The trouble is, for the user, that while security may be 'in their hands' in the broad sense of "well, nobody else seems to have it in hand", the challenges of "security" are pretty absurdly high for any but the tiniest percentage of users to meaningfully "have in hand".
In this case, the pwn2own result, for the most commonly used home platforms, fully patched, was "visit website, get owned without further intervention." In these days of rampant URL-shortening, 3rd-party ad embeds, and a constantly shifting alphabet soup of trustworthy and dodgey sites, 'Security remains in the hands of the user' in sort of the same way that 'Safety remains in the hands of th pedestrian': when there are land mines hidden in an unknown; but definitely nonzero, number of crosswalks...
A potentially complicating factor is that most of these guys are also professional security researchers/consultants(who else has the time and isn't restricted to travelling only in countries with weak extradition agreements?)
Obviously 15k isn't just beer money, and a shiny new laptop is always good news; but I'd assume that the other real prize is a cool-sounding resume bump. I don't know whether "Cracked the platform nobody else could, came in 3rd on time" or "Hacked that mac so fast it didn't have time to bring up the spinning beach ball" is better PR; but the participants probably have more to gain from better market visibility than they do from another laptop...
John "Iran-Contra" Poindexter would like to remind you that felony convictions and employment in the shadowy national security bureaucracy are hardly incompatible...
You obviously couldn't tell what was being processed(given that most chips are under heat-spreaders these days, you'd need modestly fiddly hardware to even get a rough heatmap of the die with physical access to the system); but it would be interesting to know if they consider how much load they are currently subject to to be sensitive information...
Cynically, I'd tend to assume that if a CPU falls idle, they just tap more phone lines until it peaks again; but if that isn't actually the case, satellite sensors that could pick up IR or atmospheric water vapor concentrations could, in principle, get an approximate sense of the datacenter load over time, which might correlate with level of NSA interest in something.
As Slashdotters, I think we should be concerned about the vendor lock-in imposed by government purchases of moisture vaporators that speak a binary language.
Shouldn't we be having a three to four way flame war between those of us who want them to speak an ISO standardized XML based language, the plaintext 4 lyfe UNIX crew, JSON-spouting web2.0 kids, and that dude with the beard who insists that only lisp macros are equal to the task?
One does wonder why the NSA chose that particular climate to build a big, water-hungry datacenter...(and what inducements the town leadership accepted for the... good fortune... of having its water allocated to the NSA first and its citizens second.)
Is it unusable for people after it's been through a datacenter? Why does using it to transfer heat around reduce its utility for drinking?
Depends what part of the cooling loop it ends up being used in. Because you really don't want things like galvanic corrosion or organic goo damaging your cooling system, cooling water that spends an extended period of time in the cooling loop is likely to be pretty nasty. Additives, biocides, dissolved metals, etc. Tasty.
Water that just flows past a heat exchanger into which the main cooling loop dumps its heat is probably just fine. Water used for evaporative cooling should end up being nice and distilled(assuming that there isn't too much unpleasantness in the local air); but the percentage you can re-capture in Utah's climate may or may not be all that exciting...
That is why I find the difference so curious. I'd be totally unsurprised to find that Europeans were measuring their volumes in milliliters and Americans in cups. The fact that kitchen scales(metric or imperial) are comparatively rare in the US and comparatively common in Europe is what is less obvious...
One could also set a threshold(either just a number of addresses or, in places with more sophisticated metadata available, number of different departments, etc.) beyond which the Reply All requires an extra step to activate.
The exact parameters would obviously depend on the user and use case; but it generally seems to be the case that the more users that "reply all" would imply the less likely it is that you actually mean to hit "reply all".
Senders could also do their bit by using the BCC field, rather than having a combined TO and CC field consisting of several hundreds or thousands of addresses...
For whatever reason, American cooking and recipes tend to use imperial volumetric measures(cups, half cups, teaspoons, etc.) rather than weights for most ingredients.
The imperial vs. metric thing is unsurprising enough; but I don't know why volume rather than weight is the typical criterion. Scales are certainly available, but you can traverse entire shelves of US recipes without be called to use one. Sometimes, ingredients that are commonly packaged by weight will be called for by weight; but generally in amounts that you can trivially infer from the packaging, without any measurement.
True enough. The reason that the "demand curve" is so simple and elegant is that it hides all the ugly stuff in the fine print at the bottom of the page.
