Ever heard of a multi-user machine? By definition it's both a desktop and a server. Or right-clicked on a folder in Windows 98 to share it? Your Windows 98 desktop is now a server.
We have the freedom to do whatever the hell we want. Had a network with an Ubuntu 8.04 machine that was extremely powerful (four cores, four gigabyte of RAM, a multi-hundred-gigabyte HDD) : it acted as an LTSP server for thin clients (one, two or three), served storage with Samba, proxy and wad even the local DHCP and DNS for that network segment. Single point of failure, but it was always on and worked, so who gives a shit.
Poor OS/2.. if only IBM had made it incompatible with Windows 3.1 applications, maybe it would have succeeded. As for Amiga, I disheartenedly learned not long ago that a XOR patent killed the AmigaCD 32 which is totally despicable. It would have become the first successful CD-based console, probably. A couple years headstart on the Playstation. Commodore/Amiga could have transformed into a console manufacturer, selling tens of millions units.. Junk their computer division : the DOS PC had won already back then.
I've been thinking that my next computer ugprade (which is otherwise not really needed) will allow me IOMMU/Vt-d and VGA passthrough, so maybe I can get back to Windows for gaming. But having two graphics card, and a KVM or two sets of keyboard/mouse etc. and a way to deal with the monitor(s) would be a pain so why not just use the Windows desktop and use linux via ssh, X11, RDP etc.
If debian 8 can be used without systemd if you don't use a desktop, it could be done that way! lol. Anyway there's a udev fork and debian/KfreeBSD, debian/Hurd will go on, certainly with low priority but there's a possiblity that a debian/linux/without-systemd is unofficially made building on the work for those?
Now what about Ubuntu, which is what I actually use.. (because it's just debian with more packages and more stuff just working, and linux Mint is awesome). Well we're fucked. Mint 17 is an LTS with versions based on Ubuntu 14.10, 15.04 skipped, perhaps that's good enough but what happens in 2016/2017.. I don't fucking know! I guess I'll use systemd anyway. Or go back to Windows 98, install an old Cygwin and browse the web with Internet Explorer 5.
Even the $3000 model is not internally expandable these days. Have fun with your mismatched enclosures, USB hubs and dongles cluttering your desk next to your sleek and "sturdy" well made all-metal piece of computer.
The only problem with Macs is that people hoard them instead of throwing them in the trash where they belong. Else I would have picked up a Mac Mini on the ground, install BootCramp on it and then it would be about good enough as a DHCP server and porn storage unit.
Maybe you can find some OCAML projects and ask people there what they think about it.
I guess developing F# stuff in Mono would be great, but Mono is that frowned-upon child chasing the trail.
At the uni I went to they did teach "Caml Light" as an introduction language! Heard they stopped doing that. We all cordially hated it but damn it was nice. Writing polymorphic functions by accident, the "map" function, the arbitrary, automatic and extremely strong types.. But when you get to learn some crap language like Java afterwards, you're spoiled. (C courses were a bit fun, at least it's widespread, historic and low level. looks like BASIC with structs and pointers.)
I miss MSN, the chat client/protocol. It's what everyone called it in my country, the other "MSN" stuff (later "Windows Live") we tended to not care about.. What was important is that everyone was on MSN Messenger - and we were free to use other clients like Trillian and aMSN and maybe GAIM ; just like everyone is on F...book now. We could just chat with people that were there, real name very optional, no need to go to a website and I don't think there were ads (just use a 3rd party client anyway).
Hell, I remember when I had gotten.wmv streaming to always work reliably! (around when I got to use ffdshow to be able to play everything without hunting for codecs). Full screen web video on a 500MHz computer, later flash video and youtube required a 2GHz computer to do the same. (HTML5 is even worse unless you have a smartphone or a Windows PC with recent enough graphics card, I guess)
In these days I hated Microsoft and was worried about the upcoming Palladium dystopia (which hasn't worked out on PC : Trusted Platform Module is optional and thus not included in consumer mobos, and being able to disable Secure Boot is mandatory). But I mourn the loss of MSN chat and what replaced it is worse. I won't become a facebook slave, thanks. (btw nobody used AIM or ICQ that I know of). I thought of getting a jabber/XMPP account but don't exactly know where to get one and how the stuff works exactly, so I know I'll never get other people to join in.
