My only real experience "Live Typing" was modem-to modem connection. When you want to send a file directly between PC's and not over a BBS.
First you'd call over the phone to arrange the connection, one of the users would agree to be the caller, the other would be the answerer. Hang up and then get ready for the call.
First user would ATDT5551234 When the second user hears the phone ring they'd ATA
You'd turn echo on so you'd see what you were typing, Live type chat a bit, and then send a file over KERMIT, or X/Y/Z modem.
Chat some more, and then end the conversation. +++ATH0
I have two though not currently hooked up. One touchtone, one rotary dial. Unfortunately the touch tone has a loose connection inside so there's a lot of static. The Rotary dial one can't dial out with my VoIP.
My VoIP is Magic Jack, and surprisingly it has enough power to ring 1 mechanical ringer. I used to use the rotary with it and the on screen dialer, but changed to MagicJack+ which doesn't require a PC. I replaced the phone with a cheap model with a line-powered speakerphone, since I primarily seem to use it whenever I need to navigate the menu system, or wait on hold with a customer service number.
Too bad the image quality in "tablets and laptops, and perhaps even our smartphones" is dreadful compared to even pretty basic point and shoot. Optical zoom, low light performance, time to focus, time from power off (or sleep) to on and recording.
I have an i7-3612QM in my laptop. Sure, you wouldn't likely see that in a ultralite. But comparing the i5, the i7 runs a little slower to keep 4 cores in the same heat as the 2-core i5. For multithread, the i7 will be much better. With single-thread only, and one program at a time, the i5 may have a slight advantage. A dual core i5 vs dual core i7, there's not as much difference.
Intel's "Turbo boost" will let 1 busy core run at a faster clock rate than if all cores were busy. I would have thought this would result in it running an i7 at the same speed as the comprable i5 under a single threaded task.
all modern os's wake up and do things, on their own. this competes with user tasks. having more cpus or threads or cores helps with this.
so, yes, i5 and i7 are helpful for even 'simple' desktop users. and my htpc is an i7, with 8 real cores, so that my movies are even that much resistant to being jittered by other proc's waking up and demanding cpu time.
I think having 2 cores instead of 1 was beneficial to a lot of workloads as it kept the PC responsive if one thread was really hogging the CPU, it kept the other free for the rest of the user's processes. Although modern OS's claim to use preemptive multitasking, they strain under these loads if single core. I think even a single core with hyperthreading helps with responsiveness in these situations.
With 4 cores (i5 desktop CPU), or 4 cores + hyperthreading (i7 Desktop: 8 imaginary cores), there's diminishing returns. The extra threads really only help if the user's application is multithread aware, eg: a good video encoder. Individual application performance and responsiveness frequently relies on single thread performance.
Now a lot of nuisance background stuff is IO dependent. If you use Windows check Resource monitor on disk usage. When background stuff is working away, it's probably 100% busy, grinding away at 1MB/s. I've seen things like AV's doing that. That's going to bog down disk access for your applications as well. This is where SSD's have big gains as you can get random IO performance of 80MB/s.
When specing a new PC, I went with a core i5, because single thread performance was similar to the i7, but cost $100 less, and went with an SSD for the OS drive.
It's sad, but at this point I'm almost inclined to applaud Dell and Intel for showing a product that isn't clearly just a bunch of vapid handwaving bullshit, even if Haswell and Broadwell have been somewhat underwhelming advances. Not that this is new to CES by a long shot, but it seems especially bad this year.
Same thing every year. Like the year of 3D TV's that no one cared about.
Must not live in Ontario, Canada, where 90% of the electricity bill is distribution fees, taxes, debt retirement and other fees which are pretty static. Only 10% is actual usage cost.
Well. You do live somewhere that has to cover the $0.80/kWh paid to homeowners with Solar operations feeding back to the grid. Here in another part of Canada, monthly fixed costs are $10.83/mth, and usage is $0.15/kWh. Total is taxed at GST only. Without paying for heat or hot water , my usage is $30/mth.
I've read plenty of articles in the past about partners complaining that they showed Microsoft something, Microsoft temporarily working with them, and then showing them the door while coming out with their own product. I tried googling for such just now but there's so much noise I can't find the specific articles I was looking for.
They may well be trying to clean up their act, but they have a lot, and I mean a LOT of bad-will that they have generated over the years. If they think that people are going to accept these supposed changes at face value, they're mad.
I thought specifically in the case of Surface, Microsoft had all their OEMs working on tablets, which Microsoft required their own involvement in the development. Microsoft then cherry-picked the best features from each OEM, and then released their own tablet hardware, the Surface.
While your steps work, you can also just focus on the desktop (by clicking the background, for example), then press ALT+F4. You will then be presented with the shutdown menu which includes the same options you cited, but without the need to log off first.
I prefer to click the task bar, then ALT+F4.
It's also useful in remote desktop when you're trying to shutdown or reboot the remote machine. Also included is Microsoft's "Windows Virtual PC" which uses remote desktop as the integration technology, and makes it difficult to shutdown or reboot the VM.
They word it like NASA is dumpster diving for its flight computers these days. The CPU may be from what was new 12 years ago, but I seriously doubt the physical unit is actually 12 years old.
My favorite part is having to change the password every 30 days.
A LOT of people will use base password+date. EG: Slashdotnov2014 Slashdot1114 etc.
Gee. I wonder what it might be in December...
I even know people in IT with passwords like that. When setting up a new computer for you they'll ask for your username/password so they can log in and setup your profile, so they are well aware that people do that.
. . . a carefully-timed momentary disconnection of the ethernet cable during startup to provide uninhibited exposure to all the illicit material our developing minds could lust after. Even at the time I was filled with a sense of awe & pride to witness our secret resistance in action.
This is a useful skill in the real world. In no fewer than three AD workplaces, I've seen people's accounts get locked (for one reason or another: IT had the wrong end date for the term position, too many failed login attempts, etc). Unplug the cable, log in, then plug the cable back in. Network drives won't work, but anything stored on the hard drive will, Email works, and internet works (even when you need to authenticate on the proxy). Good workaround when waiting for IT to unlock.
as their xian religion requires. I'm surprised one of their kind hasn't murdered Hawkings yet because their religion demands he be killed since he is "defective."
That example is an extreme head scratch-er for sure. However, contrast that to The GIMP, which has had a consistently bad UI for over a decade. Programmers don't always make the best UI decisions, and just because it's intuitive for them, it's not automatically intuitive for everyone.
Somewhere between the gedit bastardization and 70% of open source projects, there is a balance that can be made. Should be made.
Good old The GIMP. My favorite UI fuck-up of theirs is making save do a project save, and having to do export to save as JPEG, PNG, etc. If you complain about the interface You're told you aren't the target audience. They are targeting a professional Photoshop knockoff market that doesn't exist, and yell at their actual core userbase.
For all the talk of the ridiculous name, at my conservative Windows based workplace GIMP is available in the software catalog. I think they want to have a free offering to avoid people looking for Photoshop, etc. Thankfully they also have Paint.NET.
The 5 minutes isn't so bad. It's the 15 extra minutes the bus takes over driving in my case, or 70 minutes for my friends with 1.5 hour bus rides. You picked the smallest amount of time to take issue with instead of the colossal wastes of time?
And my comment on the subway, though you might have to wait 5 minutes, they come so frequent you don't worry about the timetable as you do a bus with a 60 minute frequency. I don't take issue waiting 5 minutes for a subway.
In my city, by my house, it takes 15 minutes to drive a route to downtown that takes the bus 30 minutes. That's on a relatively direct route, on a Saturday, with no traffic. Plus figure that you need to be at the stop 5 minutes before, and you're wasting more time. If your route requires a transfer onto another route, it's very easy to end up having to go to a terminal that's not exactly on a direct route, and then wait another 10-20 minutes. If you need a second transfer your day is basically shot. I know people that takes them 1.5 hours by bus what takes 20 minutes by car. That's each direction.
My city has gotten better by setting up express routes that aren't that bad, and cities with subways avoid street congestion, and normally have a train coming every 5 minutes or less.
Similar situation: I was on an older bus, some passengers leave the via the back door, the driver goes to pull away from the stop but can't because the bus thinks the back doors are open (green light on). Bus driver gets up, goes the the back door, pulls the doors closed. The green light goes off, brakes release, and the bus starts rolling down the road. He didn't seem that concerned when people point it out to him. He should have pulled the parking brake before leaving his seat (which I assume is standard procedure). Transit company didn't seem that concerned either when I reported it.
The door-brake interlock on modern busses require that the drive have his foot on the brake when the door closes to release the interlock. Sometimes you'll notice after the door closes they try to drive away, but the engine just revs. They push the brakes, and then are able to go.
In either case these are bad drivers, and hopefully an automated driver would keep to the SOP. There are many cities with driverless subways that function without problem.
This business of charging by distance AND time that taxis use is awful and has got to go.
As much as I dislike taxis, I can't really blame them for this. If your destination has them stuck in traffic, that prevents them from otherwise making money.
Slashdot Mirror
My only real experience "Live Typing" was modem-to modem connection. When you want to send a file directly between PC's and not over a BBS.
First you'd call over the phone to arrange the connection, one of the users would agree to be the caller, the other would be the answerer. Hang up and then get ready for the call.
First user would ATDT5551234
When the second user hears the phone ring they'd ATA
You'd turn echo on so you'd see what you were typing, Live type chat a bit, and then send a file over KERMIT, or X/Y/Z modem.
Chat some more, and then end the conversation. +++ATH0
Only after typing my PIN Number.
I have an i5-4690 Which is 3.5Ghz with turbo up to 3.9Ghz, and 84W TDP.
i7-4771 is rated at 3.5Ghz base, turbo of 3.9Ghz, and 84WTDP.
These benchmarks show identical single thread performance:
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-...
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/s...
i7-4771-2,229
i5-4690-2,228
Specifically this Nokia Ringtone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I'm glad I don't have to hear floppy drives anymore. Good riddance. This has been my experience with floppy sounds:
whir-whir tick tick tick tick (okay all is going well)
tick tick tick tick whir-whir tick tick tick tick (okay, now at 80%)
tick tick tick tick (great, now at 95%)
whir whir-whir whir whir whir (uh-oh, this isn't good)
whir whir whir whir
Not ready reading drive A ($%#)
Abort, Retry, Fail? R
whir whir whir whir whir whir whir
Not ready reading drive A (#$@# piece of @#$@)
I have two though not currently hooked up. One touchtone, one rotary dial. Unfortunately the touch tone has a loose connection inside so there's a lot of static. The Rotary dial one can't dial out with my VoIP.
My VoIP is Magic Jack, and surprisingly it has enough power to ring 1 mechanical ringer. I used to use the rotary with it and the on screen dialer, but changed to MagicJack+ which doesn't require a PC. I replaced the phone with a cheap model with a line-powered speakerphone, since I primarily seem to use it whenever I need to navigate the menu system, or wait on hold with a customer service number.
Too bad the image quality in "tablets and laptops, and perhaps even our smartphones" is dreadful compared to even pretty basic point and shoot. Optical zoom, low light performance, time to focus, time from power off (or sleep) to on and recording.
I have an i7-3612QM in my laptop. Sure, you wouldn't likely see that in a ultralite. But comparing the i5, the i7 runs a little slower to keep 4 cores in the same heat as the 2-core i5. For multithread, the i7 will be much better. With single-thread only, and one program at a time, the i5 may have a slight advantage. A dual core i5 vs dual core i7, there's not as much difference.
