If you buy a bare Pi you have a bit of work to do to have a complete general purpose computer. That's appropriate because many of them are sold for embedded systems rather than to be used that way. But people are more computer savvy now and most don't find it a challenge to gather the other parts; if you want something simpler you can buy a complete kit that has it all (Pi board, case, NOOBS card, power supply) in the package. Still a touch of assembly required: you have to put the NOOBS card in the board and the board in the case.
You also have to provide your own keyboard, mouse, and display. (Name brand desktop systems come with a keyboard and mouse, but the display is still a separate purchase unless you buy an all-in-one.) Many people already have those things left over from other projects, and if not your local office supply store or electronics store, or Amazon or eBay, will be happy to sell them to you.
Good point. Even those under-$100 B350 motherboards will take 64GB; all the ones I have seen have four sockets. I have seen pictures of A320 motherboards with two sockets as well as with four, but no A320 boards seem to be available in the real world yet. The small form factor A300 and X300 boards will be limited to two sockets and 32GB when they finally appear.
I doubt that AMD designed in any artificial roadblocks; it's not their style. So that ceiling will increase when larger DDR4 sticks become available. Right now 32GB sticks are only available as registered ECC modules and consumer motherboards don't accept those, but larger unbuffered sticks should be available in the future when higher capacity SDRAM chips are released.
Initially, these are probably all going to be eight core die with some cores disabled. But there are some interesting performance implications depending on what parts of the chip are disabled. It's entirely possible that different six and four core chips of the same model will not perform identically.
At the six core level there are two possible configurations: you could have one where one of the four cores of each complex is disabled, and another where one complex is fully enabled and the other has two cores turned off. Each type would require different process scheduling to perform optimally.
At the four core level you could have chips where one complex is turned off entirely, and also parts where both complexes are partly active. The low end Ryzen 5 1400 has only half as much L3 cache, so it's almost certainly the first type and runs only one complex. The 1500X has the full 16MB of L3 so it's presumably the second type. That could be either 2/2 or 3/1 and each would have to be scheduled differently.
GPUs also do this. A lot of the model differentiation in video cards involves selling of cards that are partially disabled and/or downclocked because they failed to meet specifications with everything turned on. They may have some completely broken parts, they may have failed at the full clock speed, or they may have consumed too much power at that speed. In some cases they actually passed all the qualifications but are sold as lesser (and less expensive) parts because of lack of demand for the most expensive model. When you buy there is no way to know which of those things you got, though you can run tests at home to try to figure it out.
It also happens with parts that don't contain processing power. DRAM comes in a variety of speed grades but they all come from the same fab line; they get sold with various speed ratings (and prices) based on how well they perform when tested.
If keeping down to the 45W TDP level or even lower is a priority you can underclock. But CPUs optimized for really low power consumption will come later, and I suspect they will be APUs rather than processor-only parts. A 15W Zen-based APU will be awesome for applications like HTPCs.
Depends on your usage. The 1600X looks like a better gaming CPU than the 1700 and it's effectively $50 cheaper. (The list price is $80 less but no cooler is included.) On the other hand it will consume more power at peak; the 1600X is a 95W TDP processor while the 1700 is 65W TDP. We won't know what the idle power story is until the Ryzen 5 CPUs are released and benchmarked.
Looks like the i5-7600K and i7-7700K have some serious competition ahead. The AMD parts will cost less than Intel's, even after the recent cuts in street price of those CPUs, and AMD motherboards are also less expensive. By the time they're available, the scheduling issues that are holding back Ryzen's performance in games should be resolved.
The important differences between various generations of CPU don't affect real mode operation, the old school mode that is used to run MS-DOS. They come into play in kernel mode instructions that are used for things like protection, memory management, and multitasking. Some changes have to be made to Windows, as well as other operating systems such as macOS and Linux, every time a new CPU generation becomes available.
