Varying the production more often and with more amplitude decreases the efficiency and increases the maintenance costs. Maybe that's a claim by the power industries but that seems to be a legit one. Like, this stuff is not free and to just build solar and wind capacity (whose nominal megawatts/gigawatts are inflated and capacity factor overestimated) while not caring about the grid is myopic and stupid.
Wind is especially problematic as it can fall off a cliff from one hour to the next and this may happen country-wide. Mind you I believe I'm a pretty hard line environmentalist next to most everyone. I "hate" all those renewables because Germany has shown up what actually happens when you apply the dogmatic, simplistic no-thinking thinking. Higher costs for everyone who pays and the CO2 emissions increasing.
I believe we need new industries that can consume the intermittent surplus energy. E.g. a place that manages a fleet of light trucks (for companies to use and for people to rent for the day), that perhaps routinely does battery swaps, where a shit ton of battery charging happens when it's the cheapest but the power use is strongly coupled to consumption goals, updated every 5 minutes and they may quickly collapse or rise back as dictated by the utility provider or some kind of regulatory structure. I'll call that a "push smartgrid".
Chemical industry with a production that can easily be scaled up/down or rather "scaled out", as per the computer jargon. Well I hope such things can be done (with "reverse fuel cells", water treatment/dessalination, or who knows what) and obviously there would be a lot of engineering and investment needed.
It's used by the Gimp. Seriously! Also, major environments : XFCE, Mate, LXDE ; and many major or common applications. Some of them support a choice of GTK2 or Qt, or GTK2 and GTK3.
No need to break stuff.. And the Gnome team owns GTK3, and has shown itself rather hostile to developers. GTK1 is completely dead, but GTK2 will probably stick around just like some other stuff does (motif, Tk, and the kind of stuff that was already ugly in 1989)
But many people who made GTK3 themes were alienated by the spec changing at every minor version. I have no idea if the thing is settled now, plus a theme has to support GTK2 apps so what is needed is a combined theme working for two or more versions.. Not sure if that's the only reason but e.g. Linux Mint comes with one single theme. I have not tried to get others.
One cost-effective method is called "wood", but while it's underutilized in some first world countries it is grossly overexploited in some other countries (and even causes respiratory diseases)
I use NetworkManager - as it doesn't hang or something on that particular computer and looks good enough, I did not rip it out for wicd - and it does automatically connect to a wifi network, but that does not give actual connectivity on a public or semi-public hotspot. There's still the task of opening a web browser page, have it "hijacked" by the hotspot and do whatever is needed there.
I recommend Filezilla to people for that task, it's DE-independant and OS independant too (runs on both Windows and Linux, probably on others).
Nemo is great, I ran some Mate franken-desktop with it ; now Mate's caja got even more similar (as a fork of Nautilus 2.x) so I believe you would find it to be a very decent option, would you be running a Mate desktop. May I say how I like pcmanfm, too. Though I don't feel like I can easily try the latest version on my current OS. It seems like all nautilus clones are great, except nautilus itself.
Wrong : the 80% efficiency is not electricity but heat + electricity. Or that is what I understand. 80% eletric efficiency would be big news. And even then, maybe the figure is optimistic i.e. apply perfect black paint to a piece of cardboard and you have a 100% efficient device, even though it's of no pratical use.
I hate Gnome 3 as much as anyone, but I once used it on a computer which I assume was probably just debian wheezy (when wheezy was still late testing). It seemed decent at showing one or two windows seemingly guessing where I wanted them to be moved to.. Maybe I can't explain myself about it. It seemed very good at managing a handful terminal and browser windows. While not providing something like a taskbar. Kind of an OpenGL accelerated, black-themed Windows 3.1.
It's not a real desktop environment, but if you have a computer with a recent enough GPU and good enough I/O it might be usable if you think of it as a window manager.
No command 'term' found, did you mean:
Command 'aterm' from package 'aterm' (universe)
Command 'aterm' from package 'aterm-ml' (universe)
Command 'bterm' from package 'bogl-bterm' (main)
Command 'terd' from package 'tcm' (universe)
Command 'kterm' from package 'kterm' (universe)
Command 'xterm' from package 'xterm' (main)
Command 'ferm' from package 'ferm' (universe)
Command 'pterm' from package 'pterm' (universe)
Command 'qterm' from package 'qterm' (universe)
Command 'qterm' from package 'torque-client-x11' (universe)
Command 'qterm' from package 'torque-client' (universe) term: command not found
If I'm in an environment I'm not familiar with (perhaps I never used it at all) I will expect that alt-f2 on *nix or win+r on Windows will give me a "run box" that works at least with raw executable names, but maybe not more than that. So on a random *nix desktop (but maybe not twm or any random weird stuff) I'll hit alf-f2 and then xterm, on Windows I'll hit win+r and then cmd. So I could e.g. shut down Windows 8 the old way without trying to figure out the GUI way.
