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Reporter Pans Open Source Laptop Kit TERES-I (theverge.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the doing-it-yourself dept.

The Verge's Paul Miller has some harsh words for the $242 open source DIY laptop kit TERES-I from Olimex. Instead of buying one hyper-integrated board that has all of the laptop's brains and I/O on it, you buy several little boards and wire them together. Then you put them inside a mostly finished case built by Olimex -- although if you want to go ultra DIY you can 3D print your own case, too. Everything, from the shell's CAD design to the motherboard's wiring, is available on GitHub for perusal or modification, and the modular nature of the internals means you can add a more powerful chipset or modify just about anything you find unsatisfying about the computer if you have the know-how or if Olimex or others offer compatible parts.

But, unfortunately, almost everything about this laptop is unsatisfying right now. It runs a quad-core ARM64 chip, though x86 and MIPS chips might be offered later on. It has a tiny 11.6-inch screen, a huge bezel, a tiny trackpad, a cramped-looking keyboard, and a whole lot of plastic. The OS (Linux, naturally) runs off a microSD card. At least the LCD comes in a 1080p variant, because the default 1366 x 768 resolution is a real throwback. There's even 802.11n Wi-Fi, which has me questioning what decade it is.
But are there any better alternatives? In the comments share your own thoughts about open source laptop kits.

69 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Sneer today, gone tomorrow by petes_PoV · · Score: 4, Funny

    The guy doesn't really seem to have much idea what the purpose of this product is. I'd hate to see how he reviewed Lego

    --
    politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
    1. Re:Sneer today, gone tomorrow by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Ha, I know right?

      The only thing I'd ding it for based on that review is the amount of RAM. Everything else, including the screen size, I could live with I think, but 1GB is getting pretty tight these days if you ever fire up a web browser.

      Oh also, I can't compile gcc6 on my RPi, since it runs out of RAM, so it really is a bit small for a fully self-hosting system. Unfortunately, DDRx is a right pain to route and do boards for.

      Also whining about 802.11n? What a smug git.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    2. Re:Sneer today, gone tomorrow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'd guess most people on Slashdot know this, but most 802.11ac wireless chipsets don't have Linux support. Those that do use proprietary firmware as part of the device driver.

    3. Re:Sneer today, gone tomorrow by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      This thing is actually great if you are in the target audience. It's cheap, it's more than good enough for a wide variety of tasks like email and posting on Slashdot, it's open source and you can trust it far more than the black boxes you get in x86 laptops, and it's design might not be an ultrabook but it's hardly a brick either.

      For running a secure OS and apps on this is ideal. For hacking and adding your own modules this is ideal. If you need better wifi, throw it in there. If you need GPS, add it. If you want an FPGA co-processor, design and integrate it.

      That just gave me an idea. Could make an excellent security/penetration testing laptop. Throw in a variety of radios, including an SDR dongle, and an FPGA for high speed cracking of hashes and passwords.

      I've been looking for a MIPS laptop for years because they are open and trustworthy. Was considering a Thinkpad with Coreboot instead, but maybe this would be an even better option.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    4. Re:Sneer today, gone tomorrow by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      The only thing I'd ding it for based on that review is the amount of RAM. Everything else, including the screen size, I could live with I think, but 1GB is getting pretty tight these days if you ever fire up a web browser.

      1GB is in fact completely unacceptable. Even the PineA64+ comes with 2GB. I have a TF201 here, it's got 1GB and it's unusable much of the time. You just wait and wait and wait. 2GB is an absolute minimum today.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    5. Re:Sneer today, gone tomorrow by Megane · · Score: 1

      1-2GB of RAM also kind of misses one of the main points of having a 64-bit CPU. If you're going to make my pointers twice as large, it would be nice if that would even matter.

      --
      #naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
    6. Re:Sneer today, gone tomorrow by Lumpy · · Score: 2

      It's Olimex, they undersize everything.

      They sell stuff based on the potential, then you get one of their boards, mess with it and then realize there are all kinds of engineering problems and you walk away from it leaving the board in a box.... and then get suckered into buying one of their products again in 3 months.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    7. Re: Sneer today, gone tomorrow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Different AC here, but a quick scan of the neighborhood (Rent 1500+/mo in a good US city) shows that only 8 out of 103 access points support 802.11ac, so 802.11n is perfectly adequate.

