Anyone have experience with Acer netbooks ?

[waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 03:33:37PM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote

> x86-64 is a better instruction set, and runs faster except in a
> few odd cases.  This is very different from pretty much every other
> architecture that has ever gone from 32 to 64bit.  Most slow down.

  This, and a lot of your other points are valid for heavy-duty tasks.
But I'm talking about buying a *NETBOOK* fer-cryin-out-loud.  Many of
your arguments are equivalant to urging potential buyers of subcompacts
to buy a Hummer instead.  If I was doing stuff that needed that much
ram and cpu power, I wouldn't be looking at a netbook in the first
place.

> x86-64 mandates the use of SSE for floating point, while x86 uses x87.
> This makes floating point much much faster, and avoids the awfullness
> that is the x87 stack based FPU.  This means all 64bit software can
> safely use SSE because it is a part of the instruction set.  x86 code
> can not assume that if it wants to just work.

  Long live Gentoo.  From my /etc/make.conf (yes, I'm running 32 bits)
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=prescott -mmmx -msse -msse2 -msse3 -mfpmath=sse -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"

> Most desktop machines these days come with 2+GB of ram, often 4 or
> 6GB, which means a 32bit OS simply doesn't work anymore.  So the move
> has to happen, and once the common desktop moves, a lot of software
> is going to go 64bit.  Why would you want your brand new machine to
> be obsolete out of the box?  You may not have more than 2GB ram now,
> but 6 month from now they might have 4GB, and you still would like to
> be able to run software on your machine a couple of years from now.

  Since the Open Source world does have open source, this allows distros
like Gentoo to compile apps from tarballs to a variety of architectures.
There are currently handbooks for installing Gentoo on x86, sparc, amd64,
ppc, ppc64, alpha, hppa, mips, ia64, and arm.  Given that sparc, ppc,
alpha, hppa, and mips are still being supported now, I'm sure that x86
support will continue for a long while.  If I was buying a machine for
running Windows, your argument might be more valid.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists