I guess a good niche usage can be showing pictures from digital camera (or phone connected as USB mass storage, or an arranged folder of pictures, or on the Internet), although 16:9 is annoyingly wide.
It's something I can imagine "normal" people to do. Unless you use a computer or device with 1080p or less output, you stand a chance at seeing the additional pixels/high res. Otherwise 4K might be used to read text on the TV (web, pdf, txt,...)
All the TV OS are sleazy and untrustworthy - you might as well buy your TV from Real Player or the Ministry of State Security. So there might be a need or demand or opportunity for a Free OS. Let's say, Ubuntu and Firefox OS are in a good position to provide such a critical software infrastructure. Oh wait!!! No they're not, the basement dwellers and their angry rants won. There's no safe OS for a TV (though maybe you can look at a picture gallery off-line)
Otherwise, in MATE desktop it has moved to GTK3 and so it's GTK3 Caja rather than GTK2 Nautilus yet it's really really close. It's maintained plus a handful features such as closing tabs with middle click. GTK2 applications ported to GTK3 but keeping the UI traditional are a minimal disruption.
Related is the problem of the / partition filling because of the APT cache. You have to go delete the cache yourself. More funny if your / partition contains/home as well and there are zero bytes left (more likely than not if you installed on a 20GB or 30GB drive and tried to do the right thing by not partitioning excessively)
Amiga CD 32 with external keyboard would have been another option. It was blockaded from reaching the US because of a XOR cursor patent! This is what killed the Amiga 1200 and Commodore outright more than anything. It would have sold millions and would have made the A1200 a bit more relevant anyway.. as till Commodore's death Amiga games only targeted the A500. Maybe the A1200/A4000 family would still have had a hard time against the 486 DX 33 and 486 DX/2 66 with Sound Blaster and VLB but with the console version killed in the egg it's hard to know.
It would have to use gaming laptop components, or up to 65W desktop CPU and mobile version of GTX 1080 or some GPU board small enough and not too hungry slanted sideways on a PCIe riser.
300 real watts in that form factor seem a bit much! That might be loud, and the power supply and heatsinks alone will be heavy.
If it ends up looking like an Apple III and weighs as much as the ugly tower this might ruin the point.
It can also run Windows 10 and get access to the Windows Store library. Just kidding here but access to the Android library might be precisely what we do not want. Millions of clones of pay-to-win games, etc. I don't want to get a controller in my hands, scroll a 250-page list of crap and waste $0.99 on something useless or ad-ridden.
Ubuntu would be interesting, they could also eventually bring their Atari game store to Ubuntu desktops/laptops (although there's support costs. I suppose they could require Wayland, which will prune old versions, unsupported drivers). There could be a way to run it in Windows (port the games outright, or just let nerds run it in a VM or Windows 10 WSL). Or they might just not bother and concentrate on making their console work right. Cross-platform games can be cross-platform games.
For a small fanless home console with no other particular defining feature? What about $99. Could be what 3rd world, Brazil etc. are looking for. Places that run on a solar panel and 4G, because their nation can't afford $200 billion to invest in power grid and fixed data network. Even in the 1st world, 10W kids machine is cheaper to run than $300 200W bro-gamer machine.
Importantly x86 gives you about the best GPU drivers. This will be either Intel or AMD, perhaps Intel is not really great on that front but not really bad either. An nvidia ARM chip also gives you a top notch GPU driver but their one current chip's production, the Tegra X1 goes entirely to Nintendo Switch surely.
Android gaming on phones is a thing so I suppose you can get something workable there also, but you will be stuck to a particular Android version or a couple ones. We have enough Android crap as is and the Android SoC vendors aren't known for decade-long support. You can do custom google-less Android but with low end x86 you can easily go linux or FreeBSD as well. Yes there's linux and FreeBSD on ARM SoCs with 3D acceleration and such but outside Raspberry Pi and Nvidia Tegra it looks like a wasteland to me, am I right?
Or more accurately no 3.5mm jack. You can add a USB DAC perhaps but if this is a small, low end low power console we won't necessarily connect it to a proper TV or gasp, an oversized overpriced AV receiver. It could go to a monitor, or a video projector, or be used as a music player so easy cheap audio out is welcome if you can put it in, thanks.
Beer/soda can can be cut in some simple way and used as a small burner for alcohol fuel. This should make feel warm?
