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To avoid "no true Scotsman" fallacies, please define "modern" first

A fair criticism.

Windows 10 recommends a minimum of 2GB of RAM (64 bit). I couldn't (quickly) find an authoritative source for a 'recommended' requirement, but this article from PCAuthority from 2014 compares performance for 2GB, 4GB and 8GB and mentions "typically, today’s budget PCs come with 4GB of RAM".

Apple sells Macbooks and Macbook Pros with a minimum config of 8GB of RAM and has done so for some years. The Mac Mini and Macbook Air have 4GB as a minimum conifg.

Steam users are not necessarily typical - gamers may well have higher specced machines - but the hardware survey is at least another data point. Currently over 80% of users have 4GB of RAM or higher.

I would argue that 4GB of RAM is a reasonable definition of a modern system.

I am concentrating on RAM as that is the only statistic that APK has mentioned. He links to the Super User thread you do as well as another source that shows uBlock using 60MB of RAM and Adblock Plus as using 100MB. This is between 1-3% of RAM on a system with 4GB

I'm happy to continue in this vein to try and work out what could reasonably be called a 'modern' machine in terms of CPU and IO, but as there's even less evidence for host file improvement for these specifications, it seems moot.

I've read the Super User thread you link to - APK links to it, frequently. Someone comments that disabling their adblocker seemed to increase browser speed. Someone else links to a 2011 article from Mozilla that shows a 250 millisecond difference in startup time. There's some discussion about Firefox memory use ... etc. It's subjective (and that's both 'it seemed to speed things up and 'there's no difference) and not well attested.

I agree that turning off an adblocking extension is going to use less resources than when it is on. I've yet to see anything that suggests that this is more than a negligible improvement, even if it is perceptible.

The claim that listing favourite sites in the hosts file speeds performance is similar.

I know of three popular sites that use ClarityRay-like scripts: WIRED, the INQUIRER, and The Atlantic

I'm using uBlock Origin, SafeScript and PrivacyBadger in Chrome on Windows 7, located in Australia. None of these sites (I assume the Inquirer is http://http//www.theinquirer.n...) balked at my adblocker. Even disabling SafeScript didn't cause a problem (although now the cookies nag showed up). I could browse the articles and no ads were displayed, nor did I get a nag screen asking me to turn my adblocker off.

As far as I can tell extension detection is a cat and mouse game that eventually gets abandoned.

YT

Except I'm not American. I am British by descent, and have lived and worked on three continents. But your point is irrelevant anyway: The term is commonly used outside the USA as well. For example:

UK:
http://arstechnica.co.uk/gamin...
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/new...
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news...
http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2015/...

CA:
http://circanews.com/news/cord...
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/n...
http://www.chathamdailynews.ca...
http://www.canadiancordcutting...
http://shayne.tablotvweb.nomad...

AU:
http://www.computerworld.com.a...
http://www.theaustralian.com.a...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
http://www.cnet.com/au/news/co...
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/...

Just because you're ignorant of its usage, that doesn't mean the term isn't broadly used around the world in countries with large English-speaking populations.

There is a book about it :
McCann, D. and Thorne, P. 2000. The Last of the First: CSIRAC: Australia's First Computer. Department of Computer Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne.

Too bad there is no ISBN so I have no idea where to get a copy outside of the Melbourne Museum where the machine is currently pretending to work.

In the second picture you can see a wood case with boxes. That is its /lib and the smaller box is its /usr/local/lib. There are paper tapes inside cardboard boxes with libraries of functions such as multiply integer and real square root.

Its "assembly language" sort of looked like "(D0)->H1" for save 10 input bits into H. That was later changed to "0 D HL". "103 -> S" was changed to "3 7 K S" which is jump to address 103 or Jump 3x32+7. Of course there was no assembler in the early days so it was all punched using tables.

The mercury delay lines are interesting. You can put about half a kbit in one tube but you have to keep refreshing it as the sound of a bit goes from one end to the other and then gets regenerated.

from wikipedia 2012.02.12 'Planned Obsolescence'

In Democracy in America (1840), Alexis de Tocqueville noted the rise of planned obsolescence in the United States: "I accost an American sailor, and I inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress, that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a certain number of years."

Now I deal in used VGA and SVGA displays (exported about 30,000 to Egypt between 2002 and 2008) and I know there is a much longer reuse value for things than Best Buy or WalMart may have us believe. But there is a finite time between when the Model T is upgraded as a primary vehicle, and when it is upgraded for a Sunday antique show. The latter market tends not to want new upgraded parts (the 'original condition' has more collector value). So this invention will either A) be used by a very small market which wants to keep upgrading their gear for typical current use (e.g. Hollywood period film which doesn't care for historical accuracy but needs high display), , or B) used by Original Manufacturers to design upgradeability for changes in market demand. I think (A) is much more likely than (B), see "Planned Obsolescence". All that said, applause and hurrahs to Matthew H. at Atari, we are better off rewarding those who strive against planned obsolescence, despite de Tocqueville's sailor's advice.

Meanwhile, back in real time, Intel has stopped producing VGA outputs, and the display device market will stop making VGA devices, keeping chop shops like mine in business in the interim. http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/241144,intel-announces-the-end-of-vga.aspx

Yep. Makerbot also sell their Replicator for around $200. I think this is a 2 colour version (dual print heads) and $48 for the spools.
http://www.makerbot.com/
Interesting stuff to make too!
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:13101
More pics:
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/Gallery/288483,in-pictures-why-the-makerbot-replicator-is-one-of-the-best-toys-ever.aspx/1
from CES

What. A. Hipster. Doofus.

Does Shuttleworth honestly think he's drawing the line between "cool" and "hip" here? Is cognitive dissonance somehow perceived an sovereign right of industry leaders?

Let's turn back the clock a bit... see who else has made claims that cut across the "cool" grain:
NOTE: Emphases are my own.

(s/good/slick)

If I were Mark Shuttleworth, I would STFU and learn from the foot-and-crow gourmets that came before me. There's no reason to get personally invested in your own innovations. Steve Jobs once insisted that the Macintosh would never have a cooling fan, didn't he get fired once? (What? Too soon?)

This Unity farce kinda reminds me of the rally MS put forth for "Microsoft Bob" after the first few bad reviews. Yeah, I said Microsoft Bob and they said it "looks really slick" too... back in the day. I admit it. I was, and am "too cool" to use Microsoft Bob. I don't use Unity either.

I'm sure Unity has it's place, it's place just doesn't happen to be on the desktop.

You mean like this? http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/261762,typing-to-power-laptops.aspx

Is it any good for, say, touch screens?

Ha. Sorry that's just plain ridiculous. A high PC would have out visually outpreformed a PS3 when it was released. The difference is today on a nice rig vs a PS3 is like a a PS1 vs Atari 2600.

Consoles are the lowest common denominator, and they reduce the progress of video games because devs develop games that can run well on old slow tech even when options many times their superior are available.

http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/170605,nvidias-fermi-so-much-potential-so-little-software-support.aspx

I find some Macbook Pros to be uncomfortable to use on my lap because they get so hot.

Not only that, but the edge where you rest your wrists is very sharp on those Macbook Pros. It makes typing almost unbearable. Call me crazy, but I don't like sharp objects near my wrists.

these aren't in any way comparable to a machined lump of aluminium with the ventilation holes hidden in the screen hinge.

Because of this very design decision (as few vents as possible and hide the ones we're forced to have), I find some Macbook Pros to be uncomfortable to use on my lap because they get so hot.

Also, while you deride plastic casing, I find Macbook Pros to be exceedingly fragile; one wrong bump and the pristine aluminum casing in marred. Dell Latitudes and HP Elitebooks (Dell's and HP's business-class laptops) are very well made and can take a lot of abuse.

Would you use a cell phone OS made by an advertising company? I only have a lowly call-and-text phone, but if I were buying a smartphone I'd avoid Android like the plague.

