creating an ever larger operating
| system which requires ever more processing power to use it is creating
| this situation. Users just are not aware of alternatives, and alternatives
| are not presented to them; there's big business in keeping them in the
| hamster wheel of hardware and software replacement. There's not enough of
| a sales story for people like Microsoft in saying their latest product
| will be more efficient in its use of resources, as opposed to having
| more novelty.
`----
http://www.linuxextremist.com/?p=97
His argument is precisely the reason why I posted all these stories about
burning laptops: greed, excess, and waste.
|
|