In my western european country I can recycle them by throwing into a special street trash can for non-glass recyclable shit but there's nothing to be earned. Beers in glass bottles are a strange affair : you throw them in the glass with everything else. No deposits. Except for Belgian beers, which have a 10c deposit! and that works in a few dedicated beer shops at least. (the other thing that's known is coke bottles, but only bar/restaurant staff deals with that)
I want to agree fully with your rant, but the multi-touch screen made it. The pinch zoom gesture to view pictures and full web pages is maybe the defining feature. Also, older wifi was about obsolete by 2007 (802.11b or WEP)
I remember Windows XP reporting all sizes in thousands of KiB (effectively - it gave you file size in KiB, displayed in a way such as 720,000 KB). I think Win 9x did the same. Best to deal with floppies surely but it made for some "fun" when burning CDs.
Sure but European Court of Human Rights is not related to the EU. This ought to be known, and this makes leaving the convention related to it not a part of a mandate given by brexit referendum.
No, they're not. A brain is a neural network as much as a tree (plant) is a tree (data structure)
I say that with a bit of rhetorical fun, but neural networks aren't actually made from neurons. They don't get drunk and have sex (in no particular order). They don't have a chemical nature and unknown features not the computer "neurons" have DNA.
I hope you're being confused by the situation (well I don't wish confusion for you) As far as I know Debian drops support for older 32bit x86 CPU, but does not drop support for 32bit x86 CPU. CPU compliant with i486 and i586 will be dropped, while CPU compliant with i686 will work.
This should mean an AMD K6/2 won't run, but a Pentium Pro will run (due to some missing or broken instruction or feature in the K6). An Athlon (original and XP) will run but might be unable to run certain software that requires SSE2, such as Firefox 52 and linux versions of evil software. AMD Geode won't run, or maybe might, I don't know. Cyrix won't run.
Pentium, Pentium MMX and 80486 definitely won't run. Although I imagine some people might make an unofficial, unsupported i486 version (no idea how hard it'll be but in the same way you still can find some Ubuntu for PowerPC Macs)
I think that by the way, Pentium Pro or Pentium II 233 machines are more likely to have survived to this day than K6/2 450 and such. Unless you have uncommon specialty hardware we shouldn't have to fear anything about the old desktops with 512MB and 1GB RAM.
New hardware generations still are coming up. Just like they likely can't run NT 4.0 on their current PC, they'll eventually be unable to run Win 7 on what will come out (or can't be arsed to hack in Win 7 drivers into the installation media, or what about when low end NVMe storage becomes available, if it eventually does)
Yes if some shit from the mid 90s runs on Win 7 and runs on Win 10 it will likely keep on running for a good while. Even Wine supports win16. This is not exactly advanced technology. You might as well complain that a crappy old program like vi still runs under linux/unix/other, and that it should be remade as a gnome 3 application.
Wow your username is the name of yet another chat or video service (I don't know) that only runs on some limited platform and will likely be shuttered in a couple years by the company that makes it (Google)
It's about Xbox One performance you dumb smug nut. Don't you remember graphics cards like Ati Rage Pro, Matrox and whatever could do 1600x1200 back when you were in your diapers.
The applications using a small fraction of the GPU power would be : HTML, PDF, desktop publishing, terminal emulators, picture editing, and also some 3D shit like Google Earth requires very little GPU power.
Fuck, if Intel graphics from 2007 were more than enough for Vista/7 "Aero" in 1680x1050 don't you think something at least 10x faster will do the job in 3840x2160? What about piece of shit phones that have 1920x1080 or more? Do you know what's GDDR5 or DDR4 memory?
Now, Apple is a scam, but the 21.5" iMac is not terribly bad. It's not an Apple laptop at least. It would be feasible to get one, then wait for the warranty to be over, crack it open, replace the 8GB memory with 32GB and the hard drive with a better one. Though by all means, get a linux desktop if you prefer it.
If that's the problem, you can wipe the OS and install a linux distro, then the 5400 rpm HDD will be fast enough. Even with things bloating up (GTK3 instead of GTK2, etc.) it's stayed reasonable and this kind of hard drive does above 100 MB/s.
It makes me think of the Atari ST. (I don't know about original and black and white Macs as those were more of a rarity)
The primary or even only way to interact with it was the file system, which was very simple : icon for the A drive on the desktop, double-click it, a window opens with an icon for each file. Only other way to do things was the top menu bar, "stolen" from Macintosh. But as the entire OS and GUI are in ROM, the file manager only dealt with user files and external programs stored on floppies. I'm sure you might do something stupid like deleting the programs on your floppies but floppies had the physical write protect tab to make them a bit fool proof. Anyway, I'm sure the iPad would be similar in displaying only user files and no system files at all. Just like my dumbphone does by the way!