    8. Re: Sneer today, gone tomorrow by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Well, *one* of the points. Larger immediate data types is a good point in itself that doesn't depend on physical memory size.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    9. Re:Sneer today, gone tomorrow by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      I got my first computer after my 30th birthday, about a year after the Apple II came to market. It came with 8 kilobytes of RAM and I beefed it up to 16 kB, but was unable to afford the big step to 32 kB.

      Your Apple II didn't have an operating system worth mentioning, either, let alone had to deal with stuff like bidirectional text and unicode. If you want to run modern programs, you're going to need more than 1GB of RAM.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    10. Re:Sneer today, gone tomorrow by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      That just gave me an idea. Could make an excellent security/penetration testing laptop. Throw in a variety of radios, including an SDR dongle, and an FPGA for high speed cracking of hashes and passwords.

      They are actually talking about making an internal FPGA accessory. But how much will they charge for it? You could use a USB FPGA dongle with a hundred dollar netbook if that's what you're really trying to accomplish.

      Was considering a Thinkpad with Coreboot instead, but maybe this would be an even better option.

      You're going to be a lot less frustrated by waiting around for the thing if you just get the stinkpad.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    11. Re:Sneer today, gone tomorrow by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Also whining about 802.11n? What a smug git.

      To be fair, if you don't have wired ethernet, that can be a bit of a speed bump. Also to be fair, however, it's bgn. Everyone keeps calling it n. If it really were just 2.4 GHz n, that really would blow. You'd have hard times connecting in the really real world.

      For a low-end laptop, bgn is fine. Honestly everything about this is fine except the RAM. 1GB should really be enough, I want it to be enough, but it is no longer enough.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    12. Re:Sneer today, gone tomorrow by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 1

      It's Olimex, they undersize everything.

      That explains their failing sex-toy subsidiary.

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    13. Re:Sneer today, gone tomorrow by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      The main issue with the Thinkpad is the Intel Management Engine. You can sabotage it to some degree, but it's hard to ever really trust that it has been neutered. Well, the Intel microcode update capability is not great either.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    14. Re: Sneer today, gone tomorrow by Miamicanes · · Score: 1

      The big question: can it at least do 5GHz 802.11n, or is it 2.4GHz-only? Most n-only implementations sold NOW are n-only BECAUSE they're 2.4GHz-only (by definition, 802.11ac REQUIRES 5GHz).

      In single-family suburbia it might not matter (much), but in most urban residential areas, 2.4GHz wifi has become almost unusable.

      I wish the FCC would buy back the upper half of the wi-fi channel centered on channel 14 via eminent domain, then allow wi-fi to use it ONLY as a 20MHz channel limited to ~5-20mW EIRP (or 1-4mW amp power, to reduce certification costs) to give urban users AT LEAST a single channel that's good enough for same-room use, but sufficiently power-limited for a single sheet of drywall to attenuate it by 20-50dB.

    15. Re:Sneer today, gone tomorrow by John+Allsup · · Score: 1

      The main thing you get for your money is that if you put the pieces together, it will work. You can get better experience playing around with bits for a quarter of the price trawling through ebay's 'for parts or repair' listings, but then it's a matter of luck if you get anything to work.

      --
      John_Chalisque
    16. Re:Sneer today, gone tomorrow by dbIII · · Score: 1

      1GB is in fact completely unacceptable

      On the Pi the bridge chip used (broadcom something) is stuck at that limit, perhaps it's something similar here. I'm not sure what else could do a better job at the low price end with available drivers.

    17. Re:Sneer today, gone tomorrow by mysticgoat · · Score: 1

      You are right, the Apple II did not have the equivalent of an OS. Isn't that marvelous, that those early machines worked without that overhead?

      And yet CPAs were buying Apples by the truckload, because He Whose Name I Cannot Remember wrote a simple spreadsheet application that came to be called VisiCalc later on. That transformed the biggest section of the entire accounting industry and ushered in the use of PCs in the workplace.

      Pretty effective computing for an underpowered 6502 machine with a lousy non-standard keyboard and external floppy drives that would put worms on every TV set within a quarter mile. Gotta love them unshielded parallel cables.

      Point being, that a lot of very powerful computing can be done without a lot RAM and other stuff. You might need it, but in most cases it really isn't necessary to get the task done.

      Mmm, I don't have a car analogy. But its more than likely that the computer that controls your car's engine has much less than a GB of RAM. And it almost certainly runs FORTH, too.

    18. Re:Sneer today, gone tomorrow by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      You are right, the Apple II did not have the equivalent of an OS. Isn't that marvelous, that those early machines worked without that overhead?