So which smartphone would you buy that doesn't come from an advertising company?

Apple? No, they're an advertising company.
Rim? No, they're an advertising company.
Nokia? No, they're an advertising company.

Looks like no smartphone for you.

Ah this again.

Apple had over a billion in the bank when Microsoft paid them off.

Wow, how did Steve Jobs miss that after all these years?

You lot are a bunch of sheep, blindly regurgitating media hype!

For a start, why are you all saying that the National Broadband Network (NBN) will cost 43 billion Australian dollars?!

The NBN has set aside 43bn for costs. This was decided over a year ago. This amount included provisions for laying new infrastructure needed.

With the recent agreement to buy existing infrastructure from Telstra it is expected to cost less.

So really who knows what the actual cost will be, do you?

FTA: "The between-mission scenes onboard Jim Raynor's ship aren't framerate capped. These are fairly static scenes, and don't take much work for the graphics card to display them. Because of this, the card renders the scene as quickly as possible, which then taxes your graphics card as it works to its full potential. It may sound illogical, but redrawing the same image over and over again can put just as much stress on a graphics processor as running a game like Crysis with everything cranked up."

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense, still sounds illogical to me.

My understanding of video cards is they see changes on the screen and renders the changes. This is why first person shooters, where the entire screen has to be rendered every frame because when you move the entire scene changes, requires a much better video card then a real time strategy like Starcraft, where the entire map would be static except for the few people that are moving around.

Now they're saying a static screen, essentially a menu screen, is causing video cards to go nuts and heat up because they're trying to render the few things that are moving around? I understand that there's no framerate cap, so it's just going nuts trying to redraw a blinking light, but that's still just a small 20x20 pixel blinking light compared to the 1980x1200 screen that Crysis requires redrawing with every step, 50 times a second.

Maybe these are very old cards that are having issues because modern cards will lower the GPU clock speed if they see nothing going on so there's even less of a chance of overheating.

Calling the currently higher-speed standard "High speed" is going to turn out to have been a mistake when a higher-speed standard appears in the future.

And, as the link referred to in TFA points out, "high speed" and "standard speed" don't even come close to suggesting the true applicability space of the cables. Consumers would be far better off if the labelling was required to carry the standard name (HDMI 1.3 or HDMI 1.4 with whatever add-on) and a URI pointing to the standards documentation.

Why do standards bodies continue to make such simple mistakes of relativism? It's not like ISO, ANSI, EIA, etc. haven't been around for decades learning from these mistakes.

In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the meta-standards published by ISO include a statement somewhere not to fall into such traps.

But of course, people who make standards sometimes do so because they don't like reading them...

The best (read: worst) one is this one with the DVD drive upside down.

Didn't even make it in Top 10 Technology Mistakes:

http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/173067,top-10-technology-mistakes.aspx

32 Reasons why PCs are Better than Macs

http://corporate.discovery.com/discovery-news/discovery-communications-sony-and-imax-announce-pl/

Yep - a 24/7 fully dedicated 3D network in the US.

I think 3D is an epic fail right out of the gate. Autostereoscopy has been on the market already, so the whole add glasses thing is idiotic.

Samsung showed it at this year's CES, but it didn't get the big exposure... but still, it's out there:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1379458976&play=1

Autostereoscopic info here (one example) - meaning, 3D without glasses:

http://www.xyz3d.tv/

In addition - 3D headsets with 1.44 megapixel/eye glasses have been out for some time. All it would take would be a few minor upgrades, and for about a grand, you'd have the equivalent of a 3D 70" set at 13'. See, for example:

http://www.i-glassesstore.com/ig-hrvpro.html

Oh - and wait for it - the Blu-ray kiddies have decided that the correct term is now 3-D, not 3D, unless it is.

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=3924

A note on spelling

Earlier this year, the blu-ray.com team unanimously decided to use the spelling "3-D", with a hyphen, for everything related to stereoscopic images, and "3D", without a hyphen, for three-dimensional graphics and animation. We shall continue to do so, except when citing the name of the "Blu-ray 3D" specification, which doesn't use the hyphen.