In some cases, the new CPU will work with code for older OSes but won't perform optimally. We know now, for example, that the disappointing performance of Ryzen in many games is due in part to the Windows scheduler not being properly optimized for the new CPU architecture. There are three things it does wrong. First, you want to schedule all the cores before you start to schedule the SMT threads; Windows already gets that right for Intel Hyperthreading but not yet for Ryzen's equivalent. Second, if you do schedule SMT threads you want to put threads of the same applications on both threads of a given core. Third, Ryzen has a split L3 cache architecture: cores 1-4 have direct access to one half of the cache and cores 5-8 have direct access to the other half, and cache access to the wrong half is much slower. For optimum performance, the scheduler needs to take that into account, keeping all the threads of an application on one side of the split whenever possible.
It's a false economy. We're talking about knowledge workers here, people who cost the company $100,000 or more per year in salary and benefits. Spending an extra $5,000 on additional office space will pay off if it increases their productivity by more than 5%; that's 100 square feet of $50/square foot office space which is pretty expensive space. (New York City is the only US market where the average cost of office space is that high, though offices in premium locations are more than that in many major cities.) The data shows that it will make a larger improvement than that.
The goal is to make money. But employees who are uncomfortable in their environment tend to be less productive than they could be, which means the company makes less money.
Also, going cheap on computer equipment is incredibly penny-wise and pound foolish. Even top of the line computers are cheap compared to the salaries of the people who use them. Giving your developers a new $5,000 system EVERY YEAR will probably show a net profit, since it needs to increase their productivity by less than 5% to break even. Even if they don't actually need it you'll probably get more than a 5% gain from the Hawthorne Effect.
The fan episodes of Star Trek have often been far more creative and original than the official productions. In particular I'm pointing at Star Trek Into Darkness, a THIRD retelling of the Khan story. Fast and Furious: Warp Factor Eight (excuse me, Star Trek Beyond) was at least a new story, but pretty much ignored the things that Star Trek is traditionally about (like anything that involves thinking) and turned it into an action movie.
Why didn't they film the book as written? Because there are long stretches of exposition about political philosophy that would make for boring cinema. Because some of the outdated attitudes would be difficult for modern audiences if served up straight. But above all, because nobody in Hollywood would fund a movie where the stars spend 75% of their time in armored suits that don't let you see their faces.
Avatar later found the solution to the last problem. Nobody would actually build armored suits with gigantic picture window fronts like the ones in the movie; they would compromise the structural integrity of the suit for no good reason. (MI suits had all sorts of vision augumentation available; nobody would want to settle for what you could see through glass, so that's not a reason for it.) But the design does solve the problem of being unable to recognize the actors.
I like Verhoeven's take on Starship Troopers, while acknowledging that it is a radical departure from what Heinlein wrote. He changed a lot of things: eliminating the armor, full gender integration of the MI that is really Forever War rather than Starship Troopers (brilliantly told in a brief shower scene that delivers the message and titillates the audience at the same time), omitting all the the History and Moral Philosophy, and combining some characters into composites. The treatment of military propaganda (the newsreel segments) has no parallel in the book and changes the message of the story.
I would also like to see a more faithful adaptation someday, though I think it would work better as a miniseries than as a movie. An important reason to want a miniseries is that you COULD include the exposition on political philosophy, which I believe is an important part of the book. It would probably be best to break it into small chunks that get inserted as flashbacks rather than serving it up as one big indigestible lump. Those bits would ruin the pacing of a film, but they would fit nicely into the slower pace of a 6-8 episode series.
Speaking of Heinlein and miniseries, the book of his that REALLY calls out for the treatment is Time Enough For Love. That would probably take about 20 episodes to do properly, though it might be half hour rather than full hour episodes or a mix of lengths. TEFL is a very episodic work so it's a natural for the series format, and you would want the episodes to be long enough so that each one could contain one or more complete scenes from the book. I see it as being an essentially complete version that doesn't leave out any scenes. It would have to be on HBO or a streaming service because the characters would spend a lot of time naked. (Better make sure those sets are well heated!)
The sad truth is that his logic is correct. It is much easier to use anti-discrimination laws in cases of wrongful termination than in cases of unlawful non-hiring. In the hiring case the company can usually come up with some other plausible reason for not hiring you.