But how many weird scripts are there in the region? How many languages are there in India and immediate neighbors that we've never heard of?
For an example there's Tamil script and language, which makes me think of Thai script - only because Thai script is different from other scripts (Thailand is far off, but so is Tamil area itself compared to other India's regions). Both are obviously different from what I will call the Sanskrit-like script : this one is the one where letters are jointed at the top - now I am 99% sure there must be several ones like that, but this description should do the job ; I am talking about what I think is the well known "Indian" script.
There will forever be an unknowable to me number of cultures, languages, regionalisms in India (e.g., in other countries : I will never know about every Chinese language, or about every German dialect) though this is balanced by nation building. (e.g., there must be a number of Chinese who learned Mandarin as a second or first language and are able to understand what's said in the news or in some official texts)
In other areas of the Earth you have similar things going : Georgian script, Armenian script. Europe has pretty mild variations of Latin script (such as Danish, French, Norwegian, other languages where "ij" might be a letter) and this makes a QWERTY US keyboard a bit of a problem already. Albeit you might use one line on the bottom of a touchscreen as a "touch bar" for accented and other letters.
I hate to be the guy that defends touch keyboards:) as I would otherwise advocate for real keyboards. On laptops, you might standardize the keyboard a little bit (as in be able to buy a replacement keyboard and stick it on a laptop) and then have different printed letters - you might even have room for both Latin labels and non Latin labels. Even there we could make do with better standardization of keyboards i.e. imagine you can use a keyboard meant for an Acer laptop on a Dell laptop. On phones it's harder. Or maybe we could go back to having a 12-key numpad, on which arbitrary input methods may be implemented.
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I guess a good niche usage can be showing pictures from digital camera (or phone connected as USB mass storage, or an arranged folder of pictures, or on the Internet), although 16:9 is annoyingly wide.
It's something I can imagine "normal" people to do. Unless you use a computer or device with 1080p or less output, you stand a chance at seeing the additional pixels/high res. ...)
Otherwise 4K might be used to read text on the TV (web, pdf, txt,
All the TV OS are sleazy and untrustworthy - you might as well buy your TV from Real Player or the Ministry of State Security. So there might be a need or demand or opportunity for a Free OS. Let's say, Ubuntu and Firefox OS are in a good position to provide such a critical software infrastructure. Oh wait!!! No they're not, the basement dwellers and their angry rants won. There's no safe OS for a TV (though maybe you can look at a picture gallery off-line)
GTK2 Nautilus is included in RHEL 6 :)
Otherwise, in MATE desktop it has moved to GTK3 and so it's GTK3 Caja rather than GTK2 Nautilus yet it's really really close. It's maintained plus a handful features such as closing tabs with middle click. GTK2 applications ported to GTK3 but keeping the UI traditional are a minimal disruption.
Related is the problem of the / partition filling because of the APT cache. You have to go delete the cache yourself. More funny if your / partition contains /home as well and there are zero bytes left (more likely than not if you installed on a 20GB or 30GB drive and tried to do the right thing by not partitioning excessively)
Amiga CD 32 with external keyboard would have been another option.
It was blockaded from reaching the US because of a XOR cursor patent!
This is what killed the Amiga 1200 and Commodore outright more than anything. It would have sold millions and would have made the A1200 a bit more relevant anyway.. as till Commodore's death Amiga games only targeted the A500.
Maybe the A1200/A4000 family would still have had a hard time against the 486 DX 33 and 486 DX/2 66 with Sound Blaster and VLB but with the console version killed in the egg it's hard to know.
It would have to use gaming laptop components, or up to 65W desktop CPU and mobile version of GTX 1080 or some GPU board small enough and not too hungry slanted sideways on a PCIe riser.
300 real watts in that form factor seem a bit much! That might be loud, and the power supply and heatsinks alone will be heavy.
If it ends up looking like an Apple III and weighs as much as the ugly tower this might ruin the point.
There would be a 150-game pirate cartridge made even before the adapter is available :)
If parts of the CPU reach 80C but it never crashes and works for 20 years, I don't see much wrong in that.
