Xposed is in deep alpha on ART, and doesn't work (at all) with stock Samsung Lollipop ROMs.
Maybe they'll fix it sooner instead of, but until then I'm on 4.4.whatever. Switching from Dalvik to ART is kind of a big deal for things like Xposed.
And yes, I realize that Xposed uses improper, and/or undocumented interfaces to do much of its business. But it, and the various tweaks it enables me to perform, gets my S5 from a perfectly reasonable 20-24 hours of battery life to something much closer to 36, while helping to maintain my privacy with AppOpsXposed.
Other than that, I somewhat frequently see updates for more mainstream apps in the Play Store that are Lollipop-related in a "we squashed a show-stopping bug, and it might work OK now" sort of way. I don't recall which ones because I won't be on 5.0 until Xposed works so I just don't care right now, but it is plain to me from these developer utterances that the non-root userland has shifted a bit.
Another car analogy: Suppose my well-hacked hyper-mile car is being towed for whatever reason, and the towing company somehow manages to break the cast oil pan. They don't notice, and I don't notice when I try to restart the car. Badness ensues*.
Someone's insurance company installs a new used engine of appropriate mileage, but this new-to-me engine doesn't support the interfaces I'm used to using for my hackery for whatever reason.
Who's to blame? Nobody, I suppose. I'm not the litigious sort. Maybe I, or someone else on the net, will find the time to similarly hack this subtly-different motor.
And sure, the car still has an engine. But that won't keep me from lamenting about the lost features on my own hardware.....and I'm certainly not going to appreciate the reduction in mileage.
*: This actually happened to my sister's car. Replacing her stock Volvo I5 with a different stock Volvo I5 was a simple thing for someone's insurance company, though.
You mean the $80 adapter that does HDMI, USB A, and USB C "passthrough"?
Because that's all I can find, other than the one that does VGA instead of HDMI.
So it's not "just to get HDMI" -- it's either better, or worse, depending on how one spins it.
Plainly it's not a good laptop for you. And I'm awful goddamn certain that it is definitely not a good laptop for me, because I do plug all manner of random stuff into my computers on a regular basis.
But not everyone does.
Meanwhile, peripherals are sure to get cheaper. This laptop was announced -- what, yesterday? And USB 3.1 passed through the usual standards-body channels only as recently as the end of July?
It's still just USB -- albeit on steroids, and with a different connector. It's electrically-compatible with USB 3.0 and 2.0, and I'd frankly be shocked if actual implementations didn't also work with 1.1 and 1.0.
The market will fill with cheap (first $20, then $12, then $5, [...]) passive adapters that present a USB A connector for plugging in traditional periphery soon enough, and the early adopters will pay Apple $80.
And, yes, we do need a better system than common USB for charging devices: 3.1 is that system, and is said to be capable of delivering 100 Watts.
Do I think it's foolhardy to have a laptop with only one physical external port, especially if charging requires that same port? Yep. But do I give a shit? Nope. I won't buy one, and I frankly don't care if anyone else does or not.
It's not my problem.
(I might buy a laptop with three of them, though, but I also want HDMI -and- DisplayPort -and- Cardbus -and- ExpressCard -and- normal USB A sockets in addition to USB C sockets, -and-...)
It doesn't work with all of the software that I am accustomed to using on my pocket computer(s).
If my old engine did things that were useful to me, and my new one lacks some of those abilities, then I would also say that my car has had features removed.
At least one of the home improvement stores in my town shifts their closing time from 9PM to 10PM during DST, while keeping the same opening time. FTW.
Android does close apps willy-nilly, based on a completely-fucked system of developer-assigned priorities and memory availability.
It also pre-loads apps willy-nilly, because some asshat (or, more probably, a multinational Skype roundtable of asshats) unilaterally decided that unused RAM is wasted RAM, and that one of the first things a device with limited RAM should do is load up every app possible....and then start killing them (see first paragraph) when the user starts using the device in a manner they themselves see fit. (Presumably, they think that CPU time is both free and without contention, that battery is unlimited, and that every IO channel has unlimited bandwidth.)
