1978, 8th grade, I had already been playing around with TTL chips (thanks to The TTL Cookbook). Cool math teacher was going to a weekly Saturday continuing education thing in the big city about programming computers in BASIC, brought me along. I actually figured out the IF statement before it was covered. Sad part was that he had to miss 3 of the 10 weeks and couldn't get the credit.
The next year we had to move, but I got a 16K TRS-80 for my b-day (partly because it was delivered to the wrong store, thus bypassing the 6-month backlog!) I must have spent an hour trying to figure out how to answer the "MEMORY SIZE?" question. (stupid answer, just press enter)
Within a year or two I had acquired a Z-80 programming reference card and started disassembling the ROM. So I learned a lot of 8080 programming style from Bill Gates. (not much Z-80 optimized code in there) Around 1983 or so, I even got a 4K CoCo just so I could hack 6809 code. Factoid: the inner loop of FORTH is just two 6809 instructions. I later had a paying job '97-'00 working with 6809 code.
Except that this may be integrated more due to the "5K" part (for Retina) than the "GPU" part. Try looking up what it takes to hook up a monitor larger than 4K when current standard cables don't support more than 4K. This GPU is probably not intended for you to play your Cowadoodys on.
Why are you connecting a work laptop over WiFi? Especially overnight! How cheap are they that you don't have a gigabit wired Ethernet connection?
And why are they such drooling morons that they don't require you to use wired Ethernet, but force you to run antivirus crap on OS X? Yeah, all those overnight updates to everybody's computers via WiFi? No wonder it's flaking out all the time.
Protip: go to the wireless icon in the menu bar, Turn Wi-Fi Off, Turn Wi-Fi On. Much faster than rebooting.
Gonna agree with you about click-less trackpads, though. (using a 2011-2012 era MBP right now) The haptic feedback is important, and I've never found a trackpad that reliably worked with soft-clicking. It drives me nuts that the trackpads on old PC laptops default to soft-click mode with no driver (when they have real buttons!), and you have to install a driver just to turn that bullshit off. Also, I turn off all trackpad options except for 2-finger scroll (which I just noticed I can't disable anyhow), they're more trouble than they're worth.
Hint: who said anything about "anchoring" to the desk? You can plug this into a laptop. And this may be more about 5K (go ahead, see what's available right now even from a desktop, yeah, that's right, even the cables only support 4K!) than about moving a high-performance GPU out of the computer.
The average person doesn't upgrade CPUs very often either. Usually they take whatever is in their new computer and leave it there. If they play games, they're mostly running them from web pages in IE. The gamer market is very small compared to the people-using-computers market.
The big thing about this is that it will let you plug a 5K monitor into a laptop. Once you get into that high of a resolution, it gets too big for integrated GPUs to handle, and you can't use a current consumer standard single video connector, they all top out at 4K now. And this will do so with a connector that can already handle dumb video at 4K.
Not to mention the power supply issues. Some of those high-end cards need a LOT of power, even having dedicated power connectors on the card. At that point you might as well go to a Thunderbolt-to-PCIe card cage, at which point you would realize that TB is only PCI-e x2 or x4, not the x16 that most video cards want. You could make it fit (PCI-e is designed that way), but you would lose 3/4 of the potential bandwidth from the start.
And the target market of this seems to be laptop users, who wouldn't have 16x slots at all. You want a real video card, get a real desktop computer with real card slots. The people who need to upgrade yearly to the latest GPU aren't playing their games on laptops. This isn't for them. There will still always be dumb monitors; there is no evil overlord trying to force you to use this.
...or as someone mentioned in another post, this is really targeted at laptop users. That actually makes a lot more sense than the Mac Mini use case. It's kind of hard to fit a monster desktop NVidia card into a laptop. Just leave the display+GPU on the desk at home, plug it in when you get back.
It's still a lot better than an integrated WHOLE FUCKING COMPUTER. Especially one with soldered-only RAM like modern iMacs. Unless you're a serious FPS gamer, you probably don't need to upgrade your GPU every year or two. And if you are, you probably already have a computer with, you know, actual card slots that you can plug those $1000 graphics cards into.
This is meant to let you use a real GPU with a computer that has no slots, like a Mac Mini, for those who need better than the now half-decent CPU integrated graphics. (Actually, since Thunderbolt can work like an x2 or x4 PCI-e, it's like having a sub-1cm slot with no card cage.)
I'm lying down on a couch right now with my 17" on my chest, right under my chin. The size is just right as far as viewing angle goes, and my nearsightedness lets me (requires me to!) go without glasses at 6-9 inches.