Now class, here is a demand curve(or demand-sloped-line if this is econ for pre-calc...). Just draw the supply curve in and find the point of intersection!
Oh, did I mention that the demand curve is of unknown shape, may or may not exhibit continuity, is not constant over time, and may in fact change in response to your pricing actions? Well, that's an, er, exercise for the reader. Gotta go!
The quotation from the Bill's sponsor sure does its best to make the case that the(technically correct) assertion that the US is a republic is being (re)emphasized in the school curriculum by special intervention of the state legislature for reasons other than a learned concern for the dissemination of accurate information...
"But on Monday, Senate floor sponsor Sen. Mark Madsen, R-Eagle Mountain, said in some states children are being indoctrinated in socialism via some curriculum.
“This is happening at least in some places in our country, so I believe this is all the more important in this state, so that we can protect our children from such curriculum,” Madsen said."
Yo, Mark, I love that supporting evidence there. I can definitely see how having the legislature intervene to insure that politically sensitive issues are handled in a doctrinally correct manner will save the kiddies from socialism. Perhaps we can appoint a Political Commissar for each classroom, to make sure that our freedom remains ideologically pure?
But maybe we could consider going out on a limb here and teaching the kiddies about systems of government rather than telling them to memorize the correct label(Which, unless you are cynical enough to say "Plutocratic empire with democratic republican ceremonial elements", is "Republic).
Hey Kids! Athens was a "Democracy". Rome, pre empire, was a "Republic"; both looked absolutely fuck-all like our government. How can this be? Let's talk about the differences between a "Republic" and a "Democracy" and what sorts of variations are possible within the broad heading of each... We may have to skip cramming names and dates for a week; but I think you'll learn something...
And hey, while we are at it, let's remember to mention that(depending on which historians you talk to), there have been at least five reasonably distinct periods during which different political parties, with different names(in some cases quite confusing, since they are the same as today's; but mean different things) vied for control... Raise your hands everyone who knows that the Democrats used to be the southern conservative party, and the Republicans the northern liberals? And that there was a "Democractic-Republican" party, (arguably the one whose name actually corresponded most closely with our governmental form), that hasn't existed in almost 200 years?
Ok, I explicitly disclaimed that theory as the "Econ101 theory"(though it is still the case that you want to hit that point on the demand curve, it's just that the rest of Econ 101 tells you fuck-all about how to find that point). I then pointed out that(much more recent) behavioral economics work about the psychological quirks of price-perception, especially at the low end and in terms of the last couple of decimal places, almost certainly introduced curious discontinuities in the demand curve, which make Econ101 even less helpful in hitting the profit-maximizing point on the curve.
The fact that digitizable goods exhibit a ratio of fixed cost to unit cost unheard of at any prior point in history certainly does allow exploration of areas of the demand curve that would previously have been irrelevant; and our study of behavioral economics strongly suggests that (especially in these newly relevant areas) the demand curve is not some kind of Homo Econimus nice, smooth, well-behaved ideal; but a fairly wonky set of discontinuities, impulse-purchase points, and assorted demonstrations of the quirky sense of cost and value among humans.
None of that changes the point on the demand curve that you are attempting to hit, it just has a substantial likelihood(except in the particular special cases noted) of changing the price at which you hit that point....
Fair enough. I wasn't warning or flaming you, just doing a little PSA(god, I feel so old...)
There are lots of electronics, chemistry, mechanics, etc. tinkering projects that are good, clean, educational fun. There are a lot more that might piss of the neighbors, give you a whiff of exactly why getting chlorine gassed would suck, or potentially give you a scary little jolt. A few might even piss off the authorities enough that you should really do them while you are still a minor, or in the sticks in some relatively laid-back state.
I am wholly in favor of people doing these things. Burning a few chips, causing enough minor property damage to get your allowance docked for ages, maybe picking up a scar or two, all good fun. Bring back the good chemistry sets, the model rockets, and the Van de Graff generators, etc.
I just wanted to note, though, that of all devices that you can pick up used but working on craigslist for $10, microwaves are among the very few that can end a young tinkerer's career good and hard, even just screwdrivering the thing open. If you get past that, you'd better actually know something about RF antenna design and non-ionizing radiation safety before you fuck around with the magnetron.