It also (if your Android device is part of the Google ecosystem with Play Services) has pervasive GPS tracking turned on, so they can do clever things like update their car traffic stats for Maps and Waze and Wifi triangulation database.
I really, really enjoy using my Samsung S5. But it took a fuckton of work to make it usable and have excellent battery life (which are two ways of saying exactly the same thing).
Suggestions: First, root (because you should be doing that anyway) and install Xposed and Greenify and BootManager and AppOpsXposed and and Wakelock Terminator and Titanium Backup (because: backups).
Greenify greedy apps which you have no interest in having run in the background -- ever.
Turn off the on-startup functionality with BootManager for any app that has no f'ing business starting up by itself, slowing the boot process, burning battery, and using more RAM. (Why does Wal-Mart start its app on boot? Why does Pandora have hooks into damn every listening intent on the system, and also start at boot? WTF does my camera app, or Ebay, or Goggles, or friggin' Firefox need to start in the background, at boot?)
Turn off location access for every app that has no business having location access using AppOpsXposed (The Wal-Mart app, which is genuinely useful for checking prices in the store, likes to keep track of where you are using power-hungry actual-goddamn GPS....even if you haven't willfully used it in months. WTF does Pandora care about where I am?)
Disable the wakelocks associated with Google Play Service's mapmaking shit using Wakelock Terminator: Removing com.google.android.gms's wakelocks for NlpCollectorWakeLock and NlpWakeLock completely destroys the battery-sucking background GPS components of Play Services, but leaves all potentially-desirous functionality intact.
And, backups. Titanium Backup is the only way that I'm aware of that actually works for backing up and restoring apps and the settings for those apps, to your choice of cloud provider or an SD card or whatever. (Also works between completely different handsets, and different versions of Android. Lose the phone in the ocean? No problem: You have backups. Just pick up a different phone when you get back on land.)
And...done. Things stay snappy, apps don't suddenly die in the background (within reason), and I have gone over 36 hours between charges on accident without manually doing anything other than the above on a stock battery. (Wifi on, GPS potentially on, 4G radio on, 3G radio on (because: Verizon), BT radio on, NFC alive and kicking, etc.)
Android is an awesome pain in the ass once you wrangle it into something usable.
I, too, remember the dark old days of PC computing...of swap meets and hamfests and "computer shows" to find deals, and toiling through the back pages of Computer Shopper to try to find a vendor who seemed worthwhile and wasn't ripping people off. Of trolling the local electronics surplus store, hoping to find a 5-pin DIN male-to-female non-coiled cable.
Where a Tseng ET4000 outperformed others because it was better at bus throughput, when it really, really mattered. Of setting IRQs, and learning the pitfalls (and successes!) of how to share them on an ISA bus.
I remember a $1900.00 10MHz XT with a CGA monitor, dual low-density floppies, a 20MB ST-225 hard drive, and a Star NX-20 9-pin monochrome tractor-fed printer. Of 8250s vs. 16450s vs. 16550s. Of the RTC in this machine being a separate card with a battery, and requiring a program that ran in autoexec. Of wondering if an NEC V10 CPU was a pin-compatible replacement for my i8088, but never having been able to get my hands on one. And of having printed, bound manuals for every. last. bit. of. hardware, included.
But I digress, which I suppose is easy enough to do. Let's get on with that case:
The good:
It looks solid. Like there's plenty of aluminum there. Like it would fit in nicely next to the exquisitely-machined billet that comprises my $8k Krell CD player (which was an unexpected gift, so don't think that owning a Krell piece means that I'm spendy).
From pictures, if it were oriented like a desktop tower, the heatsink at the top looks to be excellent for dissipating heat without forced-air cooling (lots of gaps for airflow) and heavy enough to conduct that heat to the furthest reaches. The back plate looks plenty thick enough to do much of the same tricks, which is good because that's where voltage regulators seem to like to hang out on motherboards -- radiating their own heat.
The heatpipes themselves look like overkill, which is not a bad thing in the slightest. It's exactly the right size for a mini-ITX motherboard, an SSD (or certainly mSATA), and (presumably) an optical drive. IR support looks like an option from the OEM.