Late-2011 17" here, bought in mid-2012, still going strong, recently scored a used late-2012 Mac Mini 6,2 (quad i7) for mostly remote headless use. I also got a used 1st gen 15" Unibody as a "just in case" laptop, it had trackpad problems, learned all about how to fix that mere weeks before my 17" trackpad got flaky.
What resolution do they work in? Not 5K I presume, and the link is already designed to handle 4K of raw display data. Worst case, uncompressed video of the desired resolution can be sent, and will get up-scaled in the display's GPU to Retina resolution. It just goes over a bit more wire to get to the GPU. And there's nothing to keep someone doing 4K video production from just, you know, getting a computer with a built-in GPU and a dumb high-res monitor. They're also not going to need a GPU that pushes polygons. This is meant to allow a high-end GPU (aka gaming GPU) to be used with an otherwise cheap headless Mac Mini, or a second monitor for an iMac.
The problem is, what would they use instead? Thunderbolt is already one of the highest-bandwidth links you can get without using a dual-link connection to your monitor.
It could be as easy as updated GPU firmware to support a new codec (but not for your GPL Codec of the Week). In the worst case, it's still over a link that is already designed to run a 4K monitor, so unless you had a full 5K source, you could send the raw decoded video and the GPU in the monitor would upscale to full screen resolution.
This isn't some kind of crappy USB3 here, Thunderbolt is set up to be basically a PCI-e x2 or x4 port. The question is, what's it's future? Apple has had some pretty cool technologies that died when the rest of the world finally caught up with a different technology, in particular Firewire. Intel has accepted it, I don't see any other technology leap-frogging it yet, and it is possible that Thunderbolt over USB-C could actually catch on. (which could make the mini-DisplayPort version fall to the curse, ha ha)
I hate this a lot less than cramming the whole computer (something you want to upgrade more often than the screen) into a nice screen like current iMacs. Making a KVM switch for it could be tricky, though.
Nice idea, except that orbital mechanics makes this more difficult than it sounds. Over a two year period, the low energy trajectory varies from 6 months to 18 months. (And when you get there, this flips the other way unless you stay on Mars for a year!) Not to mention, how do you deliver supplies "every 3 months" to a spacecraft that takes 6 months to get to Mars? I guess you could launch them ahead of time on trajectories where the crew module or Mars would catch up later.
The fuel factory is the basic principle of the Mars Direct plan. Launch a first unmanned mission, then let it manufacture fuel for a year. Unless it fails, launch a manned mission two years after the first with another fuel factory, then repeat every two years.
I have no interest in sports or crappy new Hollywood movies (the main things you need cable for these days), and I get more than I can watch from an antenna. I have a 4-ATSC MythTV box with about 8TB of disk of which over 7TB is currently used. Aside from glitches due to less-than-perfect reception (some channels in particular) or bad weather, I basically get to keep the raw broadcast MPEG that I can do whatever I want with. (one of the reasons I'm at 7TB used is because OTA HD is about 6GB/hour before cutting commercials)
Have you actually tested this? I doubt that the current user being on an unprivileged account would be enough to keep the installer from running as a system process with system permissions, just like how the rest of system updates work.
and they don't believe the only real solution, hitting the "cancel update" button will work.
It might matter if it was actually a button. Instead, it's the word "here", in blue, without even an underline to draw attention to it as something clickable. Having to click on the word "here" to stop a forced upgrade is much dumber than having to click on the Start menu to shut down the system.
The only real solution is to put Windows Update on full manual mode, then ignore it. But you have to do that before the GWX update installs, or after you manually remove it.
Well, actually, the only real solution is Linux, but that's a bit much for most people. And that brings in the whole systemd thing. Maybe BSD?
People who put web links (or web-style links) on the word "here" should be drawn and quartered. There's also very bad contrast between one word in dark blue next to the rest of the words in black on a white background, making it hard to even see that it's a link, not to mention that the word "here" isn't underlined, further reducing its visibility as an active UI element, to the point where one might suspect that it was made intentionally hard to see.
3GB+ file download. Internet access fees may apply."
Thanks Microsoft, for going ahead and downloading it for everyone anyhow! My experience was that the thing dumped 6.5 GB in a hidden folder with fucked up access permissions (so you couldn't delete it even as Administrator without doing some deep magic). Good thing I caught it in time. But I would have to admit that yes, that was in fact more than 3GB.
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They should've added a twist where it was really his identical twin brother!
Because it merged C syntax with sed and awk, which are alien to anybody who has a Windows-only background.
I still don't know where they got the "post-if" conditional variants from, maybe someone made a bet that he couldn't do it.
Nah, they'll break them up for repair parts! Now you see why Apple is working to keep people from being able to repair their own phones!
...No. Next question in a headline?