      It was. But it's even more marvelous (by a strict definition of the word) how much today's computers do.

      a lot of very powerful computing can be done without a lot RAM and other stuff. You might need it, but in most cases it really isn't necessary to get the task done.

      This is just like the argument about the features in word. The average user might use only 5% of them, but it's a different 5% from the next guy. By the same token, most of us don't use most of the features of our operating system, but we use different features and when we need a feature, we're glad it's there.

      The part at which I get grumpy is where the OS doesn't have a mode (whether explicit or not) where it gets the hell out of the way of your program. But most modern operating systems will let you dedicate most of your machine to one task.

      Mmm, I don't have a car analogy. But its more than likely that the computer that controls your car's engine has much less than a GB of RAM. And it almost certainly runs FORTH, too.

      It almost certainly has less than a GB of RAM, yes, but it only has to do a few things. My first electronically injected car had a 3 MHz, 16 bit Motorola MCU. But it was a fairly early SFI system and it didn't have a lot of work to do even by automotive standards. It had one O2 sensor, one EGR, and one CKP in the distributor. It didn't even have a knock sensor.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    19. Re:Sneer today, gone tomorrow by cthulhu11 · · Score: 1

      Some would say that a Chromebook meets most or all of this.

    20. Re: Sneer today, gone tomorrow by Megane · · Score: 1

      Really, I can't think of any time when I ever thought "I wish I had a 64-bit data type". Neither integer nor float, but we've had 64-bit floats for a long time anyhow. Back in the '80s, I did many times wish for a 32-bit integer data type. I just don't see much benefit to go to 64 bits other than the extra address space, or in the case of Intel, the better instruction set and CPU model.

      --
      #naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
  2. 1GB ram by citizenr · · Score: 1

    and more expensive than loaded used, but in great condition Lenovo X220 (coreboot=no drm).

    --
    Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
    1. Re:1GB ram by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      Cook your dinner while a webpage is loading.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  3. Our Attitude To Tech Resources by ytene · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm struggling a bit with the comment that "1GB is in fact completely unacceptable."

    At the risk of i) showing my age and/or ii) getting laughed off the page... I started my career in technology being paid to write software for the 1980s era BBC Micro, a computer that shipped with 32Kb of RAM, of which only 27Kb was usable in the best possible scenarios, and which disappeared rapidly if you wanted anything as high-spec as a graphical display mode...

    But behind the ridicule I expect the above comment to attract, I think there lies an important point. Most of us today experience an entire technology stack that has been developed in accordance with some of the rules personified by Eric Raymond in The Art of Unix Programming, specifically things like, "Rule of Economy: Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time". Or "Rule of Generation: Avoid hand-hacking; write programs to write programs when you can"

    As a result of this, the technology we use gradually loses sight of the purpose for which it was created. I use a word processor because it is a quick and simple way to allow me to edit a document, layering my thoughts, editing content until I am happy with it, without having to re-type it from scratch each time I want to make a change. There is/was an extremely capable word processing application called Wordwise [which shipped on a ROM chip] for the BBC Microcomputer and which took no RAM [because its code executed in ROM] and which allowed me to edit and maintain documents. Sure, Wordwise doesn't have the features of Microsoft's Word 2016, or LibreOffice Writer 5.0.3.2 [both of which I use], but it gave me word processing with a fraction of the resources demanded today.

    I think that we sometimes lose sight of the absolutely insane improvements in system performance over the last 20-30 years - and the complete lack of progress that we see at the human interface. My suspicion - going back to the works of Eric Raymond - are that our developers are writing code that is increasingly inefficient, that the environments that run that code are increasingly wasted [do I really need an animated "ribbon" in my Word Processor - i.e. something that actually slows the software down? No.].

    Today we find ourselves arguing that a computer with more than thirty-two thousand times the capacity offered by that fully-functional 1980s BBC micro is "completely unacceptable."

    Let's just pause for a moment and consider whether today's 1Gb system is north of 30,000 times faster, better, or cheaper than that 1980s system. Today's machine will surely have many improvements over such early-era systems, but will still fall far short of the orders-of-magnitude improvements that simplistic comparative analysis would suggest. Why is that? Because we have become lazy and inefficient, and so has our technology.

    In other words, "If you can't do it in 1Gb of RAM, you are doing it wrong."

    1. Re:Our Attitude To Tech Resources by c · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm struggling a bit with the comment that "1GB is in fact completely unacceptable."