It's about health care costs (and secondarily life insurance costs) even more than it is about wages. Even if older workers are willing to work for the same wage they are more costly to employ because their benefits cost more. There is a reason why those greeters at Walmart are over 65 - they're covered by Medicare so Walmart doesn't have to pay for their insurance. (There are also young greeters, but you simply won't find 60 year old workers in the position.)
Yet another reason for universal health care from the government. Taking health care costs off the table for employers will help reduce age discrimination in the workplace.
The life insurance thing mostly applies to executives and professionals; other employees rarely get life insurance as a benefit. Companies don't offer it just out of the goodness of their hearts; what they really want is a policy where THEY are the beneficiary to protect against business losses from the untimely death of a key employee, but they can't do that without also giving you insurance where your heirs benefit.
If the work assigned by an employer has long term health side effects, that employer should pay for them. It applies when astronauts get sick because of being in space. It also applies when asbestos workers get cancer and coal miners get black lung.
That modding as troll was unjustified. It's true that "free" healthcare would be funded by taxes and that should be acknowledged by everybody, including people like me who are in favor of it.
If price were no object that would be true. A 12-13" system that weighs a mere two pounds is very cool, and they have an adequate amount of computing power for many uses. Or you can step up to a three pound version and get a better display and more computing power.
But a laptop that costs $600 or more (the low end of things that were known as Ultrabooks for a while; the name seems to have fallen into disuse) and a $200 laptop are very different markets. One nice bit of progress is that the little 11.6" laptops are still lighter than the early netbooks, as well as having much better battery life. You were lucky to get 3 hours of use from the original Eee PC; a modern small laptop will provide 8 hours or more.
Microsoft never managed to completely kill them, though they tried. Their artificial restrictions on their hardware capabilities (for a while they had to max out at a 10.1" display and 1GB RAM) didn't help; if your system exceeded any of the specs you had to buy a full price Windows license ($50 or more even for OEMs) rather than a cheap (later free) one that was restricted to netbooks. It's very difficult to absorb the cost of a $50 software license in a system that will sell for under $200 retail.
Apparently there IS a small minority that wants those tiny netbooks back, thus the crowdfunding projects. Presumably they have some need to run desktop applications and they don't like tablets. The crowdfunded devices are essentially small Windows tablets with a permanently attached keyboard, and work about as well as a tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard in a folio case. (But you don't have to remember to recharge the keyboard as well as the base.)
I don't think any of those systems will ever grow beyond their little niche. It's nice that contract manufacturers can make them inexpensively enough so they can be made for the people who want them. I just hope that all the people who fund the projects actually get their little computers.
The original post conflates two things: netbooks and sub-netbooks (aka pocket PCs). Netbooks never completely went away, although the name went away after it went out of fashion. The first netbook wave had 9" screens, except for the original Eee PC 700 which had a 7" screen but was as big as a 9" system - the small screen was for cost reasons and it had huge bezels. Later they grew in size a bit as technology improved and it was possible to make them in 10-12" sizes that weren't heavy or expensive. The larger size allows for both more screen real estate, a keyboard that is closer to full size and easier to type on, and a better trackpad. Current examples include the HP Stream, the ASUS X205, the Acer Aspire 11.6, and the Dell Inspiron 11.
We also have Chromebooks now. The lower end ones either have hardware similar to the low end PCs mentioned above or use an ARM processor instead. (There are also fancier Chromebooks with Intel Core CPUs and 1080p displays that cost more.) They fill many of the needs that people used to use netbooks for. It's also possible to make them more like a full capability PC by installing Linux, either alongside Chrome OS or in place of it.
Sub-netbooks did go away for a while; tablets took over their niche. (I'm talking about devices that are a true 7" size or smaller and have full keyboards. Many of them are also designed to run full desktop software.) Devices that small don't allow normal touch typing; the technique is either hunt and peck or thumbboarding. The tiny keyboard doesn't have much advantage over a touchscreen keyboard for most users and eliminating the keyboard lowers the cost and weight, so sub-netbooks died as a mass market product.
The recent crowdfunded projects are using inexpensive contract manufacturing to make tiny PCs again. They have the same CPU and display that you'd find in a small Windows tablet (sometimes without the touchscreen) and add a tiny keyboard. They aren't likely to become mass market products again, but the crowdfunded products will satisfy the small minority that prefers that kind of system.