Like an "Do not Enter" sign, the people to which it does not apply should know who they are. I just wanted to warn the aspiring enthusiast that(unlike, say, the "touching this cord has been demonstrated by the state of california to cause flipper babies and death cancer" warning on extension cords) the warnings about microwaves are Very. Much. Not. Joking. Virtually all other household gear(not currently plugged in to the wall or attached to an active gas line) is safer to play with.
The Econ101 theory of product pricing has always been "Pick the point on the demand curve where unit profit*units sold is the largest possible number(unless that number is always negative, or is never higher than fixed costs, in which case GTFO).
The trick, of course, is locating the price that puts you on that part of the demand curve... I suspect that, for behavioral economics reasons, there are probably weird little discontinuities(ie. 99 cents is an impulse buy, while $1.21 'feels' more significant, even though you might not pick up the difference between the two if you saw those coins scattered on the side of the road...); but, given that the cost of production of a ebook is dominated by the fixed cost of writing the thing, and getting it in some semblance of acceptably typeset order, I suspect that there is a lot to be said for the "stack 'em deep, sell 'em cheap" model.
This does not apply, of course, to low-readership specialty stuff; because you can be assured that you'll never sell more than a smallish number of copies no matter how cheap it is(as with specialist academic texts), nor does it apply to books that can command higher prices because of celebrity authorship or some sort of necessity(ie. Steven King's N+1th book, or a textbook)
Your off-brand Chinese importers can hook you up with an ARM-based netbook-esque mini-notebook for $80-$100, depending on exact specs, volume, and the whims of the ebay gods.
Trouble is, in most cases, these will either be running some dubiously-legit(and sometimes questionably well-localized) version of WinCE, or a mildly elderly version of Android. Actual cryptographic lockdowns, in the Apple or Motorola vein, are way outside the budget; but total lack of usable documentation, a confusing proliferation of part numbers, or rampant hardware switching between similar looking models has somewhat retarded the growth of decent sized 3rd-party release groups.
Curiously, the hardware built into these $80-$100, with (lousy) screen, keyboard, and battery doesn't generally seem to show up in $40-$50 versions with DC-in, VGA-out, and USB for peripherals. There are some machines with those specs, like HP's t5325; but the fact that that is a "thin client" and thus "enterprise" instantly doubles the price you'd expect for the specs.
You can also get quite capable hardware in Marvell's *plug line; but those are generally network appliances only, with your only display option being a USB-based Displaylink or similar. That certainly works; but nearly doubles the price and makes for a rather ugly donglefest.
The newer Marvell SoCs do support at least one lane of PCIe, in addition to a raft of other onboard peripherals, so it wouldn't be rocket surgery for an OEM to put out a *plug-esque design with an actual PCIe graphics chip(only a low-end one would really make sense; but even the cheapest PCIe graphics chips available can drive pretty much any monitor that doesn't require dual-link DVI) hanging off that lane. However, that is a bit hardcore to just hack onto an existing *plug board, and, as noted, nobody seems to have done that in commercial quantity.
You can get the cheap-and-nasty "PocketPC of yesteryear shoved into a clone of the EEE701" from any number of mystery OEMs on ebay; but the software will blow and 3rd party firmware support is kind of a gamble.
You can get a *plug-based design, which will have a much peppier ARM core (1.2GHz) and beween 128-512mb of RAM, depending on the exact model, for about the same money(Seagate Dockstars were going crazy cheap for a while, like $10-$20; but that was a firesale of sorts); but those are network-only unless you buy a Displaylink adapter, which pushes you up toward $150-$200, at which point Atom boxes that will run normal x86 OSes with zero hassle and take 1GB+ of RAM start to beckon...
The t5325 is pretty much exactly what you are asking for, except that it is an "enterprise" product, and has a price tag to match. If one could hunt down whatever OEM produces the board inside, and buy 10,000 of the same thing in generic black boxes, those would probably be precisely what you want; but I've never seen any hints on how to do that...
Can I finally use RAM for the browser's cache like Firefox to avoid frequent hits on my SSD?
Is a userspace program really a good place for such a feature? It seems kludgey to have individual programs handling their own storing-a-bunch-of-files-in-RAM tasks in their own memory spaces and according to their own fashion, rather than just having a tmpfs(or other OS equivalent) to which the user can configure any program that needs filesystem-like RAM storage to point, without any per-program special features being involved...
Architecturally, pretty much everything that one would need is in place, if the underlying OS supports it....