      The assumption I'd make is that the reviewer is buying a small modular laptop to run what he considers lightweight laptop-style tasks... specifically, a modern (because nobody sane runs an out-of-date one) graphical web browser.

      Having actually tried it, I'll agree that running a modern graphical web browser on a systems with 1GB of memory *is* painful.

      I'll grant that this raises more questions than answers. Is it reasonable to need 2+GB of memory to run a silly browser? Is running a web browser the only sane workload for a small laptop? I'm comfortable saying "no" to both of those, but I guess that's why I'm just a lowly code grunt instead of a Verge reviewer...

      --
      Log in or piss off.
    2. Re:Our Attitude To Tech Resources by damnbunni · · Score: 1

      Today's 1GB system is many times cheaper than that BBC Micro.

      Adjust for inflation, and a BBC Micro B cost a thousand pounds in today's money. And you'd need at least a screen of some sort to connect it to, that wasn't included.

      You can get a Chromebook with two gigs of RAM for under 200 quid now. So a fifth of the price of the BBC Micro, plus it includes a screen, and networking capability, AND it can multitask.

      And note that has twice the RAM that the system being complained about has.

    3. Re:Our Attitude To Tech Resources by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I remember the BBC micro, C64 and other machines of that era. And they were shitty. Very shitty. Even back then it showed.

      Graphics had much fewer ppi, and fewer pixels in total, fewer colors etc. It looked like a five-year old found watercolors. Worse, actually.

      Nowadays a normal computer has a 240 ppi display with 3840x2160 pixels in total, (for professionals:) *more* than 17 million colors and screen refresh north of 60 fps. And that requires memory. Memory which the BBC micro didn't have. But memory we gladly spend today to make the computer not look and work like shit.

      It's not that I can't make do with 64 KiB memory. I'm and old-school hacker and I could make-do with it just fine. I just think of the users and how it's their lifetime I'm wasting when they are waiting for the same stuff to be loaded from disk for the 360th time because I couldn't be bothered to cache it in (nonexistant) RAM.

    4. Re:Our Attitude To Tech Resources by Gaby+de+Wilde · · Score: 1

      It is amazing how many of these slogans we have that people follow like gospel without ever considering how wrong it is. "Rule of Economy: Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time". This is not computer science this is Economics. A negative externality is a cost that is suffered by a third party. The correct way of putting this would be: "Rule of Acquisition 62: Profit is its own reward. The Riskier the road, the greater the profit. "

      --
      gdewilde@gmail.com
    5. Re:Our Attitude To Tech Resources by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      One thing that has stayed constant in all my 40+ years of involvement in the computer industry is complaints about "bloat".

    6. Re:Our Attitude To Tech Resources by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      It would really help if it had SATA or some other connection for a fast SSD. Even 1GB of RAM is usable for browsing if swap is on a device that can push 500MB/sec or more. I remember being amazed that RAM had gotten that fast...

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    7. Re:Our Attitude To Tech Resources by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I actually owned a computer with 64K RAM, and I'd argue that yes, my modern computer is easily 30,000 times better than my original Apple II, especially if you compare on a dollar-per-dollar cost. That doesn't mean you can write a novel 30,000 time faster. Not all productivity scales up that way. However, my modern's computers photo-editing capabilities is infinitely better, because... hey, I couldn't even do that with my original machine. Nor could I render 3D graphics, or listen to digital audio, nor could I do thousands and thousands of other things that I can easily do with my modern computer. You just happened to pick a few capabilities that the old system *could* do.

      I think that we sometimes lose sight of the absolutely insane improvements in system performance over the last 20-30 years - and the complete lack of progress that we see at the human interface.

      Okay, this is a puzzling complaint. Have you missed the whole "touch-first UI" revolution with phones and tablets? What exactly is that but a massive improvement of human interface design and technology? My parents can pick up a smartphone and intuitively figure out how to use it. They were NEVER able to do with with CLI systems (which is why I got that Apple II), and only with difficulty with Windows, but have far few problems with smartphones.

      Maybe you're talking exclusively about desktop interfaces? I'd argue we don't need significant improvements much beyond our existing paradigms. A mouse-type cursor, windows, menus, toolbars, buttons, and dialog boxes... these design elements work well for desktop systems. Attempts to "simplify" it have been nearly universally disastrous.

      In other words, "If you can't do it in 1Gb of RAM, you are doing it wrong."