It can also run Windows 10 and get access to the Windows Store library. Just kidding here but access to the Android library might be precisely what we do not want. Millions of clones of pay-to-win games, etc. I don't want to get a controller in my hands, scroll a 250-page list of crap and waste $0.99 on something useless or ad-ridden.
Ubuntu would be interesting, they could also eventually bring their Atari game store to Ubuntu desktops/laptops (although there's support costs. I suppose they could require Wayland, which will prune old versions, unsupported drivers). There could be a way to run it in Windows (port the games outright, or just let nerds run it in a VM or Windows 10 WSL). Or they might just not bother and concentrate on making their console work right. Cross-platform games can be cross-platform games.
For a small fanless home console with no other particular defining feature? What about $99. Could be what 3rd world, Brazil etc. are looking for. Places that run on a solar panel and 4G, because their nation can't afford $200 billion to invest in power grid and fixed data network. Even in the 1st world, 10W kids machine is cheaper to run than $300 200W bro-gamer machine.
Importantly x86 gives you about the best GPU drivers. This will be either Intel or AMD, perhaps Intel is not really great on that front but not really bad either.
An nvidia ARM chip also gives you a top notch GPU driver but their one current chip's production, the Tegra X1 goes entirely to Nintendo Switch surely.
Android gaming on phones is a thing so I suppose you can get something workable there also, but you will be stuck to a particular Android version or a couple ones. We have enough Android crap as is and the Android SoC vendors aren't known for decade-long support. You can do custom google-less Android but with low end x86 you can easily go linux or FreeBSD as well. Yes there's linux and FreeBSD on ARM SoCs with 3D acceleration and such but outside Raspberry Pi and Nvidia Tegra it looks like a wasteland to me, am I right?
Or more accurately no 3.5mm jack. You can add a USB DAC perhaps but if this is a small, low end low power console we won't necessarily connect it to a proper TV or gasp, an oversized overpriced AV receiver.
It could go to a monitor, or a video projector, or be used as a music player so easy cheap audio out is welcome if you can put it in, thanks.
Beer/soda can can be cut in some simple way and used as a small burner for alcohol fuel.
This should make feel warm?
In my western european country I can recycle them by throwing into a special street trash can for non-glass recyclable shit but there's nothing to be earned.
Beers in glass bottles are a strange affair : you throw them in the glass with everything else. No deposits. Except for Belgian beers, which have a 10c deposit! and that works in a few dedicated beer shops at least. (the other thing that's known is coke bottles, but only bar/restaurant staff deals with that)
I want to agree fully with your rant, but the multi-touch screen made it. The pinch zoom gesture to view pictures and full web pages is maybe the defining feature.
Also, older wifi was about obsolete by 2007 (802.11b or WEP)
I remember Windows XP reporting all sizes in thousands of KiB (effectively - it gave you file size in KiB, displayed in a way such as 720,000 KB). I think Win 9x did the same. Best to deal with floppies surely but it made for some "fun" when burning CDs.
Sure but European Court of Human Rights is not related to the EU. This ought to be known, and this makes leaving the convention related to it not a part of a mandate given by brexit referendum.
No, they're not. A brain is a neural network as much as a tree (plant) is a tree (data structure)
I say that with a bit of rhetorical fun, but neural networks aren't actually made from neurons. They don't get drunk and have sex (in no particular order). They don't have a chemical nature and unknown features not the computer "neurons" have DNA.
I hope you're being confused by the situation (well I don't wish confusion for you)
As far as I know Debian drops support for older 32bit x86 CPU, but does not drop support for 32bit x86 CPU.
CPU compliant with i486 and i586 will be dropped, while CPU compliant with i686 will work.
This should mean an AMD K6/2 won't run, but a Pentium Pro will run (due to some missing or broken instruction or feature in the K6). An Athlon (original and XP) will run but might be unable to run certain software that requires SSE2, such as Firefox 52 and linux versions of evil software.
AMD Geode won't run, or maybe might, I don't know.
Cyrix won't run.
Pentium, Pentium MMX and 80486 definitely won't run. Although I imagine some people might make an unofficial, unsupported i486 version (no idea how hard it'll be but in the same way you still can find some Ubuntu for PowerPC Macs)
I think that by the way, Pentium Pro or Pentium II 233 machines are more likely to have survived to this day than K6/2 450 and such.
Unless you have uncommon specialty hardware we shouldn't have to fear anything about the old desktops with 512MB and 1GB RAM.
