And dual link DVI covers some of the bandwith need, plus VGA optionally piggy-backed on the connector. I hope the VESA Adaptive-Sync feature gets successful (and that it'll work on linux, why not)
By the way I would like a great 1600x900 monitor with high refresh rate, great blacks and angles.. "piddly" but it would be not too big and still allow comfortable use of a maximized browser.
well I found the card on Amazon. Still has one Displayport rather than two. I'd be happy if they crammed two mini-DP, one HDMI and one VGA on a single row (include a mini DP to single link DVI adapter in the package)
It's still not to be found on most low end and even midrange hardware. On motherboards, this is a feature you have to hunt for, especially for use with Intel graphics (and to have a couple of them, that's only found on very rare mobos with Thunderbolt). Even on graphics cards the newly released GTX 750 and 750 ti don't have them, save for a model from one specific vendor that is not sold in Europe as far as I know. The cheaper ones tend to have a HDMI/VGA/DVI triad.
What's more, even sending the picture as a set of scanlines is no longer needed. With recent versions of eDP (embedded Displayport) and DP you will have the option to send it as little square chunks, send only those that have changed, and even use compression (for extremely high resolutions or power saving purpose)
Cheap solution : don't even run an OS. There's likely no need for an OS at all on a single purpose device with limited inputs/output as this. My 1989 Game Boy didn't run an OS and had more abilities than the Navy e-book. Stuff like micro-waves and alarm clocks don't run an OS either. Put evething : the program, fonts (all sizes and styles pre-baked) and books in a single mask ROM.
If the 300 books are worth reading that's decent but not only that, they're all properly bought/licensed. The collective value of the book's data is probably more than that of the hardware itself, ignoring price gouging and low runs. So there's no 4000 books, but even at $1 a piece a 4000 book device would cost $4000, multiplied by hundreds of units. We can joke at the list of "approved material". It's a bit easier to navigate a list of 300 books than 4000 or 50000, too. There's the option of releasing new "editions" of the e-book with another selection of content .
Maybe that $40 phone is so much crap that even africans don't want it. When you're poor you can't afford to buy throw-away stuff. If the phone gets unusably slow, orphaned in six monthes (or right of the bat) and subject to malware that would be quite a bad buy. Of course in the first world you can put it in a drawer or use a full blown PC to re-flash it.
One other aspect is shipping, and a strong money doesn't hurt. With the sheer infrastructure and logistics you benefit from, your Walmart is probably the cheapest place on Earth you can buy that thing.
I have just RTFA : they use a router with 3G modem. That's cheap and tiny, gives you a wifi and wired ethernet network. The choice of OS is interesting, Android 4.4. They run a cell phone / tablet OS on a desktop. It's slightly weird but it works, at least. Android laptops and desktops AIO are coming on the market so there'll be software support for it.
The benefit is obvious : a screen big enough to show a page of text, and a keyboard.
There's some hardware worth using that can't boot from USB, Pentium 3 with 440BX chipset mainly. I was still using some not long ago. More powerful than a Raspberry Pi, reliable and much less power hungry than a Pentium 4, and run pretty quick on a recent Debian or Ubuntu with LXDE desktop. But they have USB1 unless you add a USB2 card. Some Athlon XP systems are a lot faster but they tend to be junked or dead already, heard only those with nforce 2 chipset were still reliable.
Else maybe the target hardware needs to be laptops from Pentium M / underclocked Athlon 64 and up, including netbooks. Now that's easier to ship and lowish power. Africans can probably open up and clean them, change thermal paste etc. but hard drives will fail and crappy or borked/corrupted Windows installation is another big hurdle.
Even with dial up and a crap PC Africans can at least access English and French Wikipedia - those two languages are lingua franca for most of the continent, even a common native language. That is useful. A browser or extension that would display images on request (show the image frame with ALT text and show the image when clicking on it) would further reduce bandwith and RAM utilisation. Adblocking is another option.
Then you have forums, mail, slashdot and whatever home-grown services that can tell about market prices and such.
You probably won't ever notice if you use less than 100% of your memory and with a very fast CPU (like sandy bridge and up) there would be even less a reason to. If you're using something 150% of your physical memory (running a computer with 2GB or less and Firefox using well over 1GB) that's another story, it does take time to release resources when they are in hundreds of megabytes of swap.