      Except for editing images larger than 1GB, of course. Or composing music with extremely large sample sets (often dozens of GBs). Or rendering extremely detailed, high-fidelity 3D virtual worlds, like with modern videogames. Or many other examples I could come up with off the top of my head.

      Sorry for sounding so contrary, as I do understand your point, but I think you're also neglecting to acknowledge the vast gaps in system capabilities, and not just the technical specs. Just because both systems could edit text doesn't put them anywhere in the same league. Old techies love to complain about "bloat", but one users "bloat" is another user's feature.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    8. Re:Our Attitude To Tech Resources by nuckfuts · · Score: 1

      I run a virtual Domain Controller / DNS Server / DHCP Server for a small network using dynamic memory allocation on a Hyper-V hypervisor. It' settings are as follows: Startup RAM = 768 MB, Minimum RAM = 512 MB, Maximum RAM = 1536 MB. So it can grab a bit more or a bit less RAM that what it starts up with as needed. The current allocation is 772 MB. It could take double that if needed, but hasn't. Conclusion: You can run a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine quite comfortably on 1 GB RAM.

    9. Re:Our Attitude To Tech Resources by spire3661 · · Score: 1

      Intel giveth, microsft taketh away. The fact is if you gave me a terahertz computer with a petabyte of disk, i could utilize it today. Computers are WAY behind our ambitions.

      --
      Good-bye
    10. Re:Our Attitude To Tech Resources by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 2

      People keep saying things like "Why do we need so much RAM to run a simple web browser?"

      The problem is, even if the browser itself is simple, it's the modern web pages that are the problem.

      Let's take a concrete example, nytimes.com saved via Chrome:
      - The HTML itself requires 337KB
      - 13 fonts files (three fonts, two of them in multiple sizes and variations) for a total of ~347KB (data gathered from Safari)
      - 73 images (GIF,PNG,JPEG) for a total of 881KB
      - 43 scripts for a total of 3.4MB
      - 31 stylesheets for a total of ~455KB (number of stylesheets gathered from Safari, total size from Chrome)

      The total is 5.5MB for the homepage of The New York Times.

      Think about that for a moment. The actual content, what we are reading (but with all the formatting code and links to the fonts, scripts and images) takes 337KB. There's even hundreds of not thousands of additional lines of CSS in there... Then there's 43 scripts that compete for CPU time, which has to also decode all the images and render the HTML and CSS for the display.

      The total size for the images is for the compressed files, you have to account for the decoded size in pixels and RGB data to be able to display those images. Let's take "00WP-Gibbs-2-largeHorizontal375.jpg" for example. In file form, it takes 23395 bytes. It's a JPEG 375x250 pixels in size, so decoded that means 375*250*3 bytes, 281250 bytes.

      Second example: let's take the so-called "Hero" header images. Those are the huge, site-wide images in the headers of a lot of websites. Let's say the person who coded the website didn't bother to write adaptive code and works on a 5K display iMac or at least uses the display specifications of that system as the target. The display on that thing is a huge 5120x2880 pixels. Let's say he's using wide enough margins and "only" uses 4000 pixels wide images. Let's assume a ratio of around 3:1, so ~4000x1325 pixels. That's 5300000 bytes (5.3MB) of RAM for a single decoded image, before loading any HTML, CSS or Javascript.

      Sure, those examples work fine on 3GHz quad-core i7 with 16GB RAM systems, but when you try to cram all that data on something like a Raspberry Pi 3 it's normal to have problems. Your 1GiB RAM could only store 202 of those hero images if you didn't have an OS or any program in memory.

      TL;DR: that reporter bought something like a tiny two-place car in kit form and then complained that it couldn't pull the same trailer as his V8 truck.

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    11. Re:Our Attitude To Tech Resources by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      In other words, "If you can't do it in 1Gb of RAM, you are doing it wrong."

      This is a stupid comment as you're looking at a stat in isolation. It's even more so because you identified the problem right in the first sentence, let me quote you:

      and which disappeared rapidly if you wanted anything as high-spec as a graphical display mode...

      So there you have it. You just admitted yourself when you push one element of the old system it runs out. Just like here in the modern world. The device comes with a 1080p screen. Could it be that we want to watch 1080p movies on it? Maybe on Netflix. Now just how much RAM even in a simple case do you think a single Chromium window would use to display a 1080p feed from Netflix on a 1080p screen? God forbid a computer does something as radical as multi-task and run an email client in the background, or maybe have Skype logged in.

      by that fully-functional 1980s BBC micro is "completely unacceptable."