Thanks for the reply. I like to kid myself that I have a really great set up for real cheap. The VRMs for the CPU must explain the notion that aggressive power management brings up noise - something that I learnt from that whole slashdot discussion but doesn't affect my PC as far as I know (old socket AM2 motherboard, with AM3 CPU)
There's PSU noise in the hundreds of KHz.. I feel this can simply be ignored. Likewise modern SMPS such as the one powering my amp (and I suppose the same kind of PSU powers USB hubs and DAC) "vibrate" at frequencies well above 20KHz. I take your word that that's not the whole story. I'd like to keep a stance that for 99% of consumer use, sound coming out of a PC will be good enough (use a good PSU like Seasonic G360?, a simple sound card, some simple and common ATX motherboard - both the very bottom end and the very high end flashy stuff are to be avoided)
A very good PSU (not a computer one) (still switched mode) costs more than a cheap DAC or tiny class D amp, lol.
I don't pay ATM fees - which makes all the easier to me to use cash as my primary payment method. I can get cash from any ATM too, the limitation is that at banks other than my own the minimum withdrawal is 20 euros while I can withdraw 10 euros on my bank (and have the account balance printed).
We're soon gonna see display using Displayport compression. Analogous to texture compression, small blocks are compressed but that is done in real time with dedicated hardware, with a supposedly very good algorithm. The goal is to enable power savings on mobile devices (including laptops), by reducing the insanely high bitrates for transmission between the GPU or SoC and the display. It will also allow a PC with Displayport 1.3 to output to an 8K display, even though the bandwith (increased from the current standard) would be too small to do that uncompressed.
Is that why I've looked at some shots on the web that were very high res and very noisy? Maybe you have to do the anti-aliasing / proper reconstruction in the RAW importing software.
I for one would simply like a high res monochrome LCD (or greyscale, if monochrome implies 1bit). It was prevalent in the 80s and 90s, works unlit, is usable outdoors and gives you much longer battery life to boot. I wouldn't give a damn about black and white if I had a long-lived, always usable device. Hell, a 1989 Game Boy is still a better gaming device than a smartphone and I tried to read a book on one (read the first chapter before being bored with it. Blocky font with very few pixels per character is not exactly ideal)
I was getting used to the notions of multiverse so broad there exists a copy of me somewhere with a penis in place of the nose and a nose in place of the penis. And that's far from the weirdest things out there.
Can be a nice present for a linux user. I'm not saying linux drivers are better, then often suck and have so few features you might as well forget about anything other than basic stereo out.. at least they're invisible low level plumbing, so no (further) bloat.
Forget Star Wars the movie anyway. Vader royally fucked up on planet Hoth, seemed to have an overwhelming position but for some reason he decides to go on foot to capture Luke & Leia personnally. But everyone manages to escape and the scary star destroyers in orbit don't manage to destroy or stop any ship. The star destroyers are managed by grossly incompetent captains.. But even with such idiots at the bar, victory would have been certain would all the ships and stuff have burnt the rebel place to the ground with a giant laser/blaster/plasma massacre.
As for the first movie, it has manually aimed WW2-style air defences;). "The rebel fighters are too small for our turbolasers", or something like that. Star Wars is about resistance/terrorists defeating an evil military industrial empire that suffers from royal fuck ups and ineffective pork barrel weapon projects.
Did you try the driver from www.kxproject.com ? It should support Windows 7 x86-64 (no idea about 8.x) The Live 5.1 was pretty great as long as you did not think about installing a Creative driver.
Won't that crap PSU brick that powers your external device pick up noise from the mains? (rhetorical question) A desktop PC probably has the highest quality PSU in a random home inside it. PCI is "dead" by the way. It's no longer that central parallel bus where most every component was connected to (on board sound and network, IDE, cards..), instead we have segregated PCIe lanes and if there are PCI slots on a motherboard, they talk to a PCIe/PCI bridge.
I trust the dB numbers given by Asus, Creative (even them) etc. because that's the PC hardware market, and with PC hardware you have no bullshitting and very low prices. I also trust decent reviews. Or just people reporting no noise whatsoever with headphones that cost hundreds, I think that's good enough.
If you're still using stereo, it's still simple and actually cheap to have speakers that are only speakers, and an amplifier that only amplifies. The DAC can be placed anywhere in the chain.. Inside the PC, in a standalone box, in an amp, in a preamp. I choose inside the PC because the footprint is low, cost is low and it's always there.