I was shocked to discover that the Seattle train station had no WiFi. The Seattle area is the home of two technology giants, Microsoft and Amazon; they should do better. If Microsoft can sponsor WiFi on the Space Needle campus they can also cover the train station.
That same station was also a dead spot for T-Mobile cell coverage. That would be bad enough in any major city, but Seattle is the home city of T-Mobile US. It is one of those old stone buildings that eat RF, but it's a location that should get special attention from the home town carrier; put a microcell inside the building if necessary, team purple!
If you go farther back, there were many popular performers who did not write their own songs. Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Elvis Presley... all examples of people whose performed songs written by others. The girl groups of the 60s like The Supremes also did not write their songs. More recently there are pop stars such as Madonna, whose early hits were written by others.
On the other hand, singer-songwriters also go back a long way. The performers from the original golden age of blues did their own songs (though those songs often plagiarized other blues songs pretty blatantly) as well as performing songs written by others. Some of the early rock and roll performers like Chuck Berry also wrote songs. In the 60s, groups like The Beatles and The Beach Boys changed expectations; after that, most rock groups primarily performed their own compositions. And the ranks of solo singer-songwriters are legion: Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, and many many many more.
There are performers who are so closely associated with a particular songwriter that they could be considered a team. The Coasters and the songwriting duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller are an early example. More recently you have Elton John and Bernie Taupin.
A properly set up Windows machine will not take minutes to boot, especially if you have an SSD to boot from. (Unless you have a system that simply doesn't have enough RAM. In that case, buy more if you can.) One key is to disable most of those automatic updaters and the programs that want to go resident at boot time. I keep the updaters for Java and Flash and turn off the rest; the latter will be able to go soon and the former is only important because I run development tools like Eclipse that use it.
Windows Update, on the other hand, is a genuine nightmare. If you plug in a brand new computer that has been on the shelf for a few months before you buy it, you're likely to be facing a process that will take hours and require multiple reboots. First, you might need to receive an update to Windows Update itself. Next you have to receive enough updates to be eligible to receive the latest build (Windows 10 terminology, sort of analogous to the old Service Packs), probably followed by a reboot. Then you receive the build; installing that takes THREE reboots though it's all automatic. Then you will probably receive some updates after the installation of the new build, possibly followed by another reboot. And any bundle of patches may include one that requires a DOUBLE reboot because it installs something at kernel level; the system has to reboot, perform an update in Safe Mode, and then reboot again.
If you have an older computer with a version of Windows before Windows 10 and have to reinstall from the installation media it's even worse. That one may involve some initial patches, a service pack, and multiple gigabytes of additional updates because the last service pack for your version of Windows came out a long time ago. (Before Windows 7 it could have even involved installation of MULTIPLE service packs, but Windows 7 made them cumulative.) And all the downloading of updates is unreasonably slow even on a fast connection. I have seen the entire process take 8 hours or more.
And after all of that is done, there is still the little matter of getting updates for your applications. Microsoft's own applications get handled by Windows Update, but everybody else's have their own separate processes that are all over the map. Some have boot-time updaters, some check for updates when you launch them or in the background, and some do nothing at all and count on you to visit the software company's web site from time to time. Device drivers might get updated by Windows Update, by an updater from your computer manufacturer, or by an updater from the maker of the device.
Over on Linux everything is much simpler and faster. ALL the updates are handled by a single program: OS, bundled applications, and third party applications. Downloading them is faster than on Windows, and you only need one reboot.
There are rare Linux updates that involve more than one cycle; they involve updating a very old computer. If you have something from a long way back that is running Ubuntu 10.04 and you want to move to 16.04, you would have to update to 12.04 and then 14.04 before you could go to 16.04. At that point it's probably easier to do a clean install of the new version. And if you ever have to do a clean reinstall of Linux (failure of the boot drive, perhaps) there is no reason to start with the version that was first installed on the computer; just start with the new one.