At least on Windows platforms, the Flash plugin process shows up as "Chrome.exe", which is annoying; but you can get the real PID from Chrome's internal task manager and identify the process that way. Since it is a distinct process, it can be assigned a priority level of its own, distinct from that of Chrome. Re-nicing the process would presumably have the same effect on *nix systems, though I've not tried the flash plugin with Chrome there.
If one's concern is battery life/fan noise/heat, you'd need a hard limit, not just a priority(since priority keeps flash from hogging CPU time; but not from causing your system's otherwise idle CPU to wake up and start thrashing at maximum operating frequency...) On linux you'd use cpulimit, my understanding is that Windows has support starting from Vista on; but only per-SID, not per PID.
Between those, though, Chrome would have to just slightly change how it invokes the Flash plugin, or automatically run a couple of commands against it afterwards, to control the priority and/or absolute CPU time of Flash. I don't think that they've done so, so you would presently have to do this manually, or hack up an extension to do it; but it certainly seems doable enough.
Unfortunately, Flash remains a single process even for multiple distinct embedded objects, so you can't nice the banner ads into a smoking crater without also slowing your addictive flash game of choice to a crawl. Architecturally, that kind of sucks; but luckily ad-blocking can take care of most of the spurious flash...
I think the point of particular bitterness, for the "computer fixers" is that there is something about computer fixing that seems to completely annihilate the social norms concerning asking people to exercise their job and/or job-related skills for free, because of some(sometimes rather tenuous) interpersonal connection.
When it's strictly business, lousy customers and messy problems come with the territory. For whatever reason, though, anybody whose profession remotely touches computers(even if your background in SAN architectures makes you no more qualified than anybody else to reload windows on a hosed box) is liable to be asked to perform a multi-hours slogging match under impossible constraints by assorted acquaintances and relatives of some distance...
It's a perfectly reasonable response. All the computers on TV have a nigh-magical, unerringly task-specific UI (magically only available to the team's 'geeky tech genius') that can do anything the plot requires. In this case, the plot of their personal psychodrama requires magically fixing their machine. And you, the team's geeky tech genius, have just failed....
Slashdot Mirror
The trouble is, for the user, that while security may be 'in their hands' in the broad sense of "well, nobody else seems to have it in hand", the challenges of "security" are pretty absurdly high for any but the tiniest percentage of users to meaningfully "have in hand".
In this case, the pwn2own result, for the most commonly used home platforms, fully patched, was "visit website, get owned without further intervention." In these days of rampant URL-shortening, 3rd-party ad embeds, and a constantly shifting alphabet soup of trustworthy and dodgey sites, 'Security remains in the hands of the user' in sort of the same way that 'Safety remains in the hands of th pedestrian': when there are land mines hidden in an unknown; but definitely nonzero, number of crosswalks...
A potentially complicating factor is that most of these guys are also professional security researchers/consultants(who else has the time and isn't restricted to travelling only in countries with weak extradition agreements?)
Obviously 15k isn't just beer money, and a shiny new laptop is always good news; but I'd assume that the other real prize is a cool-sounding resume bump. I don't know whether "Cracked the platform nobody else could, came in 3rd on time" or "Hacked that mac so fast it didn't have time to bring up the spinning beach ball" is better PR; but the participants probably have more to gain from better market visibility than they do from another laptop...
John "Iran-Contra" Poindexter would like to remind you that felony convictions and employment in the shadowy national security bureaucracy are hardly incompatible...
You obviously couldn't tell what was being processed(given that most chips are under heat-spreaders these days, you'd need modestly fiddly hardware to even get a rough heatmap of the die with physical access to the system); but it would be interesting to know if they consider how much load they are currently subject to to be sensitive information...
Cynically, I'd tend to assume that if a CPU falls idle, they just tap more phone lines until it peaks again; but if that isn't actually the case, satellite sensors that could pick up IR or atmospheric water vapor concentrations could, in principle, get an approximate sense of the datacenter load over time, which might correlate with level of NSA interest in something.
As Slashdotters, I think we should be concerned about the vendor lock-in imposed by government purchases of moisture vaporators that speak a binary language.
Shouldn't we be having a three to four way flame war between those of us who want them to speak an ISO standardized XML based language, the plaintext 4 lyfe UNIX crew, JSON-spouting web2.0 kids, and that dude with the beard who insists that only lisp macros are equal to the task?