      When you can reply to this comment using nothing more than your 1980s BBC micro, only then can you even remotely start calling a machine like that "fully functional". Call it what it is, a relic which can't do the most basic tasks demanded of computers today.

      and the complete lack of progress that we see at the human interface.

      I remember the old days, and I suggest updating your prescription, it's a tad on the rose coloured side.

    12. Re:Our Attitude To Tech Resources by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      1GB is totally acceptable for a web browser. Just stop going to javascript heavy the-web-is-an-app sites. 1GB was acceptable by most people just five to ten years ago, and the web browsers worked just fine. Next people will be saying you need 8GB+ just to do some word processing.

    13. Re: Our Attitude To Tech Resources by Miamicanes · · Score: 1

      The thing is, a modern word processor now has capabilities that used to require a desktop publishing app (remember PageMaker?). When you get down to it, WordPerfect 6 and earlier were basically HTML editors, but with their own proprietary tokenization scheme instead of anything SGML-derived).

    14. Re: Our Attitude To Tech Resources by tigersha · · Score: 1

      I am going to agree with You here. 1gb is enough to store the names of all the people on earth, if you compress it. Why a web browser cannot display a simple page with maybe 1mb of data (images) is a mystery to me. An old ipad 1 is faster than a Cray XMP, the fastest machine in the world in 1990. but it sucks at a webpage.

      Why.???

      Layers upon layers upon layers of abstraction. It is not called the Turing tarpit for nothing.

      --
      The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
    15. Re:Our Attitude To Tech Resources by unrtst · · Score: 1

      While I mostly agree, there are plenty of tables and phones that do fine with 1gb (or even 512mb) ram. The current line of kindle tablets, including their 10" $230 one, all come with 1gb ram, and they manage to render web pages just fine. The desktop browsers aren't doing much more than phone ones. I suspect they just assume there will be more memory and optimize for that situation (or, more likely, they're forced to optimize the mobile browsers to work with less ram).

      All those figures you noted, while they do point to sloppy and bloated web sites, they're all less than 10mb elements (largest you noted was a fictional 4k pixel banner image, decoding to 5.3MB). Sure, they all add up, but not to 1024MB. That should really be plenty.

      As a side note, I was surprised the 11" screen had a 1080p option. Most laptops and tablets lack that option. That's pretty great for such a cheap device.

    16. Re:Our Attitude To Tech Resources by John+Allsup · · Score: 1

      I remember when I first got to use a 1GB hard drive! Amazing! So fast (it was SCSI) and so much space. MS Word 6 would launch on my P5 150, 64MB RAM, with Adaptec PCI SCSI card and said 1GB hard drive, in under a second. Ah, those were the days, before the dark times, before code bloat.

      --
      John_Chalisque
    17. Re: Our Attitude To Tech Resources by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      With exokernels? I think this might be somewhat close to what Alan Kay originally intended, actually.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    18. Re: Our Attitude To Tech Resources by aXis100 · · Score: 1

      They basically are already.

      Very little of modern web pages is static HTML. That's just the scaffolding. Most of it is arguably javascript (running in a sandbox) that generates client side HTML on the fly.

    19. Re:Our Attitude To Tech Resources by dbIII · · Score: 1

      The Onyx Boox M96 has 512MB of RAM and has a decent web browser.
      The answer there and everywhere else with limited memory is not to have something that keeps the contents of a hundred tabs in memory just in case. What is a really good idea with a lot of memory (the caching) is a bad idea without it.

    20. Re: Our Attitude To Tech Resources by dbIII · · Score: 1

      The thing is, a modern word processor now has capabilities that used to require a desktop publishing app

      Which IMHO has created a bastard child of both that attempts desktop publishing but can't quite get there. Page layouts that you spend ages getting right, and then the images migrate to the next page or similar fuckup just when you edit a single sentence.

    21. Re:Our Attitude To Tech Resources by Fishchip · · Score: 1

      A quick check shows /. and m.facebook up in Chrome consume north of 300MB. Considering Average User tends to visit sites loaded with ad content and Flashy McFlashfuck, that adds up really quickly. Of course being vigilant with open tabs helps, and making sure you go to mobile sites, but it can easily get out of control.

    22. Re:Our Attitude To Tech Resources by unrtst · · Score: 1

      I have over 99 tabs open in chrome on my phone, and they've been open for ages. I know it's stupid and careless, but I can still open new tabs and visit new sites and I have no problem doing so. Whatever it's doing to manage memory is working.

