It is a reasonable warning, and you don't even have to be a tinkerer to be annoyed if the device eventually turns into a paperweight. It is a computer, and a networked one at that. People don't expect and shouldn't expect it will be so flawed only three years down the road that it should be thrown out.. If there's a critical ssl or tls flaw that stays unpatched forever, it means you can't use it anymore for any service that requires a login (say, checking mail and bank account balance). You can but it would be foolish.
If the news/streaming app or whatever you cared about moves to Android 4.3 or 5.0 as a minimum it's another crappy situation. At least you can permanently turn off wifi and only use it to read books and offline media, I guess.
The old serial ports still exist technically, you always have at least one option for a motherboard of a given socket that still has it on the back but barring that, the vast majority has one as a header. Your motherboard most probably has one, if you use a desktop. That requires having a connector, prying one from an AT format PC is a solution.
What's funny is we've been slowly getting into a situation where all PC are fast so we can afford the waste of using X even more. On the other hand we're now down to three graphics vendors and the drivers are improving.. but at lot of time using the GPU for the GUI will result in less stability, potential overheating or lock up, and instead of Xorg using your CPU it will be a graphics driver and its OpenGL implementation. All so that a fraction of the userbase can look at windows flying around and zooming in/out etc.
I don't want to buy a new graphics card to read text, view movies and play minesweeper.
That's nice but what you describe is for GTK3, and not GTK2. Seems like the latter is still used a lot, and frankly GTK3 has gone rogue, deleting features, adding ones only Gnome developers will use etc. Developers of applications run away from it and migrations from GTK2 to GTK3 seldom made (though there are dual mode GTK2/GTK3 applications where you can select the UI).
Recently with GTK 3.10 they removed icons in menus and the highlighting of letters to help you with keyboard navigation (e.g. Alt-F opens File menu). It's the Slashdot Beta of the toolkit world.
Not sure if I should respond, but so many people are afraid of EM radiations and stuff because they seek something to scare themselves with. Eat organic or whole grains, use the cell phone with a headset, wipe the floor and do laundry with ecological products blah blah blah and then they're missing actual threats like indoor pollution, or failing to protect one's head from the sun - that will heat you many orders of magnitude more than wifi and cell phone signals. The former is dealt with by opening windows daily to vent the air, not by watching documentaries.
We don't need to leave the planet at all, chances of a global catastrophe caused by something other than us is very minimal. When we'll be able to, we'll be long dead anyway (you and I personally, not the species) An exception would be a large coronal mass ejection, which will fry all our satellites and computers except for some stuff in underground bunkers or buried.
It can fail on one platform due to character encodings (accented letters, pseudo graphical characters and such). It was glaring on Windows 9x (or even XP) where the DOS environment and Windows apps used a different one, though an English language user can basically spend his life in 7bit ASCII and rarely notice something is wrong.
Funnily, the DOS editor (EDIT.COM) seemed to open Unix files fine, and you could try Wordpad.
Also the GPU was relatively weak, with the limitations of the geforce 6/7 architecture while the Xbox had an almost modern one in comparison. Devs found ways to "help" the GPU such as doing preliminary geometry work and culling, and doing post-processing on SPE rather than on GPU.
That allowed to do something with the SPE resources that were still unused, even if they managed to fit other kinds of work on them.
Wow.. Crysis came out in 2007 and I gave up on being able to run it! I did get a nice 65 watt graphics card at some point, but had to run at 800x600 or 1024x768 to get high detail and anti-aliasing, game looking bad IMO without those.. and whatever I did the framerate tanked in fire fights. So I figured I was CPU limited even though I had a recent one I thought it was nice enough. Mobo/CPU still haven't died on me and I see no reason to upgrade
Another solution would be to use a PS2 with the hack to run games of a HDD (you can rip legit games I think), that would help with the concern of optical drive dying and discs getting damaged at least. PS2 is hard to emulate, might be doable at last with an extremely powerful GPU with hundreds GB/s of memory bandwith like Radeon R9 290 or future mid-range ones when they get memory on silicon interposer.. PS2 has that eDRAM with crazy bandwith, and crazy fillrate to use it. Emulating PS3 might be doable in a future where we have "many-core" CPUs made of "tiles" each with their own extremely fast local storage like the SPEs. Even then there's difficulty in the PS3 running at 3.2GHz which is almost the max clock for a chip (well we can do 4GHz to 5GHz at best) so I wonder about managing to respect some timings in some cases.
That runs on an IBM PS/3:). I have one of those, it costs $10K, the case is made of depleted uranium, hard disk drives are gigantic and the bus is MCA Express (but you won't find cards except for 1TB RAM expansions and gigabit Token Ring) Sadly a $500 PC is faster.
I think Jaguar's L2 run at half clock? sounds terrible, but the architecture is optimized for low power. Also, not all caches/memory are equal. They're optimized for certain access patterns (there's cache associativity, which I don't understand much. Or imagine that some memory only realistically allows to write 4KiB pages while another is okay with writing bytes..)