New hardware generations still are coming up. Just like they likely can't run NT 4.0 on their current PC, they'll eventually be unable to run Win 7 on what will come out (or can't be arsed to hack in Win 7 drivers into the installation media, or what about when low end NVMe storage becomes available, if it eventually does)
Yes if some shit from the mid 90s runs on Win 7 and runs on Win 10 it will likely keep on running for a good while. Even Wine supports win16. This is not exactly advanced technology. You might as well complain that a crappy old program like vi still runs under linux/unix/other, and that it should be remade as a gnome 3 application.
Wow your username is the name of yet another chat or video service (I don't know) that only runs on some limited platform and will likely be shuttered in a couple years by the company that makes it (Google)
And did you know that Firefox Hello solves the problem of getting your WebRTC session to work between two browsers?
Oh wait...
Yet ISPs typically provide their users a home router / modem / access point combo, with a web GUI that includes a section for port forwarding.
I think it's a bit nuts to expect people to have a home server though. (and maintain it for a decade, if you want to buffer messages this long)
It's about Xbox One performance you dumb smug nut. Don't you remember graphics cards like Ati Rage Pro, Matrox and whatever could do 1600x1200 back when you were in your diapers.
The applications using a small fraction of the GPU power would be : HTML, PDF, desktop publishing, terminal emulators, picture editing, and also some 3D shit like Google Earth requires very little GPU power.
Fuck, if Intel graphics from 2007 were more than enough for Vista/7 "Aero" in 1680x1050 don't you think something at least 10x faster will do the job in 3840x2160? What about piece of shit phones that have 1920x1080 or more? Do you know what's GDDR5 or DDR4 memory?
Now, Apple is a scam, but the 21.5" iMac is not terribly bad. It's not an Apple laptop at least. It would be feasible to get one, then wait for the warranty to be over, crack it open, replace the 8GB memory with 32GB and the hard drive with a better one. Though by all means, get a linux desktop if you prefer it.
There's nothing insidious about raping your wife, because we have condoms these days.
If that's the problem, you can wipe the OS and install a linux distro, then the 5400 rpm HDD will be fast enough. Even with things bloating up (GTK3 instead of GTK2, etc.) it's stayed reasonable and this kind of hard drive does above 100 MB/s.
It makes me think of the Atari ST. (I don't know about original and black and white Macs as those were more of a rarity)
The primary or even only way to interact with it was the file system, which was very simple : icon for the A drive on the desktop, double-click it, a window opens with an icon for each file. Only other way to do things was the top menu bar, "stolen" from Macintosh.
But as the entire OS and GUI are in ROM, the file manager only dealt with user files and external programs stored on floppies. I'm sure you might do something stupid like deleting the programs on your floppies but floppies had the physical write protect tab to make them a bit fool proof.
Anyway, I'm sure the iPad would be similar in displaying only user files and no system files at all. Just like my dumbphone does by the way!
But how many weird scripts are there in the region?
How many languages are there in India and immediate neighbors that we've never heard of?
For an example there's Tamil script and language, which makes me think of Thai script - only because Thai script is different from other scripts (Thailand is far off, but so is Tamil area itself compared to other India's regions). Both are obviously different from what I will call the Sanskrit-like script : this one is the one where letters are jointed at the top - now I am 99% sure there must be several ones like that, but this description should do the job ; I am talking about what I think is the well known "Indian" script.
There will forever be an unknowable to me number of cultures, languages, regionalisms in India (e.g., in other countries : I will never know about every Chinese language, or about every German dialect) though this is balanced by nation building. (e.g., there must be a number of Chinese who learned Mandarin as a second or first language and are able to understand what's said in the news or in some official texts)
In other areas of the Earth you have similar things going : Georgian script, Armenian script. Europe has pretty mild variations of Latin script (such as Danish, French, Norwegian, other languages where "ij" might be a letter) and this makes a QWERTY US keyboard a bit of a problem already. Albeit you might use one line on the bottom of a touchscreen as a "touch bar" for accented and other letters.
I hate to be the guy that defends touch keyboards :) as I would otherwise advocate for real keyboards.
On laptops, you might standardize the keyboard a little bit (as in be able to buy a replacement keyboard and stick it on a laptop) and then have different printed letters - you might even have room for both Latin labels and non Latin labels. Even there we could make do with better standardization of keyboards i.e. imagine you can use a keyboard meant for an Acer laptop on a Dell laptop.
On phones it's harder. Or maybe we could go back to having a 12-key numpad, on which arbitrary input methods may be implemented.