      On the desktop, I don't know how the codebases differ, or by how much. I know chrome on my desktop gobbles up every bit of memory I have (granted, I have an obscene number of windows+tabs open), so I'm going to assume it's not being as aggressive in caching them out to disk. On the phone, I think it only has to keep one tab in memory at a time, cause that's all you can see.

      In any case, 1gb of memory is more than enough to browse normally on popular sites. Maybe the desktop browser could use some tweaks to cache out pages more aggressively, but it's not only possible, but it's already being done on mobile.

  4. what's wrong with .11n? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I use an AP with that. FW is from this decade. No known exploits. I've been using it since 2008. Works with everything. Solid. Dependable. I've looked at new ones, and nothing compares when I look at price: $0 to stay, $300 to leave. I prefer wired ethernet over Wi-Fi so only use the Wi-Fi part for a phone and the stray tablet. Opinions and criticism welcome.

    1. Re:what's wrong with .11n? by Bert64 · · Score: 2

      Unless you have a very fast WAN link, or have servers on your LAN which you need to pull data from at high speed then 802.11ac is pointless. 802.11n (or even g) is more than fast enough to keep up with most people's uses.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
  5. Re: MIPS, please by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

    What about RISC-V? If we're going for openness...

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  6. Pompeii by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This reminds me of a story a friend of me told me a couple of years ago.

    She works for a consumer protection agency. One day, a lady (let's call her "customer") phoned her. She was furious. She had booked an organized trip to Pompeii, the renowned ancient Roman city, "preserved" under the ashes of Mount Vesuvius. "There were only destroyed houses!" she yelled at the phone "no shopping possibilities! Everything was dirty and broken!". She wanted her money back, and she wanted the agency to support her on that.

    My friend had a hard time trying to explain to the customer that, actually, that's how Pompeii is supposed to look like and that no, she saw no chance in recouping the money.

    So dear Mr. Miller, whenever you plan a trip to Pompeii, at least have a look at the relevant Wikipedia page beforehand and try to understand what it means.

  7. this has been done before.. by drewsup · · Score: 1

    with same results, a Frankenstein-ish laptop with compromises everywhere, and usually thicker and heaver than a store bought laptop. Now the HP Stream and Tosh Chromebook2 could have been the way to go, but some have hard soldered EmmC boards, or non upgradable memory.
      Could this be done, uhhm,yah... but it will take a major manufacturer to make the base kit and still have a relatively sexy laptop.
    So what we need is a great screen to start, a mother board(s) that are cheap and upgradable, extra RAM slots, and probably an M2 interface for storage, with that said, it would have to be a standard, so others can make components to fit.
    I dont see this happenening as long as the main OEM's want you to buy a new laptop every 2-3 years.

    1. Re: this has been done before.. by Miamicanes · · Score: 1

      A few years ago, MSI *had* a line of modular "whitebox" laptops. So did Clevo. They've become rare, because discrete graphics are almost the only thing *left* to vary... and engineering the cooling to be adequate for high-powered GPUs without going totally overboard for low-powered GPUs is almost impossible.

  8. Sounds Like Fun by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I would play with one -- knowing it's not meant to withstand an elephant walking on it. It could actually be very educational like a Raspberry Pi.

  9. What is his problem? by Qbertino · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's a FOSS Laptop Computer kit for ~250 USD. And for that if looks pretty neat. ... So the bezel is a bit larger? Big fat hairy deal. I guess that is why the screen is so cheap - because it's a 10 year old model optimised for production.

    I considered buying a new MB Pro - you know, the one with the touchbar. I thought long and hard and then settled for a current OS-less 11" netbook (300 Euros vis-vis 2300 Euros helped me make that decision aswell), with a quad-core pentium and 4 GB of RAM. I installed Lubuntu on it. Using it right now, typing this.

    Yes, this machine, as this FOSS kit, isn't top of the line. But it is small and fast enough to be usable. And since it's slow enough to force me to use the CLI whenever I'm in doubt a task I need to do will perform well on the GUI, it is actually quite fast.

    Long story short, I think this guy didn't quite get what the product he was reviewing is all about.

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
    1. Re:What is his problem? by RandyHill · · Score: 1

      It comes down to what you want and how you use it.

      If you are going to get great satisfaction about building your own and knowing how every part works, then build your own.

      If you are going to use it for some work related uses, but the work isn't very valuable and so the time spent on the device isn't really that lucrative, buy the cheapest laptop you can get.