One does wonder why the NSA chose that particular climate to build a big, water-hungry datacenter...(and what inducements the town leadership accepted for the... good fortune... of having its water allocated to the NSA first and its citizens second.)
Is it unusable for people after it's been through a datacenter? Why does using it to transfer heat around reduce its utility for drinking?
Depends what part of the cooling loop it ends up being used in. Because you really don't want things like galvanic corrosion or organic goo damaging your cooling system, cooling water that spends an extended period of time in the cooling loop is likely to be pretty nasty. Additives, biocides, dissolved metals, etc. Tasty.
Water that just flows past a heat exchanger into which the main cooling loop dumps its heat is probably just fine. Water used for evaporative cooling should end up being nice and distilled(assuming that there isn't too much unpleasantness in the local air); but the percentage you can re-capture in Utah's climate may or may not be all that exciting...
That is why I find the difference so curious. I'd be totally unsurprised to find that Europeans were measuring their volumes in milliliters and Americans in cups. The fact that kitchen scales(metric or imperial) are comparatively rare in the US and comparatively common in Europe is what is less obvious...
One could also set a threshold(either just a number of addresses or, in places with more sophisticated metadata available, number of different departments, etc.) beyond which the Reply All requires an extra step to activate.
The exact parameters would obviously depend on the user and use case; but it generally seems to be the case that the more users that "reply all" would imply the less likely it is that you actually mean to hit "reply all".
Senders could also do their bit by using the BCC field, rather than having a combined TO and CC field consisting of several hundreds or thousands of addresses...
For whatever reason, American cooking and recipes tend to use imperial volumetric measures(cups, half cups, teaspoons, etc.) rather than weights for most ingredients.
The imperial vs. metric thing is unsurprising enough; but I don't know why volume rather than weight is the typical criterion. Scales are certainly available, but you can traverse entire shelves of US recipes without be called to use one. Sometimes, ingredients that are commonly packaged by weight will be called for by weight; but generally in amounts that you can trivially infer from the packaging, without any measurement.
Perhaps a "Chief Freedom Officer"? We really should run this classroom like a business...
True enough. The reason that the "demand curve" is so simple and elegant is that it hides all the ugly stuff in the fine print at the bottom of the page.
Now class, here is a demand curve(or demand-sloped-line if this is econ for pre-calc...). Just draw the supply curve in and find the point of intersection!
Oh, did I mention that the demand curve is of unknown shape, may or may not exhibit continuity, is not constant over time, and may in fact change in response to your pricing actions? Well, that's an, er, exercise for the reader. Gotta go!
The quotation from the Bill's sponsor sure does its best to make the case that the(technically correct) assertion that the US is a republic is being (re)emphasized in the school curriculum by special intervention of the state legislature for reasons other than a learned concern for the dissemination of accurate information...
"But on Monday, Senate floor sponsor Sen. Mark Madsen, R-Eagle Mountain, said in some states children are being indoctrinated in socialism via some curriculum. “This is happening at least in some places in our country, so I believe this is all the more important in this state, so that we can protect our children from such curriculum,” Madsen said."
Yo, Mark, I love that supporting evidence there. I can definitely see how having the legislature intervene to insure that politically sensitive issues are handled in a doctrinally correct manner will save the kiddies from socialism. Perhaps we can appoint a Political Commissar for each classroom, to make sure that our freedom remains ideologically pure?
But maybe we could consider going out on a limb here and teaching the kiddies about systems of government rather than telling them to memorize the correct label(Which, unless you are cynical enough to say "Plutocratic empire with democratic republican ceremonial elements", is "Republic).
Hey Kids! Athens was a "Democracy". Rome, pre empire, was a "Republic"; both looked absolutely fuck-all like our government. How can this be? Let's talk about the differences between a "Republic" and a "Democracy" and what sorts of variations are possible within the broad heading of each... We may have to skip cramming names and dates for a week; but I think you'll learn something...
And hey, while we are at it, let's remember to mention that(depending on which historians you talk to), there have been at least five reasonably distinct periods during which different political parties, with different names(in some cases quite confusing, since they are the same as today's; but mean different things) vied for control... Raise your hands everyone who knows that the Democrats used to be the southern conservative party, and the Republicans the northern liberals? And that there was a "Democractic-Republican" party, (arguably the one whose name actually corresponded most closely with our governmental form), that hasn't existed in almost 200 years?