Which would be your fault for not choosing the right motherboard, if you're buying one. From lowest end to highest end, and old sockets to the latest ones you can always find a board with one, two or three PCI slots.
I use an internal sound card for stereo sound, it's still decently cheap. The concept that internal noise from the PC will ruin it is a myth, at least if you use a branded PSU that gives clean power (that is cheap too if your PC is not a gas guzzler and you don't needlessly oversize the PSU). There's enough further filtering on the sound card I think.1
I use a Xonar DX, which is way overkill (four stereo DACs and I use only one), I bet it beats your $40 DAC but that's not actually important. I bought the card to feel good lol, it's nice to have a totally perfect sound output that can get plugged on any sound system, my card beats silly audiophile $4000 CD players and the like. I'm sure some Chinese DAC on USB or S/PDIF can serve me well but there's a bit of convience for me of not having a dongle or small box hang out of the tower. The small box I have instead is what I call an "audiophile" amplifier that costs $20 and was reviewed on Klispch horn speakers by guys on the internet.
Sure my second paragraph was more a general commentary about DAC quality, I could have written some different things in the posts. Using the receiver/amps DAC plus doing a long run, that's good enough reason to use digital, sucks that the live encoding is not always available. One other little thing : some higher end onboards chips do support DTS Connect, and the vast majority of time it is disabled due to licensing reasons (a small cost must be paid by the motherboard vendor). It is enabled on some higher end motherboards.. and I'm pretty sure I read you can "unofficially" run the full featured driver!
By quick googling the DSX's manual says this, though I don't pretend to fully understand it (just plug a RCA into a jack?? but I guess you can use a trivial and cheap RCA to mono jack adapter)
"You can also use a coaxial cable for a S/PDIF connection. Just plug the coaxial RCA male connector to the S/PDIF-Out combo jack and connect the other end into the coaxial S/PDIF input on your decoder. ASUS Xonar DSX"
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore we also refer to other stars as "suns" when we feel like it or the context makes it useful.
You can get consumer hardware with 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes that run right into the CPU, wouldn't that be enough PCIe bandwith?
Ever heard of a multi-user machine? By definition it's both a desktop and a server. Or right-clicked on a folder in Windows 98 to share it? Your Windows 98 desktop is now a server.
We have the freedom to do whatever the hell we want. Had a network with an Ubuntu 8.04 machine that was extremely powerful (four cores, four gigabyte of RAM, a multi-hundred-gigabyte HDD) : it acted as an LTSP server for thin clients (one, two or three), served storage with Samba, proxy and wad even the local DHCP and DNS for that network segment. Single point of failure, but it was always on and worked, so who gives a shit.
Poor OS/2.. if only IBM had made it incompatible with Windows 3.1 applications, maybe it would have succeeded.
As for Amiga, I disheartenedly learned not long ago that a XOR patent killed the AmigaCD 32 which is totally despicable. It would have become the first successful CD-based console, probably. A couple years headstart on the Playstation. Commodore/Amiga could have transformed into a console manufacturer, selling tens of millions units.. Junk their computer division : the DOS PC had won already back then.
I've been thinking that my next computer ugprade (which is otherwise not really needed) will allow me IOMMU/Vt-d and VGA passthrough, so maybe I can get back to Windows for gaming. But having two graphics card, and a KVM or two sets of keyboard/mouse etc. and a way to deal with the monitor(s) would be a pain so why not just use the Windows desktop and use linux via ssh, X11, RDP etc.
If debian 8 can be used without systemd if you don't use a desktop, it could be done that way! lol.
Anyway there's a udev fork and debian/KfreeBSD, debian/Hurd will go on, certainly with low priority but there's a possiblity that a debian/linux/without-systemd is unofficially made building on the work for those?
Now what about Ubuntu, which is what I actually use.. (because it's just debian with more packages and more stuff just working, and linux Mint is awesome). Well we're fucked. Mint 17 is an LTS with versions based on Ubuntu 14.10, 15.04 skipped, perhaps that's good enough but what happens in 2016/2017.. I don't fucking know! I guess I'll use systemd anyway. Or go back to Windows 98, install an old Cygwin and browse the web with Internet Explorer 5.
Even the $3000 model is not internally expandable these days.
Have fun with your mismatched enclosures, USB hubs and dongles cluttering your desk next to your sleek and "sturdy" well made all-metal piece of computer.