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If you buy a bare Pi you have a bit of work to do to have a complete general purpose computer. That's appropriate because many of them are sold for embedded systems rather than to be used that way. But people are more computer savvy now and most don't find it a challenge to gather the other parts; if you want something simpler you can buy a complete kit that has it all (Pi board, case, NOOBS card, power supply) in the package. Still a touch of assembly required: you have to put the NOOBS card in the board and the board in the case.
You also have to provide your own keyboard, mouse, and display. (Name brand desktop systems come with a keyboard and mouse, but the display is still a separate purchase unless you buy an all-in-one.) Many people already have those things left over from other projects, and if not your local office supply store or electronics store, or Amazon or eBay, will be happy to sell them to you.
Good point. Even those under-$100 B350 motherboards will take 64GB; all the ones I have seen have four sockets. I have seen pictures of A320 motherboards with two sockets as well as with four, but no A320 boards seem to be available in the real world yet. The small form factor A300 and X300 boards will be limited to two sockets and 32GB when they finally appear.
I doubt that AMD designed in any artificial roadblocks; it's not their style. So that ceiling will increase when larger DDR4 sticks become available. Right now 32GB sticks are only available as registered ECC modules and consumer motherboards don't accept those, but larger unbuffered sticks should be available in the future when higher capacity SDRAM chips are released.
Initially, these are probably all going to be eight core die with some cores disabled. But there are some interesting performance implications depending on what parts of the chip are disabled. It's entirely possible that different six and four core chips of the same model will not perform identically.
At the six core level there are two possible configurations: you could have one where one of the four cores of each complex is disabled, and another where one complex is fully enabled and the other has two cores turned off. Each type would require different process scheduling to perform optimally.
At the four core level you could have chips where one complex is turned off entirely, and also parts where both complexes are partly active. The low end Ryzen 5 1400 has only half as much L3 cache, so it's almost certainly the first type and runs only one complex. The 1500X has the full 16MB of L3 so it's presumably the second type. That could be either 2/2 or 3/1 and each would have to be scheduled differently.
GPUs also do this. A lot of the model differentiation in video cards involves selling of cards that are partially disabled and/or downclocked because they failed to meet specifications with everything turned on. They may have some completely broken parts, they may have failed at the full clock speed, or they may have consumed too much power at that speed. In some cases they actually passed all the qualifications but are sold as lesser (and less expensive) parts because of lack of demand for the most expensive model. When you buy there is no way to know which of those things you got, though you can run tests at home to try to figure it out.
It also happens with parts that don't contain processing power. DRAM comes in a variety of speed grades but they all come from the same fab line; they get sold with various speed ratings (and prices) based on how well they perform when tested.
If keeping down to the 45W TDP level or even lower is a priority you can underclock. But CPUs optimized for really low power consumption will come later, and I suspect they will be APUs rather than processor-only parts. A 15W Zen-based APU will be awesome for applications like HTPCs.
Depends on your usage. The 1600X looks like a better gaming CPU than the 1700 and it's effectively $50 cheaper. (The list price is $80 less but no cooler is included.) On the other hand it will consume more power at peak; the 1600X is a 95W TDP processor while the 1700 is 65W TDP. We won't know what the idle power story is until the Ryzen 5 CPUs are released and benchmarked.
Looks like the i5-7600K and i7-7700K have some serious competition ahead. The AMD parts will cost less than Intel's, even after the recent cuts in street price of those CPUs, and AMD motherboards are also less expensive. By the time they're available, the scheduling issues that are holding back Ryzen's performance in games should be resolved.
The important differences between various generations of CPU don't affect real mode operation, the old school mode that is used to run MS-DOS. They come into play in kernel mode instructions that are used for things like protection, memory management, and multitasking. Some changes have to be made to Windows, as well as other operating systems such as macOS and Linux, every time a new CPU generation becomes available.