The box, to be clear, is nice. From these high-points, it would make an excellent box for an HTPC, or a small home-oriented desktop that doesn't ever see modern 3D gaming.
The bad:
Obviously, it's $190. Even in the dark old ages of computing, I was spending no more than $80 on a case...and usually closer to $30 (which was worth more then, than it is now).
The concept of the Pico-PSU scares me. Here I am trying to find the best, quietest, and most-efficient Seasonic PSUs for my builds for general reliability, and this thing wants a ratty $40 buck converter fed from a sealed-up Chinese wall-wart. (Of course I could put a quality 12V supply there instead of a wall-wart, but that's got its own issues.) I don't want to be surprised to understand what failure-modes can be encountered with a Pico-PSU.
The future. You espouse that this thing, being mini-ITX, is going to be useful in the future for all of its benefits. I disagree: It's a one-trick pony. HTPC requirements are slowly creeping up (with 4k and all), but power dissipation is dropping like a stone down an open well. By the time such a build needs upgraded, we'll probably be back to passive, CPU-mounted OEM heatsinks like in the 486 days (think Cyrix's 486DX2/66 clone).
Further, the mini-ITX format is due to be eliminated RSN, according to my crystal ball, with modern SoC's and ridiculously low-powered RAM: We just won't need it anymore. How much room do we need for a CPU/APU with graphics, a couple of SO-DIMM slots, a few SATA connectors, some outboard IO, and mSATA (or whatever) for local storage? ITX is huge.
I've built silent PCs. For a long time, I had a K6-2 350 with a huge and open heatsink, running passive, in a gutted (but tall, for chimney effect) box with no removable storage, and a CF card to run Windows XP instead
But USB SATA/IDE adapters are dirt cheap, and are very handy devices to have kicking around. This article reminded me that I need a new one (I own two, but can't find either of them since the last move).
If everyone had one of these that were ever interested in doing things like this, such questions wouldn't happen.
Or geek art: Buy a (cheap!) used PCMCIA ethernet adapter for the old box. Transfer the stuff using Windows and said adapter with an XP machine as an intermediary, and done. (7 doesn't include IPX or Netbios, and 3.11 doesn't include SMB over TCP/IP, but XP can do both.)
After that, re-purpose the old computer. Put an old copy of Slackware on the old laptop, install ncurses, and use the demo clock that ncurses includes. (Bonus points for also using NTP to make it an accurate clock, and for swapping the spinning hard drive for a CF card and a dirt-cheap 44-pin 2.5" IDE adapter.) Hang it on the wall. Use it for twitter feeds. (It uses very little power, especially without spinning rust -- these were the days of "heatsink? for what?")
If I charge for one item than someone else is charging for something that is functionally and internally identical, whose offering would present the better value: My expensive widget, or someone else's cheaper widget?
1. I like to make my own things. I can buy quality organic sauerkraut imported from Poland and made with two ingredients (cabbage, salt) for close to the same price -- and far less labor -- than if making it myself. But I'm learning to make it myself, anyway, for my own selfish and simple pleasure.
1.5. Not everything is about profit. Corporations are beholden to maximize shareholder value; I am beholden only to my own whims.
2. You should get a Nobel prize for your amazing theories on fluid dynamics. (See also: Maple syrup. How do they do it?)
3. It doesn't matter what you "see." It matters if it is functional or not. I don't know if it is, and you don't know if it is. Neither of us have had our hands on this device, much less used one for a season or three.
I've been here a long time, so obviously I certainly haven't read TFA and only briefly skimmed TFS, but I sure can recognize FUD as I see it in #49134319 from user 3612467.
In a strange future where I can have a small hive that keeps my garden pollinated and provides me with the most local of local honey, and so do lots of other people near me, then: Why not?
You also get to sell the hardware, a starter population, any ongoing bee-keeping supplies, and get paid (hourly) to advise and possibly sort out any problems you encounter while on-site.
Personally, where I am, the market allows me to charge individuals no more than about $50 per hour to work on their PCs, so that's what I charge. If they're nearby and schedules don't conflict, I'll make housecalls without a trip charge.
