If he had done a little research beforehand he would have known how bad the RT was and there would be zero basis for his over-inflated expectations for the Pro 2.
Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
211–220 of 329 posts
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Windows and Linux are general purpose OSes. The same kernel runs on high throughput servers and low power tablets. The apps are written with little focus on battery life. What are you saying? That Microsoft can't build a consumer OS with great power-management because the kernel also needs to work on high throughput servers? Come on. >But both Windows and Linux are more than capable to get this all sorted. Bingo. So…
> What are you saying? That Microsoft can't build a consumer OS with great power-management because the kernel also needs to work on high throughput servers? It's more the drivers than the kernel. Apple has a lot more control over OS X drivers.
Right, but the original post said the same about Linux.
With very few exceptions, Linux drivers live in the kernel tree, so the Linux community has absolute control over them. The claim doesn't really seem to make sense. It's not like power management is unimportant in a server rack.
In fact, there's a really nice talk somewhere by (I think) the LWN guy, about how running the same kernel on mobile and on big iron gives huge benefits to development -- it turns out that the needs are really not so different after all, and power management work intended for the mobile space helps big iron (and vice versa, cf. PowerTop from Intel).
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's the thing. They did create the hardware, and it isn't even the first generation, and it still performs poorly. The problem isn't the hardware. It's the software. So either Microsoft makes a new OS from scratch that only works on their hardware, or this problem won't be fixed anytime soon, either way.
Isn't Windows RT as close as it gets to a OS from scratch nowadays? (honest question)
Not really. As far as I know, Windows RT is essentially a port of the NT kernel, most Windows APIs and the new Metro/RT APIs to ARM.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's the thing. They did create the hardware, and it isn't even the first generation, and it still performs poorly. The problem isn't the hardware. It's the software. So either Microsoft makes a new OS from scratch that only works on their hardware, or this problem won't be fixed anytime soon, either way.
Isn't Windows RT as close as it gets to a OS from scratch nowadays? (honest question)
Nope. Windows RT is ARM compiled Windows 8 with a little flag that prevents the installation of 3rd party desktop apps. It's not even a little bit different.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one except a fair amount of people: http://www.macminicolo.net/ You can turn old laptops into "servers", or raspberry pi's, or hell even a commodore 64 for that matter. As long as it serves something of value over a network it qualifies. Whether its a good idea is another matter.
I think the fact you felt the need to put the word servers in quotes does a lot to show that you and justincormack are talking about computers serving a similar role, but with such laughably different requirements that it's obvious what point he was trying to make, and your statement, while technically correct, doesn't really change his point. You are correct though, people do use commodity and low-end hardware for e…
Apple took a shot at traditional datacenter rack servers with their Xserve product line. I don't think it failed because OS X couldn't scale.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What are you saying? That Microsoft can't build a consumer OS with great power-management because the kernel also needs to work on high throughput servers? It's more the drivers than the kernel. Apple has a lot more control over OS X drivers.
Right, but the original post said the same about Linux. With very few exceptions, Linux drivers live in the kernel tree , so the Linux community has absolute control over them. The claim doesn't really seem to make sense. It's not like power management is unimportant in a server rack. In fact, there's a really nice talk somewhere by (I think) the LWN guy, about how running the same kernel on mobile and on big iron gi…
Nothing is free - everything is a trade off. Hardware isn't magical. There is cost to how fast you can switch between various C states on Intel CPUs for example. There is hardware that explodes if you play too hard for another example. Servers need maximum performance and low latency - guess what aggressive power management will do to that?
You talk about drivers but what about firmware? Have you looked at how kludgy and unreliable ACPI implementations across hardware are? What about the in kernel drivers being mostly reverse engineered - how many hardware vendors care to provide power management docs for their hardware?
Everything is possible of course - it's just that it is way harder to do when you support everything from toasters to big iron in case of Linux and Phones to gazillion varying PC hardware combinations in case of Microsoft.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Windows and Linux are general purpose OSes. The same kernel runs on high throughput servers and low power tablets. The apps are written with little focus on battery life. What are you saying? That Microsoft can't build a consumer OS with great power-management because the kernel also needs to work on high throughput servers? Come on. >But both Windows and Linux are more than capable to get this all sorted. Bingo. So…
Suppose Microsoft rewrites Windows to optimize for the Surface platform. How long would it take for Microsoft to stand accused of unfair business practices in the press? How much risk would they run of being hauled into court in the EU or US? They just paid a billion dollars for failing to provide browser options in the EU last year.
Who says that Windows need to optimize only for Microsoft hardware?
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#218Does anyone here have numbers of battery life on the same machine with linux?
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Microsoft markets Windows as a mobile platform I'll compare it to the existing competition. Sure, it might not be fair, but ultimately I'm looking for results, not fairness.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-8/meet Search in a page with plenty of marketing blurb for "mobile". Zero results. So since they aren't marketing it as how you perceive perhaps you should cut them some slack.
They market Windows 8 tablets side-by-side with the iPad.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#220When you aren't creating the hardware, it is harder to care about power management in the software because that is seen as "someone else's problem". It is easy to blame things on terrible drivers or whatever, but no matter how you look at it, the product is worse as a result. This is why Microsoft needs to keep building their own hardware like the Surface. As time goes on, if Microsoft does it right, Surface is going…
But that's the thing. They did create the hardware, and it isn't even the first generation, and it still performs poorly. The problem isn't the hardware. It's the software. So either Microsoft makes a new OS from scratch that only works on their hardware, or this problem won't be fixed anytime soon, either way.
imagine owning a race car team. For years you buy cars from Ferrari. Finally, you're forced to make your own. While in 5 years you will certainly have a better understanding of the car, V1 of your new product will certainly be a bit inferior.