...which coincidentally was also in Office 2007 as well. I guess I'll be okay then, since I refuse to use ribbonized versions of Microsoft Orifice.
1978, 8th grade, I had already been playing around with TTL chips (thanks to The TTL Cookbook). Cool math teacher was going to a weekly Saturday continuing education thing in the big city about programming computers in BASIC, brought me along. I actually figured out the IF statement before it was covered. Sad part was that he had to miss 3 of the 10 weeks and couldn't get the credit.
The next year we had to move, but I got a 16K TRS-80 for my b-day (partly because it was delivered to the wrong store, thus bypassing the 6-month backlog!) I must have spent an hour trying to figure out how to answer the "MEMORY SIZE?" question. (stupid answer, just press enter)
Within a year or two I had acquired a Z-80 programming reference card and started disassembling the ROM. So I learned a lot of 8080 programming style from Bill Gates. (not much Z-80 optimized code in there) Around 1983 or so, I even got a 4K CoCo just so I could hack 6809 code. Factoid: the inner loop of FORTH is just two 6809 instructions. I later had a paying job '97-'00 working with 6809 code.
Except that this may be integrated more due to the "5K" part (for Retina) than the "GPU" part. Try looking up what it takes to hook up a monitor larger than 4K when current standard cables don't support more than 4K. This GPU is probably not intended for you to play your Cowadoodys on.
Why are you connecting a work laptop over WiFi? Especially overnight! How cheap are they that you don't have a gigabit wired Ethernet connection?
And why are they such drooling morons that they don't require you to use wired Ethernet, but force you to run antivirus crap on OS X? Yeah, all those overnight updates to everybody's computers via WiFi? No wonder it's flaking out all the time.
Protip: go to the wireless icon in the menu bar, Turn Wi-Fi Off, Turn Wi-Fi On. Much faster than rebooting.
Gonna agree with you about click-less trackpads, though. (using a 2011-2012 era MBP right now) The haptic feedback is important, and I've never found a trackpad that reliably worked with soft-clicking. It drives me nuts that the trackpads on old PC laptops default to soft-click mode with no driver (when they have real buttons!), and you have to install a driver just to turn that bullshit off. Also, I turn off all trackpad options except for 2-finger scroll (which I just noticed I can't disable anyhow), they're more trouble than they're worth.
Hey, cool, now we have a new name for Thunderbolt-over-USB-C!
Hint: who said anything about "anchoring" to the desk? You can plug this into a laptop. And this may be more about 5K (go ahead, see what's available right now even from a desktop, yeah, that's right, even the cables only support 4K!) than about moving a high-performance GPU out of the computer.
The average person doesn't upgrade CPUs very often either. Usually they take whatever is in their new computer and leave it there. If they play games, they're mostly running them from web pages in IE. The gamer market is very small compared to the people-using-computers market.
The big thing about this is that it will let you plug a 5K monitor into a laptop. Once you get into that high of a resolution, it gets too big for integrated GPUs to handle, and you can't use a current consumer standard single video connector, they all top out at 4K now. And this will do so with a connector that can already handle dumb video at 4K.
Not to mention the power supply issues. Some of those high-end cards need a LOT of power, even having dedicated power connectors on the card. At that point you might as well go to a Thunderbolt-to-PCIe card cage, at which point you would realize that TB is only PCI-e x2 or x4, not the x16 that most video cards want. You could make it fit (PCI-e is designed that way), but you would lose 3/4 of the potential bandwidth from the start.
And the target market of this seems to be laptop users, who wouldn't have 16x slots at all. You want a real video card, get a real desktop computer with real card slots. The people who need to upgrade yearly to the latest GPU aren't playing their games on laptops. This isn't for them. There will still always be dumb monitors; there is no evil overlord trying to force you to use this.
...or as someone mentioned in another post, this is really targeted at laptop users. That actually makes a lot more sense than the Mac Mini use case. It's kind of hard to fit a monster desktop NVidia card into a laptop. Just leave the display+GPU on the desk at home, plug it in when you get back.
It's still a lot better than an integrated WHOLE FUCKING COMPUTER. Especially one with soldered-only RAM like modern iMacs. Unless you're a serious FPS gamer, you probably don't need to upgrade your GPU every year or two. And if you are, you probably already have a computer with, you know, actual card slots that you can plug those $1000 graphics cards into.
This is meant to let you use a real GPU with a computer that has no slots, like a Mac Mini, for those who need better than the now half-decent CPU integrated graphics. (Actually, since Thunderbolt can work like an x2 or x4 PCI-e, it's like having a sub-1cm slot with no card cage.)
I'm lying down on a couch right now with my 17" on my chest, right under my chin. The size is just right as far as viewing angle goes, and my nearsightedness lets me (requires me to!) go without glasses at 6-9 inches.