Not sure what the new wifi feature really is, but if it can automatically log in to the wifi network instead of you doing it with a browser that's a mildly useful and convenient feature. For such a feature to be robust there would be a need for the user to set up that automatic login though (e.g. using epiphany-browser). Some will just require username/password (first form entry/second form entry) but others have a "I agree to terms of service" checkbox and some others might be different still.
If you're going to "change the runlevel to a non graphical startup", you probably know already to hit ctrl-alt-f1 to switch to a VT console, or maybe alt-f2 (then launch xterm) as somewhat of a standard in older gnome and other desktop environments? That'd be easier than finding the terminal in Mac OS X. By the way, I once had trouble finding the terminal in Unity. I don't know what the executable's name is. But xterm is always there, so I could type "xterm" somewhere and have it launched.
But these give you heat as well. It's kind of a heat collector with solar panel piggy backed on. I suppose it saves space and is serviced by the same company, which may not be true of using heat collectors + solar panels, though I'm not sure of the economics. Also where a power grid is available, I would favor using heat collectors alone for heating/cooling/warm water and power grid for power (duh).
While it's not really what the discussion is about, I think I would really like an amber OLED screen (moreso on a mobile device, maybe). It would be high res, readable, cheap, low power and durable. You wouldn't even have to think about color accuracy when cranking the brightness down or up. For a computer phone, you could even have a low latency monochrome touch screen. That's original, isn't it? Thick high quality keys on a solid state ultraportable laptop (with Cortex A7 or 4-watt x86) whose main body has to be thick enough for a RJ45 anyway. (even a COM port : let's pretend it's to set up "IoT" devices)
.. which would be more congruent with a series of anarchical low tech hacks on top of hacks hanging together with strings. So "Système D" would describe the old inits, whereas "systemd" is a big top down and corporate project.
The name "systemd" has arrogance and octopus-like conquest buit-in : the letter "d" classically means a daemon (e.g. sshd is a SSH deamon, in other terms a SSH server) and "system", well that's the "S" in "OS". So it's the daemon that takes over most all administration of your OS.
And presumably it's very good at what it's doing, but pisses off all those that rather use lots of small tools instead, or the situation is frowned upon for political reasons.
Debian stable is an outdated distro, except maybe for a few monthes in its lifecycle. So it is better to use on 10 to 15 year old PCs where it can excel at both grandma computing and PhD computing. Except that those old computers will have trouble running a 3D accelerated desktop. Really, that's a bad idea : it exposes you to driver crashes, hardware instability, overheating or things like 100% CPU use. So, use a recent computer? Fine, but if the graphics card or CPU with integrated graphics is too recent, then you're exposed to driver issues because the drivers are immature, incomplete or hardly working. So you'd better use latest Ubuntu or Linux Mint 17 or the upcoming Mint 17.1.
Running a 2D desktop avoids those issues entirely. For solid 3D support, your computer has to be perfectly antiquated (graphics a bit old, but not too old) and your distro reasonably up to date. Feel free to flame me about how your Intel laptop has always worked or whatever, I speak in general terms and I know some particular stuff works better than some other stuff.
Are you just bound by the single-thread performance? It's a big bottleneck and especially likely to occur if you're waiting on your browser. If I was building a new system I'd think about using a two-thread Pentium G3258 (the only unlocked Intel CPU besides high end i5 and i7) and overclock that to 4.2GHz or so. Then I'd see if I'm satisfied with the performance of Dosbox under linux.
Are you trying to run VNC or similar over bluetooth? That doesn't seem like a great idea. For fast low-latency remote desktops, you now have vid cards encoding the whole thing to H264 or H265 (only gtx 970/980 does the latter for now), but you'll probably want fast wifi or wired networking to use it.
For the rest of your problems, too bad for you. I don't mind it much. Glad to know the Ray Kurzweil types were entirely wrong and that I don't have to fear the rise of Skynet for now.
Specs aren't doubling everywhere anymore. We've been for three years on the 28 nanometer process and the software, hardware features have matured. So now the low end stuff is enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Varying the production more often and with more amplitude decreases the efficiency and increases the maintenance costs. Maybe that's a claim by the power industries but that seems to be a legit one.
Like, this stuff is not free and to just build solar and wind capacity (whose nominal megawatts/gigawatts are inflated and capacity factor overestimated) while not caring about the grid is myopic and stupid.