Ok, I explicitly disclaimed that theory as the "Econ101 theory"(though it is still the case that you want to hit that point on the demand curve, it's just that the rest of Econ 101 tells you fuck-all about how to find that point). I then pointed out that(much more recent) behavioral economics work about the psychological quirks of price-perception, especially at the low end and in terms of the last couple of decimal places, almost certainly introduced curious discontinuities in the demand curve, which make Econ101 even less helpful in hitting the profit-maximizing point on the curve.
The fact that digitizable goods exhibit a ratio of fixed cost to unit cost unheard of at any prior point in history certainly does allow exploration of areas of the demand curve that would previously have been irrelevant; and our study of behavioral economics strongly suggests that (especially in these newly relevant areas) the demand curve is not some kind of Homo Econimus nice, smooth, well-behaved ideal; but a fairly wonky set of discontinuities, impulse-purchase points, and assorted demonstrations of the quirky sense of cost and value among humans.
None of that changes the point on the demand curve that you are attempting to hit, it just has a substantial likelihood(except in the particular special cases noted) of changing the price at which you hit that point....
Fair enough. I wasn't warning or flaming you, just doing a little PSA(god, I feel so old...)
There are lots of electronics, chemistry, mechanics, etc. tinkering projects that are good, clean, educational fun. There are a lot more that might piss of the neighbors, give you a whiff of exactly why getting chlorine gassed would suck, or potentially give you a scary little jolt. A few might even piss off the authorities enough that you should really do them while you are still a minor, or in the sticks in some relatively laid-back state.
I am wholly in favor of people doing these things. Burning a few chips, causing enough minor property damage to get your allowance docked for ages, maybe picking up a scar or two, all good fun. Bring back the good chemistry sets, the model rockets, and the Van de Graff generators, etc.
I just wanted to note, though, that of all devices that you can pick up used but working on craigslist for $10, microwaves are among the very few that can end a young tinkerer's career good and hard, even just screwdrivering the thing open. If you get past that, you'd better actually know something about RF antenna design and non-ionizing radiation safety before you fuck around with the magnetron.
Like an "Do not Enter" sign, the people to which it does not apply should know who they are. I just wanted to warn the aspiring enthusiast that(unlike, say, the "touching this cord has been demonstrated by the state of california to cause flipper babies and death cancer" warning on extension cords) the warnings about microwaves are Very. Much. Not. Joking. Virtually all other household gear(not currently plugged in to the wall or attached to an active gas line) is safer to play with.
The Econ101 theory of product pricing has always been "Pick the point on the demand curve where unit profit*units sold is the largest possible number(unless that number is always negative, or is never higher than fixed costs, in which case GTFO).
The trick, of course, is locating the price that puts you on that part of the demand curve... I suspect that, for behavioral economics reasons, there are probably weird little discontinuities(ie. 99 cents is an impulse buy, while $1.21 'feels' more significant, even though you might not pick up the difference between the two if you saw those coins scattered on the side of the road...); but, given that the cost of production of a ebook is dominated by the fixed cost of writing the thing, and getting it in some semblance of acceptably typeset order, I suspect that there is a lot to be said for the "stack 'em deep, sell 'em cheap" model.
This does not apply, of course, to low-readership specialty stuff; because you can be assured that you'll never sell more than a smallish number of copies no matter how cheap it is(as with specialist academic texts), nor does it apply to books that can command higher prices because of celebrity authorship or some sort of necessity(ie. Steven King's N+1th book, or a textbook)
Your off-brand Chinese importers can hook you up with an ARM-based netbook-esque mini-notebook for $80-$100, depending on exact specs, volume, and the whims of the ebay gods.
Trouble is, in most cases, these will either be running some dubiously-legit(and sometimes questionably well-localized) version of WinCE, or a mildly elderly version of Android. Actual cryptographic lockdowns, in the Apple or Motorola vein, are way outside the budget; but total lack of usable documentation, a confusing proliferation of part numbers, or rampant hardware switching between similar looking models has somewhat retarded the growth of decent sized 3rd-party release groups.
Curiously, the hardware built into these $80-$100, with (lousy) screen, keyboard, and battery doesn't generally seem to show up in $40-$50 versions with DC-in, VGA-out, and USB for peripherals. There are some machines with those specs, like HP's t5325; but the fact that that is a "thin client" and thus "enterprise" instantly doubles the price you'd expect for the specs.