Simulating SPU code is nearly impossible, if you want to get it running at a reasonable speed at least. What makes it special I think is the use of its "local storage", which is impossibly fast and low latency, as if your PC used the L2 cache as RAM. Up to six SPE can be used in a game, so multiply the bandwith by six!
If you have enough low level control on a PS4 or XBO's CPU, you have 4MB L2 for the eight cores, actually two 2MB L2 each shared by four cores (the CPU is two quad-core CPUs copy-pasted next to each other). But that CPU was made for PC so I suspect the use of cache is all automatic.
Running functionnally equivalent code on the modern GPU is a better bet?, you have a 64 KiB Local Data Store per "Compute Unit" on the GCN GPU (each CU has four 16-way SIMD, vulgarized as 64 ALUs)
Even more terrifying is that it's the standard procedure for OEM PCs (laptops, but not only them) and the grandma / joe / jane user is told to do that if they call the tech support. I remember such a story by a slashdot commenter, or elsewhere.. an aging lady came short of losing all she had written in the past four monthes painstakingly since getting a computer, but thanskfully the nerd son or nephew saved the day at the last minute. Customer tech support makes you delete all your data if you're problem is any more complicated than "I lowered my task bar and can't get it back" - even then, I'm not sure they would fix that one.
FOG works by defaulting every computer to PXE boot.. so it's a perfect environment for destroying everything? Interesting stuff would happen with something like a fuck up in the dhcp ranges. On the other hand if you serve a nice diskless linux desktop by accident, that's somewhat nicer than the intended boot to local Windows.
So instead of a phone number (which is weakly pseudonymous) you have to create five accounts with the hassle of choosing pseudonyms, use real name when necessary or mandatory, manage and create the associated e-mail addresses and passwords?
A friend once "tasked" me to do it, for fun. I came up with a simple and lame method that works if you give me a pesudo-random number generator. The harder part would be to know when you've reached sufficient precision so that the n-th digit is reliable ; and for very large n the stuff would be slow and would have run out of precision anyway.
Sure, I would need to look up some 18th algorithm or something if you want me to write something better.
It was in C, but for a bad reason : it's a very simple language that every one knows. So if you want me to write a toy program that does repetitive math and prints an answer on stdout, I'll use that because I won't have to learn the syntax, boilerplate and library structure for an "easy" and "dynamic" language.
Slashdot Mirror
It is a reasonable warning, and you don't even have to be a tinkerer to be annoyed if the device eventually turns into a paperweight.
It is a computer, and a networked one at that. People don't expect and shouldn't expect it will be so flawed only three years down the road that it should be thrown out.. If there's a critical ssl or tls flaw that stays unpatched forever, it means you can't use it anymore for any service that requires a login (say, checking mail and bank account balance). You can but it would be foolish.
If the news/streaming app or whatever you cared about moves to Android 4.3 or 5.0 as a minimum it's another crappy situation.
At least you can permanently turn off wifi and only use it to read books and offline media, I guess.
The old serial ports still exist technically, you always have at least one option for a motherboard of a given socket that still has it on the back but barring that, the vast majority has one as a header. Your motherboard most probably has one, if you use a desktop. That requires having a connector, prying one from an AT format PC is a solution.
I thought that refered to a scanning laser projector that targets your retina.
What's funny is we've been slowly getting into a situation where all PC are fast so we can afford the waste of using X even more.
On the other hand we're now down to three graphics vendors and the drivers are improving.. but at lot of time using the GPU for the GUI will result in less stability, potential overheating or lock up, and instead of Xorg using your CPU it will be a graphics driver and its OpenGL implementation.
All so that a fraction of the userbase can look at windows flying around and zooming in/out etc.
I don't want to buy a new graphics card to read text, view movies and play minesweeper.
A long VGA cable run could be nicer, or these days there's beaming of HDMI on CAT6 for a bit more investment.
That's nice but what you describe is for GTK3, and not GTK2. Seems like the latter is still used a lot, and frankly GTK3 has gone rogue, deleting features, adding ones only Gnome developers will use etc.
Developers of applications run away from it and migrations from GTK2 to GTK3 seldom made (though there are dual mode GTK2/GTK3 applications where you can select the UI).
Recently with GTK 3.10 they removed icons in menus and the highlighting of letters to help you with keyboard navigation (e.g. Alt-F opens File menu). It's the Slashdot Beta of the toolkit world.
or elinks, or dillo.
Can it work without OpenGL or a GPU on the remote computer?
Not sure if I should respond, but so many people are afraid of EM radiations and stuff because they seek something to scare themselves with. Eat organic or whole grains, use the cell phone with a headset, wipe the floor and do laundry with ecological products blah blah blah and then they're missing actual threats like indoor pollution, or failing to protect one's head from the sun - that will heat you many orders of magnitude more than wifi and cell phone signals. The former is dealt with by opening windows daily to vent the air, not by watching documentaries.
It's a WAN so not fucking the same.
The alternative to using this new thing is a GSM modem and SIM card, to send a SMS.
We don't need to leave the planet at all, chances of a global catastrophe caused by something other than us is very minimal. When we'll be able to, we'll be long dead anyway (you and I personally, not the species)
An exception would be a large coronal mass ejection, which will fry all our satellites and computers except for some stuff in underground bunkers or buried.