Wind is especially problematic as it can fall off a cliff from one hour to the next and this may happen country-wide.
Mind you I believe I'm a pretty hard line environmentalist next to most everyone. I "hate" all those renewables because Germany has shown up what actually happens when you apply the dogmatic, simplistic no-thinking thinking. Higher costs for everyone who pays and the CO2 emissions increasing.
I believe we need new industries that can consume the intermittent surplus energy.
E.g. a place that manages a fleet of light trucks (for companies to use and for people to rent for the day), that perhaps routinely does battery swaps, where a shit ton of battery charging happens when it's the cheapest but the power use is strongly coupled to consumption goals, updated every 5 minutes and they may quickly collapse or rise back as dictated by the utility provider or some kind of regulatory structure. I'll call that a "push smartgrid".
Chemical industry with a production that can easily be scaled up/down or rather "scaled out", as per the computer jargon. Well I hope such things can be done (with "reverse fuel cells", water treatment/dessalination, or who knows what) and obviously there would be a lot of engineering and investment needed.
It's used by the Gimp. Seriously!
Also, major environments : XFCE, Mate, LXDE ; and many major or common applications. Some of them support a choice of GTK2 or Qt, or GTK2 and GTK3.
No need to break stuff.. And the Gnome team owns GTK3, and has shown itself rather hostile to developers. GTK1 is completely dead, but GTK2 will probably stick around just like some other stuff does (motif, Tk, and the kind of stuff that was already ugly in 1989)
As long as doing that sort of thing won't kill people by carbon monoxide poisoning, sure.
But many people who made GTK3 themes were alienated by the spec changing at every minor version. I have no idea if the thing is settled now, plus a theme has to support GTK2 apps so what is needed is a combined theme working for two or more versions..
Not sure if that's the only reason but e.g. Linux Mint comes with one single theme. I have not tried to get others.
xcalc is pretty good as a basic calculator, not too ugly and right mix of small but not hiding stuff like 1/x, trig and x^y.
One cost-effective method is called "wood", but while it's underutilized in some first world countries it is grossly overexploited in some other countries (and even causes respiratory diseases)
I use NetworkManager - as it doesn't hang or something on that particular computer and looks good enough, I did not rip it out for wicd - and it does automatically connect to a wifi network, but that does not give actual connectivity on a public or semi-public hotspot. There's still the task of opening a web browser page, have it "hijacked" by the hotspot and do whatever is needed there.
I recommend Filezilla to people for that task, it's DE-independant and OS independant too (runs on both Windows and Linux, probably on others).
Nemo is great, I ran some Mate franken-desktop with it ; now Mate's caja got even more similar (as a fork of Nautilus 2.x) so I believe you would find it to be a very decent option, would you be running a Mate desktop.
May I say how I like pcmanfm, too. Though I don't feel like I can easily try the latest version on my current OS.
It seems like all nautilus clones are great, except nautilus itself.
What is leftist about it? Free subsidies to corporations and a lack of will to do anything about global warming is a right-wing thing.
Wrong : the 80% efficiency is not electricity but heat + electricity. Or that is what I understand. 80% eletric efficiency would be big news. And even then, maybe the figure is optimistic i.e. apply perfect black paint to a piece of cardboard and you have a 100% efficient device, even though it's of no pratical use.
I hate Gnome 3 as much as anyone, but I once used it on a computer which I assume was probably just debian wheezy (when wheezy was still late testing). It seemed decent at showing one or two windows seemingly guessing where I wanted them to be moved to.. Maybe I can't explain myself about it. It seemed very good at managing a handful terminal and browser windows. While not providing something like a taskbar. Kind of an OpenGL accelerated, black-themed Windows 3.1.
It's not a real desktop environment, but if you have a computer with a recent enough GPU and good enough I/O it might be usable if you think of it as a window manager.
but my terminal says :
No command 'term' found, did you mean:
Command 'aterm' from package 'aterm' (universe)
Command 'aterm' from package 'aterm-ml' (universe)
Command 'bterm' from package 'bogl-bterm' (main)
Command 'terd' from package 'tcm' (universe)
Command 'kterm' from package 'kterm' (universe)
Command 'xterm' from package 'xterm' (main)
Command 'ferm' from package 'ferm' (universe)
Command 'pterm' from package 'pterm' (universe)
Command 'qterm' from package 'qterm' (universe)
Command 'qterm' from package 'torque-client-x11' (universe)
Command 'qterm' from package 'torque-client' (universe)
term: command not found
If I'm in an environment I'm not familiar with (perhaps I never used it at all) I will expect that alt-f2 on *nix or win+r on Windows will give me a "run box" that works at least with raw executable names, but maybe not more than that. So on a random *nix desktop (but maybe not twm or any random weird stuff) I'll hit alf-f2 and then xterm, on Windows I'll hit win+r and then cmd. So I could e.g. shut down Windows 8 the old way without trying to figure out the GUI way.
