The Linux Extremist

Some of the people reading this article may be using a brand new laptop. I have some news for those individuals: your ceaseless hunger for ever more powerful machines is responsible for everything from the recent Dell and Apple battery fires to the next dot com bust. In other words, you’re naughty, evil and bad.

It’s not me who said this, rather it was stated in an article entitled “Crunch Time For Power Hungry Silicon”, written by Richard Waters, which appeared in Monday’s Financial Times Europe. According to him, our need for ever more powerful lightweight machines is creating a problem as battery technology is not keeping up with the demands of new processors. In his opinion, it’s doing things like “streaming racy videos from YouTube” or “cruising your friends photographs” which is causing a “fever in your laptop’s silicon brain”. The law of diminishing returns is coming into effect in our attempts to extend present battery technology. The mobile internet is about to be frozen in stasis. We’re all going to die or be poor, whichever is worse. Film at 11.

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.

To be fair, those who do present an alternative are not helping matters either. It’s disappointing, but Iyonix are not offering a laptop. Acorn PC, a defunct British manufacturer of RISC OS PCs, just had its trademark bought by another company; this firm has decided to offer standard Windows laptops rather than doing something really interesting and offering the low power, high performance PCs that consumer can and should get.

In fact, the only low power device that is presently a working model of this concept is the $100 laptop that is being produced for children in the third world. This laptop proves that one can have a machine running Linux with wireless internet capabilites, with a processor that only requires a human turning a crank to make it work.

For the moment, however, we are going to live with the threat of exploding laptops; Dell and Apple are likely to be the butt of jokes for some time. I am sure any employee presented with a new laptop from either of these manufacturers is going to have a slight worry that their boss may be trying to kill them. The battery manufacturer, Sony, just slashed its profit projections thanks to these recent incidents. Perhaps there will be a slowdown in the development of mobile technology. This actually might be a cathartic experience for consumers and businesses, and refocus their minds on what is really important: efficiency, quality and durability, and frankly what would be really magnificent, an Xscale laptop running Debian, accessing the wireless at high speed while remaining cool and collected. For the moment, though, that’s just a dream.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS