...there is still some nerd sex appeal to the possibilities of trunk mounted PC. What possibilities at my command, what freedom from the confines of the factory "infotainment" system.
What a great way to broadcast the guy who breaks your side window to the internet (be sure to take a photo for insurance).
I paid $260 and $300 for the two earlier generation Fit PCs I have, and I love them. Getting a little long in the tooth now but they still work great as light duty headless servers. What do I like most about them? The anodized extruded aluminum box secured with bog standard cross head machine screws. Industrial art for my jaded eyes.
I believe that was his point. Nobody besides a fanatic or clueless rich guy buys a high end PC these days, as witness the market statistics. Even highly paid engineers are now making do with years old gear that was never top of the line in the first place. So it goes.
My only worry is with the AMD/ATi video, but it's been a long time since I had been burned by the ATi 7500 All-in-Wonder...
That stopped being a worry a few years back. I've been running Radeon graphcs exclusively and continuously now for years. I switched from fglrx to exclusively Xorg drivers a few years back, at first with some noticeable loss of functionality and performance, but now... no worries, it is way past good enough. BTW, that is not just normal desktop loads but a lot of serious OpenGL hacking. For a coulple of years I put up with jaggies... no antialiasing support (though I hacked some myself with buffer accumulation, only applicable to my own code.) Now the Xorg drivers have MSAA antialising for all recent hardware and MLAA up to Evergreen with the last few generations apparently just needing testing. (MLAA is full screen smoothing just of detectable edges, slightly crappier but way faster than multisampling.)
By way of illustration:
lspci | grep Radeon 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Park [Mobility Radeon HD 5430] 01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cedar HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5400/6300 Series]
The 25 users are all me, last reboot was a power failure that outlasted my UPS. I guess you could call that stable:) I know, I know, 5430, the machine beside it has a much better card. But the 5430 is surprisingly good and - most important to me - completely, utterly silent. And I can push a million triangles per frame through it at video rates, not bad for an ancient card that set me back all of $50.
I haven't tried many 3D games, but I can report that Civ V works just fine with Xorg drivers, the only serious problem being the risk of getting permantly sucked into the game and losing touch with real life.
Their previous offerings have been in the $300 range, I have two of them from a few years back. Beautiful, understated and rugged engineering. Due to the technology of the day, somewhat underpowered but they still manage debian with KDE, short of smooth video playback or 3D animation. With wifi and a hard disk they run a bit hot at 11 watts, but with 100 MHz ethernet and a SSD they drop down to less than 4 watts.
I certainly do not begrudge them their relatively high price point in the past, it allowed their boutique business to survive until technology caught up with them. Now, with the kickass AMD graphics, improved mips/watt, more memory and half the price, they land firmly in the buy it and try it zone. Remember Shuttle? We all hoped they would keep pushing the envelope of light and tight, but they lost the plot and devolved to just another mediocre box maker.
This new generation of Fit PCs should now be just about perfect for video playing, and even work decently for legacy 3D games, but don't even think about the latest Far Cry. Or the latest Windows for that matter, if you want it to be not a toy then it better be running Linux, you have been warned.
These little boxes are just about as perfect as you can get for a home server. Completely silent, can be exanded to as much usb storage as you want, the right network connectivity, enough memory. The tiny power envelope means "always on" is a no brainer. Also decent for a non-professional browsing/emailing box capable of running drawing programs but not engineering CAD. Gimp but not Photoshop (unless you are truly patient...) Blender but not Maya.
I really appreciate the return to the straight box form factor. Their previous couple of generations are curvy and cute, but what practical sense does that make? I will take squat and homely, but stacks nicely, any day. That is beautiful to me. Much like the way I like my stero amplifier.
So long as Android fails to gain the UI functionality you actually need for productivity apps, these tiny PCs have a niche to grow in, and needless to say, these are fully functional with completely "libre" software with all the benefits that entails, not at all the case with Android.
No, they didn't pay me to write this post or send me a free machine. I just really like the way they engineer their boxes, their general attitude, and their stick-with-it-ness, and needless to say, their first class Linux support.
MS recently introduced something called "Windows 8.1 with Bing". Basically they are giving away windows free for low end laptops and tablets on the condition that the PC vendor doesn't change the default search engine.
Wow, it is hard to see how that one is not a blatant violation of the Sherman act that will land Microsoft back in court, let alone running afoul of the Eurocrats once again.
It was "built" on government land with government authorization and according to government directions (see Coolidge) and later finished with government funds. A government work in all but name.