The only problem with Macs is that people hoard them instead of throwing them in the trash where they belong. Else I would have picked up a Mac Mini on the ground, install BootCramp on it and then it would be about good enough as a DHCP server and porn storage unit.
He already has a smart dryer if the dryer is able to stop when the clothes are dry.
Maybe you can find some OCAML projects and ask people there what they think about it.
I guess developing F# stuff in Mono would be great, but Mono is that frowned-upon child chasing the trail.
At the uni I went to they did teach "Caml Light" as an introduction language! Heard they stopped doing that. We all cordially hated it but damn it was nice. Writing polymorphic functions by accident, the "map" function, the arbitrary, automatic and extremely strong types.. But when you get to learn some crap language like Java afterwards, you're spoiled. (C courses were a bit fun, at least it's widespread, historic and low level. looks like BASIC with structs and pointers.)
I miss MSN, the chat client/protocol. It's what everyone called it in my country, the other "MSN" stuff (later "Windows Live") we tended to not care about.. What was important is that everyone was on MSN Messenger - and we were free to use other clients like Trillian and aMSN and maybe GAIM ; just like everyone is on F...book now. We could just chat with people that were there, real name very optional, no need to go to a website and I don't think there were ads (just use a 3rd party client anyway).
Hell, I remember when I had gotten .wmv streaming to always work reliably! (around when I got to use ffdshow to be able to play everything without hunting for codecs). Full screen web video on a 500MHz computer, later flash video and youtube required a 2GHz computer to do the same. (HTML5 is even worse unless you have a smartphone or a Windows PC with recent enough graphics card, I guess)
In these days I hated Microsoft and was worried about the upcoming Palladium dystopia (which hasn't worked out on PC : Trusted Platform Module is optional and thus not included in consumer mobos, and being able to disable Secure Boot is mandatory). But I mourn the loss of MSN chat and what replaced it is worse. I won't become a facebook slave, thanks. (btw nobody used AIM or ICQ that I know of). I thought of getting a jabber/XMPP account but don't exactly know where to get one and how the stuff works exactly, so I know I'll never get other people to join in.
Thanks for the reply.
I like to kid myself that I have a really great set up for real cheap.
The VRMs for the CPU must explain the notion that aggressive power management brings up noise - something that I learnt from that whole slashdot discussion but doesn't affect my PC as far as I know (old socket AM2 motherboard, with AM3 CPU)
There's PSU noise in the hundreds of KHz.. I feel this can simply be ignored. Likewise modern SMPS such as the one powering my amp (and I suppose the same kind of PSU powers USB hubs and DAC) "vibrate" at frequencies well above 20KHz.
I take your word that that's not the whole story. I'd like to keep a stance that for 99% of consumer use, sound coming out of a PC will be good enough (use a good PSU like Seasonic G360?, a simple sound card, some simple and common ATX motherboard - both the very bottom end and the very high end flashy stuff are to be avoided)
A very good PSU (not a computer one) (still switched mode) costs more than a cheap DAC or tiny class D amp, lol.
I don't pay ATM fees - which makes all the easier to me to use cash as my primary payment method.
I can get cash from any ATM too, the limitation is that at banks other than my own the minimum withdrawal is 20 euros while I can withdraw 10 euros on my bank (and have the account balance printed).
We're soon gonna see display using Displayport compression. Analogous to texture compression, small blocks are compressed but that is done in real time with dedicated hardware, with a supposedly very good algorithm. The goal is to enable power savings on mobile devices (including laptops), by reducing the insanely high bitrates for transmission between the GPU or SoC and the display. It will also allow a PC with Displayport 1.3 to output to an 8K display, even though the bandwith (increased from the current standard) would be too small to do that uncompressed.
Is that why I've looked at some shots on the web that were very high res and very noisy?
Maybe you have to do the anti-aliasing / proper reconstruction in the RAW importing software.
Interesting.
I for one would simply like a high res monochrome LCD (or greyscale, if monochrome implies 1bit).
It was prevalent in the 80s and 90s, works unlit, is usable outdoors and gives you much longer battery life to boot. I wouldn't give a damn about black and white if I had a long-lived, always usable device. Hell, a 1989 Game Boy is still a better gaming device than a smartphone and I tried to read a book on one (read the first chapter before being bored with it. Blocky font with very few pixels per character is not exactly ideal)
I was getting used to the notions of multiverse so broad there exists a copy of me somewhere with a penis in place of the nose and a nose in place of the penis. And that's far from the weirdest things out there.