Intel's "Turbo boost" will let 1 busy core run at a faster clock rate than if all cores were busy. I would have thought this would result in it running an i7 at the same speed as the comprable i5 under a single threaded task.
all modern os's wake up and do things, on their own. this competes with user tasks. having more cpus or threads or cores helps with this.
so, yes, i5 and i7 are helpful for even 'simple' desktop users. and my htpc is an i7, with 8 real cores, so that my movies are even that much resistant to being jittered by other proc's waking up and demanding cpu time.
I think having 2 cores instead of 1 was beneficial to a lot of workloads as it kept the PC responsive if one thread was really hogging the CPU, it kept the other free for the rest of the user's processes. Although modern OS's claim to use preemptive multitasking, they strain under these loads if single core. I think even a single core with hyperthreading helps with responsiveness in these situations.
With 4 cores (i5 desktop CPU), or 4 cores + hyperthreading (i7 Desktop: 8 imaginary cores), there's diminishing returns. The extra threads really only help if the user's application is multithread aware, eg: a good video encoder. Individual application performance and responsiveness frequently relies on single thread performance.
Now a lot of nuisance background stuff is IO dependent. If you use Windows check Resource monitor on disk usage. When background stuff is working away, it's probably 100% busy, grinding away at 1MB/s. I've seen things like AV's doing that. That's going to bog down disk access for your applications as well. This is where SSD's have big gains as you can get random IO performance of 80MB/s.
When specing a new PC, I went with a core i5, because single thread performance was similar to the i7, but cost $100 less, and went with an SSD for the OS drive.
It's sad, but at this point I'm almost inclined to applaud Dell and Intel for showing a product that isn't clearly just a bunch of vapid handwaving bullshit, even if Haswell and Broadwell have been somewhat underwhelming advances. Not that this is new to CES by a long shot, but it seems especially bad this year.
Same thing every year. Like the year of 3D TV's that no one cared about.
Must not live in Ontario, Canada, where 90% of the electricity bill is distribution fees, taxes, debt retirement and other fees which are pretty static. Only 10% is actual usage cost.
Well. You do live somewhere that has to cover the $0.80/kWh paid to homeowners with Solar operations feeding back to the grid. Here in another part of Canada, monthly fixed costs are $10.83/mth, and usage is $0.15/kWh. Total is taxed at GST only. Without paying for heat or hot water , my usage is $30/mth.
You mean, like Nokia?
I've read plenty of articles in the past about partners complaining that they showed Microsoft something, Microsoft temporarily working with them, and then showing them the door while coming out with their own product. I tried googling for such just now but there's so much noise I can't find the specific articles I was looking for.
They may well be trying to clean up their act, but they have a lot, and I mean a LOT of bad-will that they have generated over the years. If they think that people are going to accept these supposed changes at face value, they're mad.
I thought specifically in the case of Surface, Microsoft had all their OEMs working on tablets, which Microsoft required their own involvement in the development. Microsoft then cherry-picked the best features from each OEM, and then released their own tablet hardware, the Surface.
Crap. Ok, what's your address? And is that $100 Canadian, or $100 Canadian Tire?
Hold on while I count my stack of 5 cent bills while the Christmas shopping lineup wraps around the store.
-Some old guy 10 people in front of you.
While your steps work, you can also just focus on the desktop (by clicking the background, for example), then press ALT+F4. You will then be presented with the shutdown menu which includes the same options you cited, but without the need to log off first.
I prefer to click the task bar, then ALT+F4.
It's also useful in remote desktop when you're trying to shutdown or reboot the remote machine. Also included is Microsoft's "Windows Virtual PC" which uses remote desktop as the integration technology, and makes it difficult to shutdown or reboot the VM.
They word it like NASA is dumpster diving for its flight computers these days. The CPU may be from what was new 12 years ago, but I seriously doubt the physical unit is actually 12 years old.
Not yet anyways
For Parts, NASA Boldly Goes . . . on eBay
My favorite part is having to change the password every 30 days.
A LOT of people will use base password+date. EG:
Slashdotnov2014
Slashdot1114
etc.
Gee. I wonder what it might be in December...
I even know people in IT with passwords like that. When setting up a new computer for you they'll ask for your username/password so they can log in and setup your profile, so they are well aware that people do that.