OBTW - Did we all notice that the proposed tech is going to eat an additional 50% of bandwidth? For those suffering from compression/decompression artifacting - read: for everyone with digital cable or satellite HD - it's going to get worse as the 3D premiums are added. Woot!

I loved David Pogue's view (amusing as always) on 3D TV in his Truth Serum video.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1386497920&play=1

Let's not forget - the Avatar craze was with circularly polarized PASSIVE GLASSES - not Bluetooth'd active shutters!

http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/164200,3d-tv-buzz-at-ces-2010-just-another-gimmick-or-should-you-hang-onto-those-avatar-glasses.aspx

I think this is a simple case of **I AM** ready for 3D-D ... ready to wait until it dies or makes sense!

BTW - Let's not forget Johnny Lee's head-tracking system (if you watch nothing else - watch this!!) - at least that was cool:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

only for certain values of "can't".

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/18/2227231
which links to:
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/137639,macbook-unremoveable-battery-is-a-doddle-to-replace.aspx
which links to:
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-17-Inch-Unibody/618/1#s3248

Also, check out the keyboard on this beast! Not QUERTY. Not DVORAK. Who thought that would be a good idea?

Having worked for Alcatel in the .COM boom time, I can tell you it's completely within character for them to build something cockamamie and then force it to be popular by dint of their market position. They're the French telecomm version of Microsoft, after all!

Except for here and here.

Going through these photo's make the equipment at my old job look hi-tech! They have a 10MB hard drive that must have weighed at least 20kg - although I only saw it used once to update some y2k code in 1999.

Except for here and here.

Going through these photo's make the equipment at my old job look hi-tech! They have a 10MB hard drive that must have weighed at least 20kg - although I only saw it used once to update some y2k code in 1999.

Here was an interesting one, an old PC with a monitor in portrait format. It asks why they didn't catch on, and I'm not sure I know the answer. It seems like it WOULD be better, especially because you could look at an entire page on the thing. Now with 21 inch monitors I can do that anyway, but what was it that caused our landscape monitors to become standardized like they are?

Since the 1970's, and possibly earlier, computer monitors have piggybacked off TV technology, which first standardized on the 4:3 ratio and later moved to 16:9. The 4:3 ratio was a compromise between picture-tube technology, which wanted to present a circular face, and the material presented, which tended to be wider than it was tall.

Why is that? Well, it's they way we're used to seeing our world and the things in it. The human visual field is wider than it is tall, because the things we're looking at tend to be spread out more horizontally than vertically. Your food and your enemies are likely to be at approximately the same level as you are (standing or growing on the ground), so it's better to be able to take in more information from the space "around" you than from the space "above" (which is likely to be empty) or "below" (which is likely to be close, and therefore smaller and less occupied).

Printed matter in Western languages, though, especially code, tends to occupy a relatively narrow width and extend further in the vertical direction. That's why writers and coders want taller monitors, and that's why the relentless drive to "wider", that is, more squat aspect ratios is bad news for the computer field.

Functional? The joke's on them. It seems that a vital gear was surreptitiously removed and placed "on display" by the Computer Museum's jealous curators.

I find this one very interesting also. However the caption lacks any information or keyword that might allow one to search for more information on what that device is.

Or maybe my Google-fu just failed me? Any of the experts here know what that thing is?

No kidding, did you check out this insane piece? It's like a rats nest but needs to be immersed in coolant to run. Smaller than a desktop computer, too.

Here was an interesting one, an old PC with a monitor in portrait format. It asks why they didn't catch on, and I'm not sure I know the answer. It seems like it WOULD be better, especially because you could look at an entire page on the thing. Now with 21 inch monitors I can do that anyway, but what was it that caused our landscape monitors to become standardized like they are?

Also, check out the keyboard on this beast! Not QUERTY. Not DVORAK. Who thought that would be a good idea?