Can be a nice present for a linux user.
I'm not saying linux drivers are better, then often suck and have so few features you might as well forget about anything other than basic stereo out.. at least they're invisible low level plumbing, so no (further) bloat.
I guess it would work fine if you simply stuff your motherboard slots with USB controllers.
Forget Star Wars the movie anyway. Vader royally fucked up on planet Hoth, seemed to have an overwhelming position but for some reason he decides to go on foot to capture Luke & Leia personnally. But everyone manages to escape and the scary star destroyers in orbit don't manage to destroy or stop any ship. The star destroyers are managed by grossly incompetent captains.. But even with such idiots at the bar, victory would have been certain would all the ships and stuff have burnt the rebel place to the ground with a giant laser/blaster/plasma massacre.
As for the first movie, it has manually aimed WW2-style air defences ;). "The rebel fighters are too small for our turbolasers", or something like that.
Star Wars is about resistance/terrorists defeating an evil military industrial empire that suffers from royal fuck ups and ineffective pork barrel weapon projects.
Did you try the driver from www.kxproject.com ? It should support Windows 7 x86-64 (no idea about 8.x)
The Live 5.1 was pretty great as long as you did not think about installing a Creative driver.
Won't that crap PSU brick that powers your external device pick up noise from the mains? (rhetorical question)
A desktop PC probably has the highest quality PSU in a random home inside it.
PCI is "dead" by the way. It's no longer that central parallel bus where most every component was connected to (on board sound and network, IDE, cards..), instead we have segregated PCIe lanes and if there are PCI slots on a motherboard, they talk to a PCIe/PCI bridge.
I trust the dB numbers given by Asus, Creative (even them) etc. because that's the PC hardware market, and with PC hardware you have no bullshitting and very low prices. I also trust decent reviews. Or just people reporting no noise whatsoever with headphones that cost hundreds, I think that's good enough.
If you're still using stereo, it's still simple and actually cheap to have speakers that are only speakers, and an amplifier that only amplifies.
The DAC can be placed anywhere in the chain.. Inside the PC, in a standalone box, in an amp, in a preamp. I choose inside the PC because the footprint is low, cost is low and it's always there.
Which would be your fault for not choosing the right motherboard, if you're buying one. From lowest end to highest end, and old sockets to the latest ones you can always find a board with one, two or three PCI slots.
Analog headphones, speakers and amps still are extremely widespread to say the least, mixers can be useful as well.
I use an internal sound card for stereo sound, it's still decently cheap. The concept that internal noise from the PC will ruin it is a myth, at least if you use a branded PSU that gives clean power (that is cheap too if your PC is not a gas guzzler and you don't needlessly oversize the PSU). There's enough further filtering on the sound card I think.1
I use a Xonar DX, which is way overkill (four stereo DACs and I use only one), I bet it beats your $40 DAC but that's not actually important.
I bought the card to feel good lol, it's nice to have a totally perfect sound output that can get plugged on any sound system, my card beats silly audiophile $4000 CD players and the like. I'm sure some Chinese DAC on USB or S/PDIF can serve me well but there's a bit of convience for me of not having a dongle or small box hang out of the tower. The small box I have instead is what I call an "audiophile" amplifier that costs $20 and was reviewed on Klispch horn speakers by guys on the internet.
Sure my second paragraph was more a general commentary about DAC quality, I could have written some different things in the posts. Using the receiver/amps DAC plus doing a long run, that's good enough reason to use digital, sucks that the live encoding is not always available.
One other little thing : some higher end onboards chips do support DTS Connect, and the vast majority of time it is disabled due to licensing reasons (a small cost must be paid by the motherboard vendor). It is enabled on some higher end motherboards.. and I'm pretty sure I read you can "unofficially" run the full featured driver!
By quick googling the DSX's manual says this, though I don't pretend to fully understand it (just plug a RCA into a jack?? but I guess you can use a trivial and cheap RCA to mono jack adapter)
"You can also use a coaxial cable for a S/PDIF connection. Just plug the coaxial RCA male connector to the S/PDIF-Out combo jack and connect the other end into the coaxial S/PDIF input on your decoder. ASUS Xonar DSX"