It can fail on one platform due to character encodings (accented letters, pseudo graphical characters and such). It was glaring on Windows 9x (or even XP) where the DOS environment and Windows apps used a different one, though an English language user can basically spend his life in 7bit ASCII and rarely notice something is wrong.
Funnily, the DOS editor (EDIT.COM) seemed to open Unix files fine, and you could try Wordpad.
Also the GPU was relatively weak, with the limitations of the geforce 6/7 architecture while the Xbox had an almost modern one in comparison.
Devs found ways to "help" the GPU such as doing preliminary geometry work and culling, and doing post-processing on SPE rather than on GPU.
That allowed to do something with the SPE resources that were still unused, even if they managed to fit other kinds of work on them.
Wow.. Crysis came out in 2007 and I gave up on being able to run it! I did get a nice 65 watt graphics card at some point, but had to run at 800x600 or 1024x768 to get high detail and anti-aliasing, game looking bad IMO without those.. and whatever I did the framerate tanked in fire fights. So I figured I was CPU limited even though I had a recent one I thought it was nice enough. Mobo/CPU still haven't died on me and I see no reason to upgrade
Another solution would be to use a PS2 with the hack to run games of a HDD (you can rip legit games I think), that would help with the concern of optical drive dying and discs getting damaged at least.
PS2 is hard to emulate, might be doable at last with an extremely powerful GPU with hundreds GB/s of memory bandwith like Radeon R9 290 or future mid-range ones when they get memory on silicon interposer.. PS2 has that eDRAM with crazy bandwith, and crazy fillrate to use it.
Emulating PS3 might be doable in a future where we have "many-core" CPUs made of "tiles" each with their own extremely fast local storage like the SPEs. Even then there's difficulty in the PS3 running at 3.2GHz which is almost the max clock for a chip (well we can do 4GHz to 5GHz at best) so I wonder about managing to respect some timings in some cases.
That runs on an IBM PS/3 :). I have one of those, it costs $10K, the case is made of depleted uranium, hard disk drives are gigantic and the bus is MCA Express (but you won't find cards except for 1TB RAM expansions and gigabit Token Ring)
Sadly a $500 PC is faster.
I think Jaguar's L2 run at half clock? sounds terrible, but the architecture is optimized for low power. Also, not all caches/memory are equal. They're optimized for certain access patterns (there's cache associativity, which I don't understand much. Or imagine that some memory only realistically allows to write 4KiB pages while another is okay with writing bytes..)
Simulating SPU code is nearly impossible, if you want to get it running at a reasonable speed at least. What makes it special I think is the use of its "local storage", which is impossibly fast and low latency, as if your PC used the L2 cache as RAM. Up to six SPE can be used in a game, so multiply the bandwith by six!
If you have enough low level control on a PS4 or XBO's CPU, you have 4MB L2 for the eight cores, actually two 2MB L2 each shared by four cores (the CPU is two quad-core CPUs copy-pasted next to each other). But that CPU was made for PC so I suspect the use of cache is all automatic.
Running functionnally equivalent code on the modern GPU is a better bet?, you have a 64 KiB Local Data Store per "Compute Unit" on the GCN GPU (each CU has four 16-way SIMD, vulgarized as 64 ALUs)
Even more terrifying is that it's the standard procedure for OEM PCs (laptops, but not only them) and the grandma / joe / jane user is told to do that if they call the tech support.
I remember such a story by a slashdot commenter, or elsewhere.. an aging lady came short of losing all she had written in the past four monthes painstakingly since getting a computer, but thanskfully the nerd son or nephew saved the day at the last minute. Customer tech support makes you delete all your data if you're problem is any more complicated than "I lowered my task bar and can't get it back" - even then, I'm not sure they would fix that one.
FOG works by defaulting every computer to PXE boot.. so it's a perfect environment for destroying everything? Interesting stuff would happen with something like a fuck up in the dhcp ranges. On the other hand if you serve a nice diskless linux desktop by accident, that's somewhat nicer than the intended boot to local Windows.
Even if you have a D: drive it's possible that the "recovery" wipes everything out or at least the partition table.
Wow that's fucked up. Why not do a class action lawsuit?
against the providers that do that sort of thing. A quarter by received message, that's nuts.
So instead of a phone number (which is weakly pseudonymous) you have to create five accounts with the hassle of choosing pseudonyms, use real name when necessary or mandatory, manage and create the associated e-mail addresses and passwords?
A friend once "tasked" me to do it, for fun. I came up with a simple and lame method that works if you give me a pesudo-random number generator. The harder part would be to know when you've reached sufficient precision so that the n-th digit is reliable ; and for very large n the stuff would be slow and would have run out of precision anyway.
Sure, I would need to look up some 18th algorithm or something if you want me to write something better.
It was in C, but for a bad reason : it's a very simple language that every one knows. So if you want me to write a toy program that does repetitive math and prints an answer on stdout, I'll use that because I won't have to learn the syntax, boilerplate and library structure for an "easy" and "dynamic" language.
I hereby trademark OpenFileSync and NetFileSync, to confuse your users gratuitously.