. . . a carefully-timed momentary disconnection of the ethernet cable during startup to provide uninhibited exposure to all the illicit material our developing minds could lust after. Even at the time I was filled with a sense of awe & pride to witness our secret resistance in action.
This is a useful skill in the real world. In no fewer than three AD workplaces, I've seen people's accounts get locked (for one reason or another: IT had the wrong end date for the term position, too many failed login attempts, etc). Unplug the cable, log in, then plug the cable back in. Network drives won't work, but anything stored on the hard drive will, Email works, and internet works (even when you need to authenticate on the proxy). Good workaround when waiting for IT to unlock.
as their xian religion requires. I'm surprised one of their kind hasn't murdered Hawkings yet because their religion demands he be killed since he is "defective."
In 2009 when the concept of "Universal healthcare" was floated around in the USA, one Republican FUD'er going on about "death panels" was saying "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."
Hawking was born, and lives in England.
Oops!
That example is an extreme head scratch-er for sure. However, contrast that to The GIMP, which has had a consistently bad UI for over a decade. Programmers don't always make the best UI decisions, and just because it's intuitive for them, it's not automatically intuitive for everyone.
Somewhere between the gedit bastardization and 70% of open source projects, there is a balance that can be made. Should be made.
Good old The GIMP. My favorite UI fuck-up of theirs is making save do a project save, and having to do export to save as JPEG, PNG, etc. If you complain about the interface You're told you aren't the target audience. They are targeting a professional Photoshop knockoff market that doesn't exist, and yell at their actual core userbase.
For all the talk of the ridiculous name, at my conservative Windows based workplace GIMP is available in the software catalog. I think they want to have a free offering to avoid people looking for Photoshop, etc. Thankfully they also have Paint.NET.
The 5 minutes isn't so bad. It's the 15 extra minutes the bus takes over driving in my case, or 70 minutes for my friends with 1.5 hour bus rides. You picked the smallest amount of time to take issue with instead of the colossal wastes of time?
And my comment on the subway, though you might have to wait 5 minutes, they come so frequent you don't worry about the timetable as you do a bus with a 60 minute frequency. I don't take issue waiting 5 minutes for a subway.
Linux is fucking garbage.
Hey! That's my line!
If busses were the answer for middle class transport we would see a luxury version of the greyhound.
You mean like the ones Google Uses?
In my city, by my house, it takes 15 minutes to drive a route to downtown that takes the bus 30 minutes. That's on a relatively direct route, on a Saturday, with no traffic. Plus figure that you need to be at the stop 5 minutes before, and you're wasting more time. If your route requires a transfer onto another route, it's very easy to end up having to go to a terminal that's not exactly on a direct route, and then wait another 10-20 minutes. If you need a second transfer your day is basically shot. I know people that takes them 1.5 hours by bus what takes 20 minutes by car. That's each direction.
My city has gotten better by setting up express routes that aren't that bad, and cities with subways avoid street congestion, and normally have a train coming every 5 minutes or less.
Similar situation: I was on an older bus, some passengers leave the via the back door, the driver goes to pull away from the stop but can't because the bus thinks the back doors are open (green light on). Bus driver gets up, goes the the back door, pulls the doors closed. The green light goes off, brakes release, and the bus starts rolling down the road. He didn't seem that concerned when people point it out to him. He should have pulled the parking brake before leaving his seat (which I assume is standard procedure). Transit company didn't seem that concerned either when I reported it.
The door-brake interlock on modern busses require that the drive have his foot on the brake when the door closes to release the interlock. Sometimes you'll notice after the door closes they try to drive away, but the engine just revs. They push the brakes, and then are able to go.
In either case these are bad drivers, and hopefully an automated driver would keep to the SOP. There are many cities with driverless subways that function without problem.
This business of charging by distance AND time that taxis use is awful and has got to go.
As much as I dislike taxis, I can't really blame them for this. If your destination has them stuck in traffic, that prevents them from otherwise making money.