In some cases, the new CPU will work with code for older OSes but won't perform optimally. We know now, for example, that the disappointing performance of Ryzen in many games is due in part to the Windows scheduler not being properly optimized for the new CPU architecture. There are three things it does wrong. First, you want to schedule all the cores before you start to schedule the SMT threads; Windows already gets that right for Intel Hyperthreading but not yet for Ryzen's equivalent. Second, if you do schedule SMT threads you want to put threads of the same applications on both threads of a given core. Third, Ryzen has a split L3 cache architecture: cores 1-4 have direct access to one half of the cache and cores 5-8 have direct access to the other half, and cache access to the wrong half is much slower. For optimum performance, the scheduler needs to take that into account, keeping all the threads of an application on one side of the split whenever possible.
It's a false economy. We're talking about knowledge workers here, people who cost the company $100,000 or more per year in salary and benefits. Spending an extra $5,000 on additional office space will pay off if it increases their productivity by more than 5%; that's 100 square feet of $50/square foot office space which is pretty expensive space. (New York City is the only US market where the average cost of office space is that high, though offices in premium locations are more than that in many major cities.) The data shows that it will make a larger improvement than that.
Of course they shouldn't be surprised. THEY are Dilbert cartoons.
This. Totally this. Introverts and extraverts have fundamentally different needs, and managers often don't understand it.
The goal is to make money. But employees who are uncomfortable in their environment tend to be less productive than they could be, which means the company makes less money.
Also, going cheap on computer equipment is incredibly penny-wise and pound foolish. Even top of the line computers are cheap compared to the salaries of the people who use them. Giving your developers a new $5,000 system EVERY YEAR will probably show a net profit, since it needs to increase their productivity by less than 5% to break even. Even if they don't actually need it you'll probably get more than a 5% gain from the Hawthorne Effect.
The fan episodes of Star Trek have often been far more creative and original than the official productions. In particular I'm pointing at Star Trek Into Darkness, a THIRD retelling of the Khan story. Fast and Furious: Warp Factor Eight (excuse me, Star Trek Beyond) was at least a new story, but pretty much ignored the things that Star Trek is traditionally about (like anything that involves thinking) and turned it into an action movie.
Why didn't they film the book as written? Because there are long stretches of exposition about political philosophy that would make for boring cinema. Because some of the outdated attitudes would be difficult for modern audiences if served up straight. But above all, because nobody in Hollywood would fund a movie where the stars spend 75% of their time in armored suits that don't let you see their faces.
Avatar later found the solution to the last problem. Nobody would actually build armored suits with gigantic picture window fronts like the ones in the movie; they would compromise the structural integrity of the suit for no good reason. (MI suits had all sorts of vision augumentation available; nobody would want to settle for what you could see through glass, so that's not a reason for it.) But the design does solve the problem of being unable to recognize the actors.
I like Verhoeven's take on Starship Troopers, while acknowledging that it is a radical departure from what Heinlein wrote. He changed a lot of things: eliminating the armor, full gender integration of the MI that is really Forever War rather than Starship Troopers (brilliantly told in a brief shower scene that delivers the message and titillates the audience at the same time), omitting all the the History and Moral Philosophy, and combining some characters into composites. The treatment of military propaganda (the newsreel segments) has no parallel in the book and changes the message of the story.
I would also like to see a more faithful adaptation someday, though I think it would work better as a miniseries than as a movie. An important reason to want a miniseries is that you COULD include the exposition on political philosophy, which I believe is an important part of the book. It would probably be best to break it into small chunks that get inserted as flashbacks rather than serving it up as one big indigestible lump. Those bits would ruin the pacing of a film, but they would fit nicely into the slower pace of a 6-8 episode series.
Speaking of Heinlein and miniseries, the book of his that REALLY calls out for the treatment is Time Enough For Love. That would probably take about 20 episodes to do properly, though it might be half hour rather than full hour episodes or a mix of lengths. TEFL is a very episodic work so it's a natural for the series format, and you would want the episodes to be long enough so that each one could contain one or more complete scenes from the book. I see it as being an essentially complete version that doesn't leave out any scenes. It would have to be on HBO or a streaming service because the characters would spend a lot of time naked. (Better make sure those sets are well heated!)
The sad truth is that his logic is correct. It is much easier to use anti-discrimination laws in cases of wrongful termination than in cases of unlawful non-hiring. In the hiring case the company can usually come up with some other plausible reason for not hiring you.