And yes, I'll drive a few miles to your house and inspect/tend to your PC for $50. What's the difference?
Speed depends on the gear that the merchant has, and the process that the consumer uses.
At Kroger, my debit-based magstripe credit card transactions happen nearly instantly -- less than a second -- and I don't have to sign anything if it's under $50.
It goes like this: Swipe card, begin to think about putting it back in my wallet, and the receipt printer goes *whoosh* with a flurry of thermal paper. Put card in wallet, and the clerk is handing my receipt to me by the time my wallet is away.
It takes longer than that less-than-a-second to physically open and close the til to be able to handle cash, let alone actually transact with it.
And if I've got my wits about me, it's even faster: Before the items are even done being rung up, I've generally already got my credit card swiped and selected and put away.
Same with the phone and Google Wallet, at the few places that actually accept it near me: I've generally already done the tap-to-pay thing before the clerk is done ringing things up.
Hmm. You know, I've never had an old, proper WRT54G/S (or the current GL model) die from heat death. I've got dozens of them scattered around. Radios get weak or strange after awhile (electron migration of somesuch), and maaaaybe I remember some swollen filter caps on one (which got repaired), but I don't consider any of that heat-death (and it's not like bad caps weren't ridiculously common for a time from almost every manufacturer of almost anything).
I've had the power supplies dive on me, which is problematic. I find that the old linear supplies are far more reliable than the new switch-mode ones, so I tend to install them with overkill power supplies. (Asus, my current go-to cheap router-wifi-box maker, is no better when it comes to just plain garbage for wall-warts.)
The modded GS I have, I did attach a heatsink to the CPU because I was overclocking it for fun. But that doesn't count.:)
By early routers that didn't route, I mean the BEFSR-whatever-it-was style of garbage that reared its ugly head back when I was still using a *nix PC for routing at home. Grossly inadequate and broken, like a SCSI adapter that never quite works right (even with active termination, new cabling, and the goat blood). Or a client of mine that had a fancy metal-boxed Linksys wired router with many ports and some sort of VPN functionality: It was wonky from day 1, from the complaints. I replaced it with a random (but non-Linksys) switch and a WRT54GL running Tomato, and never had to troubleshoot that side of things ever again.
By switches that suck, I mean blocking 10/100 switches sold for a premium in the day of cheap non-blocking 100mbps with auto MDI/MDI-X. A then-cow-orker bought a bunch of them and scattered them in the field, and they all got replaced with something (anything!) different within a year or two.
DD-WRT seems so splintered: A million different builds, of a million different versions, for a million different things.
For comparison, Tomato is more monolithic. When a new version is prepared for release, all of the different builds are updated to that version. The builds themselves are genericized as much as possible: All old Broadcom-based MIPS routers (think WRT54G) get the MIPSR1 release, for instance.
For everything else, there's OpenWRT.
For my own purposes, I'm sticking with Asus routers. It seems like solid kit, and they sell the same hardware for years and years without the sneakiness that Linksys and Netgear do with routinely completely changing the underlying hardware while keeping the same model number.
(Oh, and Belkin has owned Linksys for almost 2 years now.)
Slashdot Mirror
Xposed is in deep alpha on ART, and doesn't work (at all) with stock Samsung Lollipop ROMs.
Maybe they'll fix it sooner instead of, but until then I'm on 4.4.whatever. Switching from Dalvik to ART is kind of a big deal for things like Xposed.
And yes, I realize that Xposed uses improper, and/or undocumented interfaces to do much of its business. But it, and the various tweaks it enables me to perform, gets my S5 from a perfectly reasonable 20-24 hours of battery life to something much closer to 36, while helping to maintain my privacy with AppOpsXposed.
Other than that, I somewhat frequently see updates for more mainstream apps in the Play Store that are Lollipop-related in a "we squashed a show-stopping bug, and it might work OK now" sort of way. I don't recall which ones because I won't be on 5.0 until Xposed works so I just don't care right now, but it is plain to me from these developer utterances that the non-root userland has shifted a bit.
Another car analogy: Suppose my well-hacked hyper-mile car is being towed for whatever reason, and the towing company somehow manages to break the cast oil pan. They don't notice, and I don't notice when I try to restart the car. Badness ensues*.
Someone's insurance company installs a new used engine of appropriate mileage, but this new-to-me engine doesn't support the interfaces I'm used to using for my hackery for whatever reason.
Who's to blame? Nobody, I suppose. I'm not the litigious sort. Maybe I, or someone else on the net, will find the time to similarly hack this subtly-different motor.
And sure, the car still has an engine. But that won't keep me from lamenting about the lost features on my own hardware.....and I'm certainly not going to appreciate the reduction in mileage.
*: This actually happened to my sister's car. Replacing her stock Volvo I5 with a different stock Volvo I5 was a simple thing for someone's insurance company, though.
I couldn't even tell from TFS that it was a website, and not some other manner of site.
You mean the $80 adapter that does HDMI, USB A, and USB C "passthrough"?
Because that's all I can find, other than the one that does VGA instead of HDMI.
So it's not "just to get HDMI" -- it's either better, or worse, depending on how one spins it.
Plainly it's not a good laptop for you. And I'm awful goddamn certain that it is definitely not a good laptop for me, because I do plug all manner of random stuff into my computers on a regular basis.
But not everyone does.
Meanwhile, peripherals are sure to get cheaper. This laptop was announced -- what, yesterday? And USB 3.1 passed through the usual standards-body channels only as recently as the end of July?
It's still just USB -- albeit on steroids, and with a different connector. It's electrically-compatible with USB 3.0 and 2.0, and I'd frankly be shocked if actual implementations didn't also work with 1.1 and 1.0.
The market will fill with cheap (first $20, then $12, then $5, [...]) passive adapters that present a USB A connector for plugging in traditional periphery soon enough, and the early adopters will pay Apple $80.
And, yes, we do need a better system than common USB for charging devices: 3.1 is that system, and is said to be capable of delivering 100 Watts.
Do I think it's foolhardy to have a laptop with only one physical external port, especially if charging requires that same port? Yep. But do I give a shit? Nope. I won't buy one, and I frankly don't care if anyone else does or not.
It's not my problem.
(I might buy a laptop with three of them, though, but I also want HDMI -and- DisplayPort -and- Cardbus -and- ExpressCard -and- normal USB A sockets in addition to USB C sockets, -and- ...)
It doesn't work with all of the software that I am accustomed to using on my pocket computer(s).
If my old engine did things that were useful to me, and my new one lacks some of those abilities, then I would also say that my car has had features removed.
Bad car analogy time:
Before I replace the engine in my car, I must first remove the old one.
That Lollipop includes a Java-esque VM called ART does not mean that Dalvik has not been removed.
Indeed, Dalvik is not there. It was removed and replaced with something rather different.
Words are useful. It is good to understand what they mean.
It might be.
Last I really, really looked into it, the requisite XDA thread said something like "it'll be ready if it ever gets ready, until then naff off."
Perhaps I will look again. I don't consider Xposed to be optional equipment anymore...
Are you using it?
Dalvik.
At least one of the home improvement stores in my town shifts their closing time from 9PM to 10PM during DST, while keeping the same opening time. FTW.
I like DST: It gives me an "extra" hour of daylight after "work" to do productive things that require sunlight.
["Scare" "quotes" intentional.]
Android does close apps willy-nilly, based on a completely-fucked system of developer-assigned priorities and memory availability.
It also pre-loads apps willy-nilly, because some asshat (or, more probably, a multinational Skype roundtable of asshats) unilaterally decided that unused RAM is wasted RAM, and that one of the first things a device with limited RAM should do is load up every app possible....and then start killing them (see first paragraph) when the user starts using the device in a manner they themselves see fit. (Presumably, they think that CPU time is both free and without contention, that battery is unlimited, and that every IO channel has unlimited bandwidth.)
It also (if your Android device is part of the Google ecosystem with Play Services) has pervasive GPS tracking turned on, so they can do clever things like update their car traffic stats for Maps and Waze and Wifi triangulation database.
I really, really enjoy using my Samsung S5. But it took a fuckton of work to make it usable and have excellent battery life (which are two ways of saying exactly the same thing).
Suggestions: First, root (because you should be doing that anyway) and install Xposed and Greenify and BootManager and AppOpsXposed and and Wakelock Terminator and Titanium Backup (because: backups).
Greenify greedy apps which you have no interest in having run in the background -- ever.
Turn off the on-startup functionality with BootManager for any app that has no f'ing business starting up by itself, slowing the boot process, burning battery, and using more RAM. (Why does Wal-Mart start its app on boot? Why does Pandora have hooks into damn every listening intent on the system, and also start at boot? WTF does my camera app, or Ebay, or Goggles, or friggin' Firefox need to start in the background, at boot?)
Turn off location access for every app that has no business having location access using AppOpsXposed (The Wal-Mart app, which is genuinely useful for checking prices in the store, likes to keep track of where you are using power-hungry actual-goddamn GPS....even if you haven't willfully used it in months. WTF does Pandora care about where I am?)
Disable the wakelocks associated with Google Play Service's mapmaking shit using Wakelock Terminator: Removing com.google.android.gms's wakelocks for NlpCollectorWakeLock and NlpWakeLock completely destroys the battery-sucking background GPS components of Play Services, but leaves all potentially-desirous functionality intact.
And, backups. Titanium Backup is the only way that I'm aware of that actually works for backing up and restoring apps and the settings for those apps, to your choice of cloud provider or an SD card or whatever. (Also works between completely different handsets, and different versions of Android. Lose the phone in the ocean? No problem: You have backups. Just pick up a different phone when you get back on land.)
And...done. Things stay snappy, apps don't suddenly die in the background (within reason), and I have gone over 36 hours between charges on accident without manually doing anything other than the above on a stock battery. (Wifi on, GPS potentially on, 4G radio on, 3G radio on (because: Verizon), BT radio on, NFC alive and kicking, etc.)
Android is an awesome pain in the ass once you wrangle it into something usable.
I didn't become suddenly rich in my 20's, and I know personally I've done all kinds of stupid, lost all my real friends, etc.
On the other hand, if I were suddenly rich in my 20's I might have been able to finance better choices.
And the external case's USB - IDE chip inherently differs from an external adapter's USB - IDE chip...how, exactly?
Checking reviews is an idea that I'm already behind.
But my point is simple: Only suckers and halfwits think that they "get what they pay for," as if price is some indicator of quality.
(Which one of those are you?)
Thank you for the well-reasoned reply.
I, too, remember the dark old days of PC computing...of swap meets and hamfests and "computer shows" to find deals, and toiling through the back pages of Computer Shopper to try to find a vendor who seemed worthwhile and wasn't ripping people off. Of trolling the local electronics surplus store, hoping to find a 5-pin DIN male-to-female non-coiled cable.
Where a Tseng ET4000 outperformed others because it was better at bus throughput, when it really, really mattered. Of setting IRQs, and learning the pitfalls (and successes!) of how to share them on an ISA bus.
I remember a $1900.00 10MHz XT with a CGA monitor, dual low-density floppies, a 20MB ST-225 hard drive, and a Star NX-20 9-pin monochrome tractor-fed printer. Of 8250s vs. 16450s vs. 16550s. Of the RTC in this machine being a separate card with a battery, and requiring a program that ran in autoexec. Of wondering if an NEC V10 CPU was a pin-compatible replacement for my i8088, but never having been able to get my hands on one. And of having printed, bound manuals for every. last. bit. of. hardware, included.
But I digress, which I suppose is easy enough to do. Let's get on with that case:
The good:
It looks solid. Like there's plenty of aluminum there. Like it would fit in nicely next to the exquisitely-machined billet that comprises my $8k Krell CD player (which was an unexpected gift, so don't think that owning a Krell piece means that I'm spendy).
From pictures, if it were oriented like a desktop tower, the heatsink at the top looks to be excellent for dissipating heat without forced-air cooling (lots of gaps for airflow) and heavy enough to conduct that heat to the furthest reaches. The back plate looks plenty thick enough to do much of the same tricks, which is good because that's where voltage regulators seem to like to hang out on motherboards -- radiating their own heat.
The heatpipes themselves look like overkill, which is not a bad thing in the slightest. It's exactly the right size for a mini-ITX motherboard, an SSD (or certainly mSATA), and (presumably) an optical drive. IR support looks like an option from the OEM.
The box, to be clear, is nice. From these high-points, it would make an excellent box for an HTPC, or a small home-oriented desktop that doesn't ever see modern 3D gaming.
The bad:
Obviously, it's $190. Even in the dark old ages of computing, I was spending no more than $80 on a case...and usually closer to $30 (which was worth more then, than it is now).
The concept of the Pico-PSU scares me. Here I am trying to find the best, quietest, and most-efficient Seasonic PSUs for my builds for general reliability, and this thing wants a ratty $40 buck converter fed from a sealed-up Chinese wall-wart. (Of course I could put a quality 12V supply there instead of a wall-wart, but that's got its own issues.) I don't want to be surprised to understand what failure-modes can be encountered with a Pico-PSU.
The future. You espouse that this thing, being mini-ITX, is going to be useful in the future for all of its benefits. I disagree: It's a one-trick pony. HTPC requirements are slowly creeping up (with 4k and all), but power dissipation is dropping like a stone down an open well. By the time such a build needs upgraded, we'll probably be back to passive, CPU-mounted OEM heatsinks like in the 486 days (think Cyrix's 486DX2/66 clone).
Further, the mini-ITX format is due to be eliminated RSN, according to my crystal ball, with modern SoC's and ridiculously low-powered RAM: We just won't need it anymore. How much room do we need for a CPU/APU with graphics, a couple of SO-DIMM slots, a few SATA connectors, some outboard IO, and mSATA (or whatever) for local storage? ITX is huge.
I've built silent PCs. For a long time, I had a K6-2 350 with a huge and open heatsink, running passive, in a gutted (but tall, for chimney effect) box with no removable storage, and a CF card to run Windows XP instead
But USB SATA/IDE adapters are dirt cheap, and are very handy devices to have kicking around. This article reminded me that I need a new one (I own two, but can't find either of them since the last move).
If everyone had one of these that were ever interested in doing things like this, such questions wouldn't happen.
Or geek art: Buy a (cheap!) used PCMCIA ethernet adapter for the old box. Transfer the stuff using Windows and said adapter with an XP machine as an intermediary, and done. (7 doesn't include IPX or Netbios, and 3.11 doesn't include SMB over TCP/IP, but XP can do both.)
After that, re-purpose the old computer. Put an old copy of Slackware on the old laptop, install ncurses, and use the demo clock that ncurses includes. (Bonus points for also using NTP to make it an accurate clock, and for swapping the spinning hard drive for a CF card and a dirt-cheap 44-pin 2.5" IDE adapter.) Hang it on the wall. Use it for twitter feeds. (It uses very little power, especially without spinning rust -- these were the days of "heatsink? for what?")
If I charge for one item than someone else is charging for something that is functionally and internally identical, whose offering would present the better value: My expensive widget, or someone else's cheaper widget?
1. I like to make my own things. I can buy quality organic sauerkraut imported from Poland and made with two ingredients (cabbage, salt) for close to the same price -- and far less labor -- than if making it myself. But I'm learning to make it myself, anyway, for my own selfish and simple pleasure.
1.5. Not everything is about profit. Corporations are beholden to maximize shareholder value; I am beholden only to my own whims.
2. You should get a Nobel prize for your amazing theories on fluid dynamics. (See also: Maple syrup. How do they do it?)
3. It doesn't matter what you "see." It matters if it is functional or not. I don't know if it is, and you don't know if it is. Neither of us have had our hands on this device, much less used one for a season or three.
I've been here a long time, so obviously I certainly haven't read TFA and only briefly skimmed TFS, but I sure can recognize FUD as I see it in #49134319 from user 3612467.
Now get off my lawn.
In a strange future where I can have a small hive that keeps my garden pollinated and provides me with the most local of local honey, and so do lots of other people near me, then: Why not?
You also get to sell the hardware, a starter population, any ongoing bee-keeping supplies, and get paid (hourly) to advise and possibly sort out any problems you encounter while on-site.
Personally, where I am, the market allows me to charge individuals no more than about $50 per hour to work on their PCs, so that's what I charge. If they're nearby and schedules don't conflict, I'll make housecalls without a trip charge.
And yes, I'll drive a few miles to your house and inspect/tend to your PC for $50. What's the difference?
(And if $50 isn't enough, what is?)
ARM enclosures are free-as-in-beer?
At $190 for the case alone, I can think of at least a hundred reasons not to build a fanless box.
Speed depends on the gear that the merchant has, and the process that the consumer uses.
At Kroger, my debit-based magstripe credit card transactions happen nearly instantly -- less than a second -- and I don't have to sign anything if it's under $50.
It goes like this: Swipe card, begin to think about putting it back in my wallet, and the receipt printer goes *whoosh* with a flurry of thermal paper. Put card in wallet, and the clerk is handing my receipt to me by the time my wallet is away.
It takes longer than that less-than-a-second to physically open and close the til to be able to handle cash, let alone actually transact with it.
And if I've got my wits about me, it's even faster: Before the items are even done being rung up, I've generally already got my credit card swiped and selected and put away.
Same with the phone and Google Wallet, at the few places that actually accept it near me: I've generally already done the tap-to-pay thing before the clerk is done ringing things up.
Hmm. You know, I've never had an old, proper WRT54G/S (or the current GL model) die from heat death. I've got dozens of them scattered around. Radios get weak or strange after awhile (electron migration of somesuch), and maaaaybe I remember some swollen filter caps on one (which got repaired), but I don't consider any of that heat-death (and it's not like bad caps weren't ridiculously common for a time from almost every manufacturer of almost anything).
I've had the power supplies dive on me, which is problematic. I find that the old linear supplies are far more reliable than the new switch-mode ones, so I tend to install them with overkill power supplies. (Asus, my current go-to cheap router-wifi-box maker, is no better when it comes to just plain garbage for wall-warts.)
The modded GS I have, I did attach a heatsink to the CPU because I was overclocking it for fun. But that doesn't count. :)
By early routers that didn't route, I mean the BEFSR-whatever-it-was style of garbage that reared its ugly head back when I was still using a *nix PC for routing at home. Grossly inadequate and broken, like a SCSI adapter that never quite works right (even with active termination, new cabling, and the goat blood). Or a client of mine that had a fancy metal-boxed Linksys wired router with many ports and some sort of VPN functionality: It was wonky from day 1, from the complaints. I replaced it with a random (but non-Linksys) switch and a WRT54GL running Tomato, and never had to troubleshoot that side of things ever again.
By switches that suck, I mean blocking 10/100 switches sold for a premium in the day of cheap non-blocking 100mbps with auto MDI/MDI-X. A then-cow-orker bought a bunch of them and scattered them in the field, and they all got replaced with something (anything!) different within a year or two.
Hasn't that always been the case?
They struck gold with the WRT54G and WRT54GS (I still have a modded GS as a spare). But everything before or since has been garbage.
Their nics are garbage, their switches always suck, and their early routers largely didn't route.
Just sayin'.
Is that a new problem?
(To answer my own question: No, it's not.
DD-WRT seems so splintered: A million different builds, of a million different versions, for a million different things.
For comparison, Tomato is more monolithic. When a new version is prepared for release, all of the different builds are updated to that version. The builds themselves are genericized as much as possible: All old Broadcom-based MIPS routers (think WRT54G) get the MIPSR1 release, for instance.
For everything else, there's OpenWRT.
For my own purposes, I'm sticking with Asus routers. It seems like solid kit, and they sell the same hardware for years and years without the sneakiness that Linksys and Netgear do with routinely completely changing the underlying hardware while keeping the same model number.
(Oh, and Belkin has owned Linksys for almost 2 years now.)