You can also get quite capable hardware in Marvell's *plug line; but those are generally network appliances only, with your only display option being a USB-based Displaylink or similar. That certainly works; but nearly doubles the price and makes for a rather ugly donglefest.
The newer Marvell SoCs do support at least one lane of PCIe, in addition to a raft of other onboard peripherals, so it wouldn't be rocket surgery for an OEM to put out a *plug-esque design with an actual PCIe graphics chip(only a low-end one would really make sense; but even the cheapest PCIe graphics chips available can drive pretty much any monitor that doesn't require dual-link DVI) hanging off that lane. However, that is a bit hardcore to just hack onto an existing *plug board, and, as noted, nobody seems to have done that in commercial quantity.
You can get the cheap-and-nasty "PocketPC of yesteryear shoved into a clone of the EEE701" from any number of mystery OEMs on ebay; but the software will blow and 3rd party firmware support is kind of a gamble.
You can get a *plug-based design, which will have a much peppier ARM core (1.2GHz) and beween 128-512mb of RAM, depending on the exact model, for about the same money(Seagate Dockstars were going crazy cheap for a while, like $10-$20; but that was a firesale of sorts); but those are network-only unless you buy a Displaylink adapter, which pushes you up toward $150-$200, at which point Atom boxes that will run normal x86 OSes with zero hassle and take 1GB+ of RAM start to beckon...
The t5325 is pretty much exactly what you are asking for, except that it is an "enterprise" product, and has a price tag to match. If one could hunt down whatever OEM produces the board inside, and buy 10,000 of the same thing in generic black boxes, those would probably be precisely what you want; but I've never seen any hints on how to do that...
Can I finally use RAM for the browser's cache like Firefox to avoid frequent hits on my SSD?
Is a userspace program really a good place for such a feature? It seems kludgey to have individual programs handling their own storing-a-bunch-of-files-in-RAM tasks in their own memory spaces and according to their own fashion, rather than just having a tmpfs(or other OS equivalent) to which the user can configure any program that needs filesystem-like RAM storage to point, without any per-program special features being involved...
Architecturally, pretty much everything that one would need is in place, if the underlying OS supports it....
At least on Windows platforms, the Flash plugin process shows up as "Chrome.exe", which is annoying; but you can get the real PID from Chrome's internal task manager and identify the process that way. Since it is a distinct process, it can be assigned a priority level of its own, distinct from that of Chrome. Re-nicing the process would presumably have the same effect on *nix systems, though I've not tried the flash plugin with Chrome there.
If one's concern is battery life/fan noise/heat, you'd need a hard limit, not just a priority(since priority keeps flash from hogging CPU time; but not from causing your system's otherwise idle CPU to wake up and start thrashing at maximum operating frequency...) On linux you'd use cpulimit, my understanding is that Windows has support starting from Vista on; but only per-SID, not per PID.
Between those, though, Chrome would have to just slightly change how it invokes the Flash plugin, or automatically run a couple of commands against it afterwards, to control the priority and/or absolute CPU time of Flash. I don't think that they've done so, so you would presently have to do this manually, or hack up an extension to do it; but it certainly seems doable enough.
Unfortunately, Flash remains a single process even for multiple distinct embedded objects, so you can't nice the banner ads into a smoking crater without also slowing your addictive flash game of choice to a crawl. Architecturally, that kind of sucks; but luckily ad-blocking can take care of most of the spurious flash...
Thanks for nothing, King James...
What did you let it eat this time?
It's never warez: they always "got it from work" or "lost the CD"...
I think the point of particular bitterness, for the "computer fixers" is that there is something about computer fixing that seems to completely annihilate the social norms concerning asking people to exercise their job and/or job-related skills for free, because of some(sometimes rather tenuous) interpersonal connection.
When it's strictly business, lousy customers and messy problems come with the territory. For whatever reason, though, anybody whose profession remotely touches computers(even if your background in SAN architectures makes you no more qualified than anybody else to reload windows on a hosed box) is liable to be asked to perform a multi-hours slogging match under impossible constraints by assorted acquaintances and relatives of some distance...
It's a perfectly reasonable response. All the computers on TV have a nigh-magical, unerringly task-specific UI (magically only available to the team's 'geeky tech genius') that can do anything the plot requires. In this case, the plot of their personal psychodrama requires magically fixing their machine. And you, the team's geeky tech genius, have just failed....