Here was an interesting one, an old PC with a monitor in portrait format. It asks why they didn't catch on, and I'm not sure I know the answer. It seems like it WOULD be better, especially because you could look at an entire page on the thing. Now with 21 inch monitors I can do that anyway, but what was it that caused our landscape monitors to become standardized like they are?

Also, check out the keyboard on this beast! Not QUERTY. Not DVORAK. Who thought that would be a good idea?

Third photo has an ominous misspelling. They can't even spell computers correctly in the caption.

Magnetic core memory came in a range of sizes. It replaced vacuum tubes entirely by about 1960, and was extremely cheap to produce - from $1 per bit initially, to 1c per bit by the mid-60s.

Crazy, but in those days, no one ever used more than 640 bits of memory. True story.

Direct link to photograph, in case you want to see a range of core memories, which, incidentally were great because they didn't lose their values in a power outage:

http://www.pcauthority.com.au/Gallery/153867,computer-history-museum-photo-gallery-weird-fascinating-photos-including-a-giant-cray-and-a-60kg-hard-drive.aspx/40

This seems like pure flamebait, or perhaps just extremely ignorant journalism.

Mostly ignorant journalism. These guys do no research. I read TFA, and followed a link to an earlier article which was even more cringe-worthy (so much so that I had to finally register for an account at PCAuthority just to leave a comment). These guys pretty much pass off personal conjecture as fact, and do next to no research on anything, leading to some amusing prose that unfortunately is unintentionally amusing in some spots.

The bit about biometrics is pretty retarded, considering that biometrics are quietly infiltrating more and more aspects of our lives (including passive biometric scanning that most people aren't even aware of -- smile for the hidden cameras in the airport!). Yes, there are flaws in any biometric system, and even DNA profiling fails with human chimeras, who are more common than previously thought.

I find the inclusion of Bluetooth baffling beyond belief.

Top ten incomplete top ten lists:

10) That virus one

9) This one

When was Stallman against Dell installing Linux ?

As I said, he wasn't "against" it. He just complained about it rather than seeing the good side of things. From this interview:

Do you believe notebooks like the Asus EeePC are championing the cause of the FSF?

Not entirely. The EeePC comes with a variant of the GNU/Linux operating system, but it's a very bad one: it contains lots of non-free software. In fact, the machine demands that the user agree to an EULA before it will even start up. I received an EeePC as a gift, but I could not run it because my conscience will not let me agree to the EULA. Finally, I asked someone to install a free GNU/Linux distro so the machine could be used.

When was Stallman against Debian becoming a meta-distribution with others creating a desktop version (what Canonical does)?

He wasn't against Debian. They're fully RMS-compliant! He's always been against Ubuntu though, because it contains non-free software. (So much that the FSF created a spin-off of Ubuntu called gNewSense, just to remove the offending packages).

There is an answer to this.

Broadband without the pork is a big issue in Australia, due to rising telephone line rental charges by telephone companies - people are paying extra for something most Internet users essentially don't want.

ISPs have now begun offering something called "Naked DSL". As the name implies, it's DSL, but naked - meaning the telephone service has been stripped, leaving only the Internet service. The beauty of Naked DSL is it's cheaper - take a look at the cost analysis here.

From what I can see you'll save at least $10, because you don't pay monthly telephone fees, and you still get your broadband Internet.

Interesting comparison of the new Android phone here, compared with T-Mobile G1 and Blackberry Bold: http://www.pcauthority.com.au/Review/130280,kogan-agora--a-simpler-practical-google-phone.aspx In a nutshell, it's a Blackberry, but with Android.

Major suckage.

wait, iiNet wasn't the one actually experimenting the new Australian filtering technology? This lawsuit is a HUGE win against such filtering protection... or not? Am I missing something?

Yes, it is an indicator that iiNet is opposed to internet content filtering. However, it's also an indicator to all ISP's around the world that if they do not employ filtering they risk an extremely expensive legal battle with the seven top film studios, each of which probably has more assets and prior experience in court than the ISP's.