Late-2011 17" here, bought in mid-2012, still going strong, recently scored a used late-2012 Mac Mini 6,2 (quad i7) for mostly remote headless use. I also got a used 1st gen 15" Unibody as a "just in case" laptop, it had trackpad problems, learned all about how to fix that mere weeks before my 17" trackpad got flaky.
What resolution do they work in? Not 5K I presume, and the link is already designed to handle 4K of raw display data. Worst case, uncompressed video of the desired resolution can be sent, and will get up-scaled in the display's GPU to Retina resolution. It just goes over a bit more wire to get to the GPU. And there's nothing to keep someone doing 4K video production from just, you know, getting a computer with a built-in GPU and a dumb high-res monitor. They're also not going to need a GPU that pushes polygons. This is meant to allow a high-end GPU (aka gaming GPU) to be used with an otherwise cheap headless Mac Mini, or a second monitor for an iMac.
The problem is, what would they use instead? Thunderbolt is already one of the highest-bandwidth links you can get without using a dual-link connection to your monitor.
It could be as easy as updated GPU firmware to support a new codec (but not for your GPL Codec of the Week). In the worst case, it's still over a link that is already designed to run a 4K monitor, so unless you had a full 5K source, you could send the raw decoded video and the GPU in the monitor would upscale to full screen resolution.
This isn't some kind of crappy USB3 here, Thunderbolt is set up to be basically a PCI-e x2 or x4 port. The question is, what's it's future? Apple has had some pretty cool technologies that died when the rest of the world finally caught up with a different technology, in particular Firewire. Intel has accepted it, I don't see any other technology leap-frogging it yet, and it is possible that Thunderbolt over USB-C could actually catch on. (which could make the mini-DisplayPort version fall to the curse, ha ha)
I hate this a lot less than cramming the whole computer (something you want to upgrade more often than the screen) into a nice screen like current iMacs. Making a KVM switch for it could be tricky, though.
1) Launch supplies to Mars every 3 months.
Nice idea, except that orbital mechanics makes this more difficult than it sounds. Over a two year period, the low energy trajectory varies from 6 months to 18 months. (And when you get there, this flips the other way unless you stay on Mars for a year!) Not to mention, how do you deliver supplies "every 3 months" to a spacecraft that takes 6 months to get to Mars? I guess you could launch them ahead of time on trajectories where the crew module or Mars would catch up later.
The fuel factory is the basic principle of the Mars Direct plan. Launch a first unmanned mission, then let it manufacture fuel for a year. Unless it fails, launch a manned mission two years after the first with another fuel factory, then repeat every two years.
I have no interest in sports or crappy new Hollywood movies (the main things you need cable for these days), and I get more than I can watch from an antenna. I have a 4-ATSC MythTV box with about 8TB of disk of which over 7TB is currently used. Aside from glitches due to less-than-perfect reception (some channels in particular) or bad weather, I basically get to keep the raw broadcast MPEG that I can do whatever I want with. (one of the reasons I'm at 7TB used is because OTA HD is about 6GB/hour before cutting commercials)
I don't think that picture accurately reflects the concept of "the carrot".
A more appropriate analogy would be a rectally inserted carrot.
Have you actually tested this? I doubt that the current user being on an unprivileged account would be enough to keep the installer from running as a system process with system permissions, just like how the rest of system updates work.
and they don't believe the only real solution, hitting the "cancel update" button will work.
It might matter if it was actually a button. Instead, it's the word "here", in blue, without even an underline to draw attention to it as something clickable. Having to click on the word "here" to stop a forced upgrade is much dumber than having to click on the Start menu to shut down the system.
The only real solution is to put Windows Update on full manual mode, then ignore it. But you have to do that before the GWX update installs, or after you manually remove it.
Well, actually, the only real solution is Linux, but that's a bit much for most people. And that brings in the whole systemd thing. Maybe BSD?
People who put web links (or web-style links) on the word "here" should be drawn and quartered. There's also very bad contrast between one word in dark blue next to the rest of the words in black on a white background, making it hard to even see that it's a link, not to mention that the word "here" isn't underlined, further reducing its visibility as an active UI element, to the point where one might suspect that it was made intentionally hard to see.
3GB+ file download. Internet access fees may apply."
Thanks Microsoft, for going ahead and downloading it for everyone anyhow! My experience was that the thing dumped 6.5 GB in a hidden folder with fucked up access permissions (so you couldn't delete it even as Administrator without doing some deep magic). Good thing I caught it in time. But I would have to admit that yes, that was in fact more than 3GB.
Just like Robin Hood and Friar Tuck?