It's about health care costs (and secondarily life insurance costs) even more than it is about wages. Even if older workers are willing to work for the same wage they are more costly to employ because their benefits cost more. There is a reason why those greeters at Walmart are over 65 - they're covered by Medicare so Walmart doesn't have to pay for their insurance. (There are also young greeters, but you simply won't find 60 year old workers in the position.)
Yet another reason for universal health care from the government. Taking health care costs off the table for employers will help reduce age discrimination in the workplace.
The life insurance thing mostly applies to executives and professionals; other employees rarely get life insurance as a benefit. Companies don't offer it just out of the goodness of their hearts; what they really want is a policy where THEY are the beneficiary to protect against business losses from the untimely death of a key employee, but they can't do that without also giving you insurance where your heirs benefit.
If the work assigned by an employer has long term health side effects, that employer should pay for them. It applies when astronauts get sick because of being in space. It also applies when asbestos workers get cancer and coal miners get black lung.
That modding as troll was unjustified. It's true that "free" healthcare would be funded by taxes and that should be acknowledged by everybody, including people like me who are in favor of it.
I guess that explains Senator John Glenn.
If price were no object that would be true. A 12-13" system that weighs a mere two pounds is very cool, and they have an adequate amount of computing power for many uses. Or you can step up to a three pound version and get a better display and more computing power.
But a laptop that costs $600 or more (the low end of things that were known as Ultrabooks for a while; the name seems to have fallen into disuse) and a $200 laptop are very different markets. One nice bit of progress is that the little 11.6" laptops are still lighter than the early netbooks, as well as having much better battery life. You were lucky to get 3 hours of use from the original Eee PC; a modern small laptop will provide 8 hours or more.
Microsoft never managed to completely kill them, though they tried. Their artificial restrictions on their hardware capabilities (for a while they had to max out at a 10.1" display and 1GB RAM) didn't help; if your system exceeded any of the specs you had to buy a full price Windows license ($50 or more even for OEMs) rather than a cheap (later free) one that was restricted to netbooks. It's very difficult to absorb the cost of a $50 software license in a system that will sell for under $200 retail.
Apparently there IS a small minority that wants those tiny netbooks back, thus the crowdfunding projects. Presumably they have some need to run desktop applications and they don't like tablets. The crowdfunded devices are essentially small Windows tablets with a permanently attached keyboard, and work about as well as a tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard in a folio case. (But you don't have to remember to recharge the keyboard as well as the base.)
I don't think any of those systems will ever grow beyond their little niche. It's nice that contract manufacturers can make them inexpensively enough so they can be made for the people who want them. I just hope that all the people who fund the projects actually get their little computers.
The original post conflates two things: netbooks and sub-netbooks (aka pocket PCs). Netbooks never completely went away, although the name went away after it went out of fashion. The first netbook wave had 9" screens, except for the original Eee PC 700 which had a 7" screen but was as big as a 9" system - the small screen was for cost reasons and it had huge bezels. Later they grew in size a bit as technology improved and it was possible to make them in 10-12" sizes that weren't heavy or expensive. The larger size allows for both more screen real estate, a keyboard that is closer to full size and easier to type on, and a better trackpad. Current examples include the HP Stream, the ASUS X205, the Acer Aspire 11.6, and the Dell Inspiron 11.
We also have Chromebooks now. The lower end ones either have hardware similar to the low end PCs mentioned above or use an ARM processor instead. (There are also fancier Chromebooks with Intel Core CPUs and 1080p displays that cost more.) They fill many of the needs that people used to use netbooks for. It's also possible to make them more like a full capability PC by installing Linux, either alongside Chrome OS or in place of it.
Sub-netbooks did go away for a while; tablets took over their niche. (I'm talking about devices that are a true 7" size or smaller and have full keyboards. Many of them are also designed to run full desktop software.) Devices that small don't allow normal touch typing; the technique is either hunt and peck or thumbboarding. The tiny keyboard doesn't have much advantage over a touchscreen keyboard for most users and eliminating the keyboard lowers the cost and weight, so sub-netbooks died as a mass market product.