What's strange and rather scary about this situation is that "iiNet will be participating in the trials, mostly to prove that the filters are impractical, unworkable and unwanted." [see link above] The studios are suing them not for refusing to cooperate, but for cooperating reluctantly. That's all it takes for the MAFIAA to pull the trigger it seems.

I saw this here earlier today.

Interesting gadgets, but the PC Authority page says they will be $399 for the one reviewed in TFA and $599 for the one that will play Blu-Ray backups. I don't think I'll be interested in that market anytime soon.

It has seen the end of Jack Thompson,
It has seen the end of a RIAA lawsuit,
The end of copyright cops,
The end of Comcast's forging of RST packets,
It will soon see the end of the Empire itself!

Is that we haven't come close to theoretical storage densities yet. Seagate expects to achieve 50TB/inch^2 by the next decade. Currently we are at around 200GB/inch^2. So that's around 250* what we have now. A 250TB drive would contain 41k 6GB DVDs, or 5k 50GB Blu-ray discs.

For comparison purposes, the number of movies/year on IMDB is about 20-25k in recent years. If each movie is 2 hours long, that means that if you spent 12 hours per day every day watching movies, you would only get through 2190 movies per year.

Another comparison: If you wanted to record every waking hour of your life and you lived until age 75, that's 438000 hours. If you had one 250TB drive, you'd fit it all if encoded to something like XVid.

The continuing unimpeded exponential growth of storage media just blows my mind.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7044606.stm
http://business.pcauthority.com.au/feature/3203,futuretech-bigger-better-and-faster-hard-drives.aspx/1

I think that it is still going to cause problems. My local computer mag site already has it as a download and will prolly be on their next cover disk: http://www.pcauthority.com.au/Download/109499,microsoft-windows-xp-service-pack-3.aspx

But as someone else pointed out, not many who run Dynamics will ever bother to do a manual update.

And what happens when they come out with an incompatible new version of Silverlight and don't release the documentation and don't help with the development of the FOSS version? From what I've seen, developers are still leery of Microsoft's recent "Interoperability Initiative".

If [Asus's Eee PC] starts to do well [...]

What do you mean, "if"?

was about as small as a laptop could be while still being useful. http://www.pcauthority.com.au/review.aspx?CIaRID=139/

Keeping the keyboard to 95% of a full-sized laptop's was a god-send. Too bad the fastest processor they ever shipped with was a 500MHz Pentium III.

Also Telstra ranked last in last years service and reliability awards.

This year they ranked 3rd last, not because they improved, Telstra moved up the rank because 2 other ISPs managed the difficult task of providing a worse service.

http://www.pcauthority.com.au/feature.aspx?CIaFID=4078

IIRC, XP Home doesn't support dual processor, so if dual-core == SMP then it shouldn't support dual-core. But according to this article, XP Home will support dual-core, so perhaps Microsoft isn't regarding them as essentially the same thing?

Thankfully Windows XP Home and Professional will support dual-core right away, although Home will likely see only two processors even with HyperThreading enabled.

Don't forget that Intel does a lot more than X86 CPUs too. They just retook the NOR flash sales title (admittedly after losing it, through another stupid business decision), and Hector Ruiz may now be mulling the sale of Spansion because of the intense competition. On one hand they are up against the wall WRT being forced to use band-aid solutions for the current P4 CPUs as a result of their bull-headed run for MHz, as well as the limited acceptance of Itanium. On the other hand, however, they are dominating the mobile sector with P-M and are expanding that platform; they also have their hands in things like WiMax and other emerging technologies; and don't forget they have enough money in the bank to probably buy AMD.

With Otellini now being fairly frank about the competitive landscape, I think it's possible that the company has reached a turning point.

You had me worried for a bit there. No, that was not what I was describing. Nor is this although it is related. It is also a couple of years old.

This appears to be what I was thinking of although it is not my original source. Sorry, can't find it now, it was probably in German anyhow.