Not sure what the new wifi feature really is, but if it can automatically log in to the wifi network instead of you doing it with a browser that's a mildly useful and convenient feature.
For such a feature to be robust there would be a need for the user to set up that automatic login though (e.g. using epiphany-browser). Some will just require username/password (first form entry/second form entry) but others have a "I agree to terms of service" checkbox and some others might be different still.
If you're going to "change the runlevel to a non graphical startup", you probably know already to hit ctrl-alt-f1 to switch to a VT console, or maybe alt-f2 (then launch xterm) as somewhat of a standard in older gnome and other desktop environments?
That'd be easier than finding the terminal in Mac OS X.
By the way, I once had trouble finding the terminal in Unity. I don't know what the executable's name is. But xterm is always there, so I could type "xterm" somewhere and have it launched.
How often do people sit on a *cupholder*? Car fellatio gone wrong?
But these give you heat as well. It's kind of a heat collector with solar panel piggy backed on. I suppose it saves space and is serviced by the same company, which may not be true of using heat collectors + solar panels, though I'm not sure of the economics. Also where a power grid is available, I would favor using heat collectors alone for heating/cooling/warm water and power grid for power (duh).
While it's not really what the discussion is about, I think I would really like an amber OLED screen (moreso on a mobile device, maybe). It would be high res, readable, cheap, low power and durable. You wouldn't even have to think about color accuracy when cranking the brightness down or up.
For a computer phone, you could even have a low latency monochrome touch screen. That's original, isn't it?
Thick high quality keys on a solid state ultraportable laptop (with Cortex A7 or 4-watt x86) whose main body has to be thick enough for a RJ45 anyway. (even a COM port : let's pretend it's to set up "IoT" devices)
So many things are possible but don't get made.
s/scripts/software
.. which would be more congruent with a series of anarchical low tech hacks on top of hacks hanging together with strings. So "Système D" would describe the old inits, whereas "systemd" is a big top down and corporate project.
The name "systemd" has arrogance and octopus-like conquest buit-in : the letter "d" classically means a daemon (e.g. sshd is a SSH deamon, in other terms a SSH server) and "system", well that's the "S" in "OS".
So it's the daemon that takes over most all administration of your OS.
And presumably it's very good at what it's doing, but pisses off all those that rather use lots of small tools instead, or the situation is frowned upon for political reasons.
Funny that I still have most of my data in ntfs. I've not tried it but I guess the BSDs would read/write it fine, if FUSE is working correctly.
Debian stable is an outdated distro, except maybe for a few monthes in its lifecycle. So it is better to use on 10 to 15 year old PCs where it can excel at both grandma computing and PhD computing. Except that those old computers will have trouble running a 3D accelerated desktop. Really, that's a bad idea : it exposes you to driver crashes, hardware instability, overheating or things like 100% CPU use.
So, use a recent computer? Fine, but if the graphics card or CPU with integrated graphics is too recent, then you're exposed to driver issues because the drivers are immature, incomplete or hardly working. So you'd better use latest Ubuntu or Linux Mint 17 or the upcoming Mint 17.1.
Running a 2D desktop avoids those issues entirely. For solid 3D support, your computer has to be perfectly antiquated (graphics a bit old, but not too old) and your distro reasonably up to date. Feel free to flame me about how your Intel laptop has always worked or whatever, I speak in general terms and I know some particular stuff works better than some other stuff.
Are you just bound by the single-thread performance? It's a big bottleneck and especially likely to occur if you're waiting on your browser.
If I was building a new system I'd think about using a two-thread Pentium G3258 (the only unlocked Intel CPU besides high end i5 and i7) and overclock that to 4.2GHz or so. Then I'd see if I'm satisfied with the performance of Dosbox under linux.
Are you trying to run VNC or similar over bluetooth? That doesn't seem like a great idea.
For fast low-latency remote desktops, you now have vid cards encoding the whole thing to H264 or H265 (only gtx 970/980 does the latter for now), but you'll probably want fast wifi or wired networking to use it.
For the rest of your problems, too bad for you. I don't mind it much. Glad to know the Ray Kurzweil types were entirely wrong and that I don't have to fear the rise of Skynet for now.
every year, I meant
Specs aren't doubling everywhere anymore. We've been for three years on the 28 nanometer process and the software, hardware features have matured. So now the low end stuff is enough.