      If you use a laptop professionally at any reasonable rate, spend 10-20 cents per hour more to get the best laptop possible, which is typically a Macbook Pro (runs Unix, Windows and MacOs, great screen, retina instead of tiny fonts, great build quality, and great resale value) because it only takes a tiny increase in productivity/output to pay for it.

  10. Re:MIPS, please by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

    Take a closer look at the aarch64 (ARMv8) instruction set, it's very similar to MIPS and not really very ARM-like.

    (RISC-V is like MIPS with a lot of the ugly painful things fixed)

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  11. Imagine if this guy got his hands on a netbook by future+assassin · · Score: 1

    from 2010 oh the humanity, how soon people seem to forget.

    --
    by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
  12. EOMA68 laptop 15.6" screen and actually open by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The EOMA68 is sort of similar. It's a standard around which 100% free devices are being designed one of which is a laptop computer. It's god a good keyboard, large screen, and upgradable core via modular computer cards. Throwback is sort of a joke- given 1336x768 is the most popular screens being used on the market. There are also other factors if you actually care about open source- like is the hardware really open. If your are dependant on some 802.11ac chip your depending on proprietary junk. If the bootloader isn't free it's more of the same. Is your keyboard / LCD controller running open source software? I can tell you- the answer is almost certainly no. EOMA68 is solving those problems and the hardware specs don't matter because it's a standard and you can just upgrade later.

    1. Re:EOMA68 laptop 15.6" screen and actually open by admin7087 · · Score: 1

      Interesting. Where can you buy it? (In Europe)

  13. Re:MIPS, please by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 1

    MEEP > Coyote

    --
    #DeleteFacebook
  14. Re:Reporter pans by Hognoxious · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Pan. Verb (t): to criticise harshly or vociferously. His latest play was widely panned in the press".

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  15. Re: Its a KIT, not a product! by hackwrench · · Score: 1

    All toys are tools, but not all tools are toys. The purpose of a toy is whatever the user wants to do with it. This item is a toy.

  16. Re:Making use of products you don't return by hackwrench · · Score: 1

    I am poor, on disability and a bit of an idiot-savant. I would be interested in obtaining your unused technology. At the very least, I would learn a little bit. A bit of a reach, but if you don't ask, you don't get.

  17. Re: first post by negRo_slim · · Score: 1
    Speaking of 1080....

    because the default 1366 x 768 resolution is a real throwback.
    I believe that's still the second most common screen rez on the Steam hardware survey, by a wide margin too. A real throwback indeed!

    --
    On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
  18. Re:Failing to see the potential by hackwrench · · Score: 1

    Sure, great strides have been made in getting user interfaces usable to people who couldn't use earlier interfaces, but when it comes to imbuing interfaces with power, we have a long way to go. The computer doesn't keep track of much of anything I have done and not do stuff that makes stupid mistakes happen. I spend a lot of time in File Manager and its idea that it should put a check mark next to folders you return from, and uncheck everything when you are a little bit off the mark of checking a box has caused me untold grief. The file picker dialog boxes should have more of the features of the full-fledged File Manager as well. I don't know how many times I find an outdated file I want to delete when I download an update, but the process to do so is cumbersome. The file picker for no particular reason wants to replace the name of the file with the name of the selected file.

    For that matter, grouping of programs by tasks has a long way to go. Tabs are grouped by application. Windows should be application agnostic as to what tabs belong to them. Text is unselectable in many places and lack a context-menu in still others.

  19. Re: Moles and trolls, work, work, work by hackwrench · · Score: 1

    I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but many of us do not live for "work". Your dismissal of anything that is not work is shallow. There is plenty of action in the places you dismiss as the sidelines.

  20. Re: first post by Darinbob · · Score: 2

    Reporters don't understand that. Well, let's be honest, reporters don't understand much of anything so I guess the comment is redundant. A reporter uses a computer and thinks "I'm tech savvy, I should cover the tech beat!" but then is baffled by actual nerds.

  21. Re: Its a KIT, not a product! by Darinbob · · Score: 1

    Sorry, most consumers are not interested in results with computers either, they just want to see kitten videos and update social media status. Computers in general are not being used as high technology computing devices except by the nerds.

  22. Micro SD Cards by Cmdln+Daco · · Score: 2

    A curious potential customer on the website asked:

    "What kinds of micro sd cards does it support?"

    "Olimex Ltd" replies:

    "we don’t have anything above 32GB to try"

    So that's their official answer? They've not even done that level of testing???

    128G micro SD cards are $25 items now.