The toll road is a classic embodyment of the "user must pay" theory. I have to ask: given that the toll road will be paid for eventually by taxpayers, why was the road not paid for from government revenue in the first place, rather than inconveniencing every user with a fee collection scheme and helping to drive the wedge deeper between the haves and have-nots? I view every toll road as a failure of government. Either the road is a net benefit and the system of apportioning government funds to it failed to function correctly, or the road is not a net benefit and the process of determining whether it should be built in the first place failed to function correctly. Either way, each toll road constitutes a failure of government and a net devaluation of infrastructure. The situation becomes even more starkly counterproductive when the government fails entirely to serve the common good by granting a monopoly on public infrastructure to a private firm, that is, a private toll road. Of course the government should not be building private driveways for rich people, which does happen, but that too is a failure of government.
Naturally, there are shades of grey and overconsumption certainly can become an issue. The correct remedy is to restrict consumption of shared infrastructure where necessary, not to impose user fees, which are regressive in terms of providing service to those least able to provide it for themselves and are a net cost to society in their own right.
The article only briefly mentions the fact that PC prices fell a lot while volumes only increased marginally. In spite of the click bait headline, the PC market still smells like one big load of wither. Oh I forget, Microsoft isn't sharing the pain because they didn't drop their per unit monpoly winnings... for now.
Many roads benefit taxpayers whether they use them or not, for example, roads that carry freight, or roads that take the load away from other roads that the taxpayer does use. So while a taxpayer may not be willing to pay in the hopes that somebody else will, the taxpayer still better pay. That is why having a government and tax laws is not necessarily all bad.
That is a wild exaggeration. Though personally I would like it to just die, the most you can say at the moment is that its exponential growth phase is over, and thus is rapidly losing share to other platforms that are still growing exponentially. It served its purpose and continues to carry much of the workload on the web but its glory days are over. Thankfully.
To me, the reason that LAMP must die is more the "M" part... MySQL. Given that somebody can't perceive the flaws in PHP it may not be any surprise that they fail to see what is wrong with the massive travesty called MySQL (see: ACID violation). Not that JS is an admirable improvement over PHP by any means, but if at least it helps wean masses of frontline weanies off of MySQL then it serves a worthwhile purpose. BTW, Postgres now gets lots of design wins in MEAN stack projects for (the many) cases where full relational db support is actually needed, or faster to bring up than a hand rolled MongoDB effort.
C++ also (usually) produces the fastest executables, the smallest binaries and the lowest memory consumption. It also scales better for large scale software engineering, as witness the fact that it completely dominates the engineering CAD industry. Downside is, development is slower, skilled developers are harder to hire, and some popular libraries might not have C++ equivalents. On the whole, C++ projects regularly achieve a level of reliability and performance that has proved difficult to impossible for the typical sloppy scripting project.
It's easy for us in the US to decry China building massive projects...
Somebody was decrying? Slight terminology skew, perhaps you meant "deride", which does seem to be the intent of mischaracterizing infrastructure projects as showcases. Any American who feels the urge to to deride other country's showcases should just mutter "Mount Rushmore" to themselves.
The state of repair of US roads in general, from freeways to alleys, ought to be a major embarrassment to every American. No wonder that American cars have loose springs.
I hardly think so. For one thing, it is wrong to talk about "a" great wall, it is actually a sprawling agglomeration of many walls built over hundreds of years. Its primary function was a matter of survival, a military means of countering attacks from various upstarts in the north.
An all flash array is as impractical now as a single SSD drive was 10 years ago (or 15)
Flash drives have been on the market for 35 years. Those drives have always been practical for someone, and flash arrays that are shipping right now are practical for someone. The cost equation for flash arrays is the same, including variables like how much money your application earns or saves by running faster and cooler, and whether your application does not actually need a whole lot of space.
You missed the point. "Very slim" is fundamentally different from "never, ever". This is not a question of "theoretically", it is a question of truth. Play fast and lose with logic like that and fail your thesis. Of course for the average Joe it hardly matters, but to anybody schooled in logic, imprecision of that kind is unacceptable. And this one isn't even subtle.
The thing about this robot is that it only wins over time and many hands...
Indeed. The finite probability of long term loss never goes to zero no matter now perfectly the odds are played, so "never, ever lose" is grossly inaccurate.
...lets be real here, and not blame an entire reliegon of 1.2 billion people for a handful of incidents, and fringe groups...
It is far more than a handful of incidents. For example in Syria, wholesale slaughter is a more accurate description. And it is more than fringe groups. Rather, the lunatics on the front lines are supported by far reaching ideolgical and financial networks with roots in mainstream society.
Hmm, swearing plus lolcat. Attitude plus ignorance. Smells like 12 years old, but don't feel bad, our world needs even you. I will leave the "what for" to your imagination.
Slashdot Mirror
...there is still some nerd sex appeal to the possibilities of trunk mounted PC. What possibilities at my command, what freedom from the confines of the factory "infotainment" system.
What a great way to broadcast the guy who breaks your side window to the internet (be sure to take a photo for insurance).
I paid $260 and $300 for the two earlier generation Fit PCs I have, and I love them. Getting a little long in the tooth now but they still work great as light duty headless servers. What do I like most about them? The anodized extruded aluminum box secured with bog standard cross head machine screws. Industrial art for my jaded eyes.
I believe that was his point. Nobody besides a fanatic or clueless rich guy buys a high end PC these days, as witness the market statistics. Even highly paid engineers are now making do with years old gear that was never top of the line in the first place. So it goes.
My only worry is with the AMD/ATi video, but it's been a long time since I had been burned by the ATi 7500 All-in-Wonder...
That stopped being a worry a few years back. I've been running Radeon graphcs exclusively and continuously now for years. I switched from fglrx to exclusively Xorg drivers a few years back, at first with some noticeable loss of functionality and performance, but now... no worries, it is way past good enough. BTW, that is not just normal desktop loads but a lot of serious OpenGL hacking. For a coulple of years I put up with jaggies... no antialiasing support (though I hacked some myself with buffer accumulation, only applicable to my own code.) Now the Xorg drivers have MSAA antialising for all recent hardware and MLAA up to Evergreen with the last few generations apparently just needing testing. (MLAA is full screen smoothing just of detectable edges, slightly crappier but way faster than multisampling.)
By way of illustration:
lspci | grep Radeon
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Park [Mobility Radeon HD 5430]
01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cedar HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5400/6300 Series]
$ uptime
18:17:28 up 169 days, 4:44, 25 users, load average: 0.62, 1.18, 1.40
The 25 users are all me, last reboot was a power failure that outlasted my UPS. I guess you could call that stable :) I know, I know, 5430, the machine beside it has a much better card. But the 5430 is surprisingly good and - most important to me - completely, utterly silent. And I can push a million triangles per frame through it at video rates, not bad for an ancient card that set me back all of $50.
I haven't tried many 3D games, but I can report that Civ V works just fine with Xorg drivers, the only serious problem being the risk of getting permantly sucked into the game and losing touch with real life.
Their previous offerings have been in the $300 range, I have two of them from a few years back. Beautiful, understated and rugged engineering. Due to the technology of the day, somewhat underpowered but they still manage debian with KDE, short of smooth video playback or 3D animation. With wifi and a hard disk they run a bit hot at 11 watts, but with 100 MHz ethernet and a SSD they drop down to less than 4 watts.
I certainly do not begrudge them their relatively high price point in the past, it allowed their boutique business to survive until technology caught up with them. Now, with the kickass AMD graphics, improved mips/watt, more memory and half the price, they land firmly in the buy it and try it zone. Remember Shuttle? We all hoped they would keep pushing the envelope of light and tight, but they lost the plot and devolved to just another mediocre box maker.
This new generation of Fit PCs should now be just about perfect for video playing, and even work decently for legacy 3D games, but don't even think about the latest Far Cry. Or the latest Windows for that matter, if you want it to be not a toy then it better be running Linux, you have been warned.
These little boxes are just about as perfect as you can get for a home server. Completely silent, can be exanded to as much usb storage as you want, the right network connectivity, enough memory. The tiny power envelope means "always on" is a no brainer. Also decent for a non-professional browsing/emailing box capable of running drawing programs but not engineering CAD. Gimp but not Photoshop (unless you are truly patient...) Blender but not Maya.
I really appreciate the return to the straight box form factor. Their previous couple of generations are curvy and cute, but what practical sense does that make? I will take squat and homely, but stacks nicely, any day. That is beautiful to me. Much like the way I like my stero amplifier.
So long as Android fails to gain the UI functionality you actually need for productivity apps, these tiny PCs have a niche to grow in, and needless to say, these are fully functional with completely "libre" software with all the benefits that entails, not at all the case with Android.
No, they didn't pay me to write this post or send me a free machine. I just really like the way they engineer their boxes, their general attitude, and their stick-with-it-ness, and needless to say, their first class Linux support.
MS recently introduced something called "Windows 8.1 with Bing". Basically they are giving away windows free for low end laptops and tablets on the condition that the PC vendor doesn't change the default search engine.
Wow, it is hard to see how that one is not a blatant violation of the Sherman act that will land Microsoft back in court, let alone running afoul of the Eurocrats once again.
So why can Germans maintain their roads beautifully while Americans can not?
It was "built" on government land with government authorization and according to government directions (see Coolidge) and later finished with government funds. A government work in all but name.
The toll road is a classic embodyment of the "user must pay" theory. I have to ask: given that the toll road will be paid for eventually by taxpayers, why was the road not paid for from government revenue in the first place, rather than inconveniencing every user with a fee collection scheme and helping to drive the wedge deeper between the haves and have-nots? I view every toll road as a failure of government. Either the road is a net benefit and the system of apportioning government funds to it failed to function correctly, or the road is not a net benefit and the process of determining whether it should be built in the first place failed to function correctly. Either way, each toll road constitutes a failure of government and a net devaluation of infrastructure. The situation becomes even more starkly counterproductive when the government fails entirely to serve the common good by granting a monopoly on public infrastructure to a private firm, that is, a private toll road. Of course the government should not be building private driveways for rich people, which does happen, but that too is a failure of government.
Naturally, there are shades of grey and overconsumption certainly can become an issue. The correct remedy is to restrict consumption of shared infrastructure where necessary, not to impose user fees, which are regressive in terms of providing service to those least able to provide it for themselves and are a net cost to society in their own right.
The article only briefly mentions the fact that PC prices fell a lot while volumes only increased marginally. In spite of the click bait headline, the PC market still smells like one big load of wither. Oh I forget, Microsoft isn't sharing the pain because they didn't drop their per unit monpoly winnings... for now.
Many roads benefit taxpayers whether they use them or not, for example, roads that carry freight, or roads that take the load away from other roads that the taxpayer does use. So while a taxpayer may not be willing to pay in the hopes that somebody else will, the taxpayer still better pay. That is why having a government and tax laws is not necessarily all bad.
PHP is a carcass...
That is a wild exaggeration. Though personally I would like it to just die, the most you can say at the moment is that its exponential growth phase is over, and thus is rapidly losing share to other platforms that are still growing exponentially. It served its purpose and continues to carry much of the workload on the web but its glory days are over. Thankfully.
PHP is the P in LAMP...
To me, the reason that LAMP must die is more the "M" part... MySQL. Given that somebody can't perceive the flaws in PHP it may not be any surprise that they fail to see what is wrong with the massive travesty called MySQL (see: ACID violation). Not that JS is an admirable improvement over PHP by any means, but if at least it helps wean masses of frontline weanies off of MySQL then it serves a worthwhile purpose. BTW, Postgres now gets lots of design wins in MEAN stack projects for (the many) cases where full relational db support is actually needed, or faster to bring up than a hand rolled MongoDB effort.
C++ also (usually) produces the fastest executables, the smallest binaries and the lowest memory consumption. It also scales better for large scale software engineering, as witness the fact that it completely dominates the engineering CAD industry. Downside is, development is slower, skilled developers are harder to hire, and some popular libraries might not have C++ equivalents. On the whole, C++ projects regularly achieve a level of reliability and performance that has proved difficult to impossible for the typical sloppy scripting project.
You are clearly the right market for a php movie, or perhaps a gtk movie.
It's easy for us in the US to decry China building massive projects...
Somebody was decrying? Slight terminology skew, perhaps you meant "deride", which does seem to be the intent of mischaracterizing infrastructure projects as showcases. Any American who feels the urge to to deride other country's showcases should just mutter "Mount Rushmore" to themselves.
The state of repair of US roads in general, from freeways to alleys, ought to be a major embarrassment to every American. No wonder that American cars have loose springs.
I hardly think so. For one thing, it is wrong to talk about "a" great wall, it is actually a sprawling agglomeration of many walls built over hundreds of years. Its primary function was a matter of survival, a military means of countering attacks from various upstarts in the north.
An all flash array is as impractical now as a single SSD drive was 10 years ago (or 15)
Flash drives have been on the market for 35 years. Those drives have always been practical for someone, and flash arrays that are shipping right now are practical for someone. The cost equation for flash arrays is the same, including variables like how much money your application earns or saves by running faster and cooler, and whether your application does not actually need a whole lot of space.
You missed the point. "Very slim" is fundamentally different from "never, ever". This is not a question of "theoretically", it is a question of truth. Play fast and lose with logic like that and fail your thesis. Of course for the average Joe it hardly matters, but to anybody schooled in logic, imprecision of that kind is unacceptable. And this one isn't even subtle.
The thing about this robot is that it only wins over time and many hands...
Indeed. The finite probability of long term loss never goes to zero no matter now perfectly the odds are played, so "never, ever lose" is grossly inaccurate.
...lets be real here, and not blame an entire reliegon of 1.2 billion people for a handful of incidents, and fringe groups...
It is far more than a handful of incidents. For example in Syria, wholesale slaughter is a more accurate description. And it is more than fringe groups. Rather, the lunatics on the front lines are supported by far reaching ideolgical and financial networks with roots in mainstream society.
You seem to suggest that there is nothing wrong with inciting others to murder.
Are they still doing it?
Hmm, swearing plus lolcat. Attitude plus ignorance. Smells like 12 years old, but don't feel bad, our world needs even you. I will leave the "what for" to your imagination.