The recent crowdfunded projects are using inexpensive contract manufacturing to make tiny PCs again. They have the same CPU and display that you'd find in a small Windows tablet (sometimes without the touchscreen) and add a tiny keyboard. They aren't likely to become mass market products again, but the crowdfunded products will satisfy the small minority that prefers that kind of system.
I was shocked to discover that the Seattle train station had no WiFi. The Seattle area is the home of two technology giants, Microsoft and Amazon; they should do better. If Microsoft can sponsor WiFi on the Space Needle campus they can also cover the train station.
That same station was also a dead spot for T-Mobile cell coverage. That would be bad enough in any major city, but Seattle is the home city of T-Mobile US. It is one of those old stone buildings that eat RF, but it's a location that should get special attention from the home town carrier; put a microcell inside the building if necessary, team purple!
If you go farther back, there were many popular performers who did not write their own songs. Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Elvis Presley... all examples of people whose performed songs written by others. The girl groups of the 60s like The Supremes also did not write their songs. More recently there are pop stars such as Madonna, whose early hits were written by others.
On the other hand, singer-songwriters also go back a long way. The performers from the original golden age of blues did their own songs (though those songs often plagiarized other blues songs pretty blatantly) as well as performing songs written by others. Some of the early rock and roll performers like Chuck Berry also wrote songs. In the 60s, groups like The Beatles and The Beach Boys changed expectations; after that, most rock groups primarily performed their own compositions. And the ranks of solo singer-songwriters are legion: Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, and many many many more.
There are performers who are so closely associated with a particular songwriter that they could be considered a team. The Coasters and the songwriting duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller are an early example. More recently you have Elton John and Bernie Taupin.
A properly set up Windows machine will not take minutes to boot, especially if you have an SSD to boot from. (Unless you have a system that simply doesn't have enough RAM. In that case, buy more if you can.) One key is to disable most of those automatic updaters and the programs that want to go resident at boot time. I keep the updaters for Java and Flash and turn off the rest; the latter will be able to go soon and the former is only important because I run development tools like Eclipse that use it.
Windows Update, on the other hand, is a genuine nightmare. If you plug in a brand new computer that has been on the shelf for a few months before you buy it, you're likely to be facing a process that will take hours and require multiple reboots. First, you might need to receive an update to Windows Update itself. Next you have to receive enough updates to be eligible to receive the latest build (Windows 10 terminology, sort of analogous to the old Service Packs), probably followed by a reboot. Then you receive the build; installing that takes THREE reboots though it's all automatic. Then you will probably receive some updates after the installation of the new build, possibly followed by another reboot. And any bundle of patches may include one that requires a DOUBLE reboot because it installs something at kernel level; the system has to reboot, perform an update in Safe Mode, and then reboot again.
If you have an older computer with a version of Windows before Windows 10 and have to reinstall from the installation media it's even worse. That one may involve some initial patches, a service pack, and multiple gigabytes of additional updates because the last service pack for your version of Windows came out a long time ago. (Before Windows 7 it could have even involved installation of MULTIPLE service packs, but Windows 7 made them cumulative.) And all the downloading of updates is unreasonably slow even on a fast connection. I have seen the entire process take 8 hours or more.
And after all of that is done, there is still the little matter of getting updates for your applications. Microsoft's own applications get handled by Windows Update, but everybody else's have their own separate processes that are all over the map. Some have boot-time updaters, some check for updates when you launch them or in the background, and some do nothing at all and count on you to visit the software company's web site from time to time. Device drivers might get updated by Windows Update, by an updater from your computer manufacturer, or by an updater from the maker of the device.
Over on Linux everything is much simpler and faster. ALL the updates are handled by a single program: OS, bundled applications, and third party applications. Downloading them is faster than on Windows, and you only need one reboot.
There are rare Linux updates that involve more than one cycle; they involve updating a very old computer. If you have something from a long way back that is running Ubuntu 10.04 and you want to move to 16.04, you would have to update to 12.04 and then 14.04 before you could go to 16.04. At that point it's probably easier to do a clean install of the new version. And if you ever have to do a clean reinstall of Linux (failure of the boot drive, perhaps) there is no reason to start with the version that was first installed on the computer; just start with the new one.