It does do that. When quitting a heavy session with lots of active/loaded tabs, just the task of exiting and releasing resources etc. can be quite long esp. if a lot of the process's memory resides in swap. Even when all UI windows are closed there's still a firefox process doing that work. At least it did that pre-29. In case like this you can watch it with top in a terminal window, look at the CPU use, and the "RES" memory use going down.
If you don't want to baby sit Firefox I can recommend the "Restartless restart" extension. It gives you a restart, "restartless" refers to the fact that you don't have to restart to enable the extension:).
I like the new UI (importantly, it still has the classic menu bar) and the extension to get a fully customisable UI back was available monthes before the official release of FF29.
That's interesting. It would be partially solved by boosting the processor to full speed when JIT compiling code, then instantly going back to lower power operation for the rest of the experience. You solve the problem with brute force.. That's what Firefox OS is essentially doing, it takes advantage of even low end hardware having 1.x GHz ARM. In several years low end stuff will have updated CPUs on 20nm process. There can be good incremental progress. But code bloat will eat it up?
That's why you don't let Doctor Bashir play with the ship's phasers or the self-destruct sequence. There are other qualified high-rank officers to do that kind of work (when they're not mind-controlled by aliens or trapped in another plane of existence)
Why do we need an OS at all on a phone? Dumbphones work well with a simple firmware. I don't really want a phone with an OS. Most smartphones are barely usable because they're touchscreen based, and they need a PC and cable to flash them. Firefox OS gives the base stuff and a browser. Maybe that's fake simplicity since all the stuff is moved to an extremely complex browser. But the browser needed to be there anyway.
Funnily, some phones do support output to a projector (via some micro HDMI or MHL thing, perhaps Displayport in the future) and Windows Phone uses.NET - perhaps that not worse than feature phones using Java a decade ago.
There's quite some public and semi-public (needing codes, leeching from ISP customers) wifi where I live but it may be unreliable, may be too slow or disconnect and of course will be plain unavailable if you're not at the right place. It may work.. But how do you receive calls? Only would work when you connect to access points and have reliable service. So you're uncallable most of the time and rely on others having a real mobile phone so you can call them. But it's an interesting way to deal with the absence of pay phones.
Latin is even more terse than English and the words can be placed where the fuck you want. It can be well ambiguous enough!, but that's because I studied poetic latin a bit in high school. Declensions on every word save it, but mean you can really abuse it. Then being a dead language noone knows how to say "yes", "no", "hello", "thanks", "how are you doing?" and such little things.
In 17th/18th century French replaced it, with less declensions and more grammar. (and you had other such artifical national languages such as German, Italian and English) English goes a bit too far, it's a pain to write a sentence with the word "could" which can both be read as being in the past tense or in present conditional, and no way to tell between the two (similar thing with "would". And you can't even write "I will can")
Slashdot Mirror
And dual link DVI covers some of the bandwith need, plus VGA optionally piggy-backed on the connector.
I hope the VESA Adaptive-Sync feature gets successful (and that it'll work on linux, why not)
By the way I would like a great 1600x900 monitor with high refresh rate, great blacks and angles.. "piddly" but it would be not too big and still allow comfortable use of a maximized browser.
well I found the card on Amazon. Still has one Displayport rather than two. I'd be happy if they crammed two mini-DP, one HDMI and one VGA on a single row (include a mini DP to single link DVI adapter in the package)
It's still not to be found on most low end and even midrange hardware. On motherboards, this is a feature you have to hunt for, especially for use with Intel graphics (and to have a couple of them, that's only found on very rare mobos with Thunderbolt). Even on graphics cards the newly released GTX 750 and 750 ti don't have them, save for a model from one specific vendor that is not sold in Europe as far as I know. The cheaper ones tend to have a HDMI/VGA/DVI triad.
What's more, even sending the picture as a set of scanlines is no longer needed. With recent versions of eDP (embedded Displayport) and DP you will have the option to send it as little square chunks, send only those that have changed, and even use compression (for extremely high resolutions or power saving purpose)
Cheap solution : don't even run an OS. There's likely no need for an OS at all on a single purpose device with limited inputs/output as this. My 1989 Game Boy didn't run an OS and had more abilities than the Navy e-book. Stuff like micro-waves and alarm clocks don't run an OS either.
Put evething : the program, fonts (all sizes and styles pre-baked) and books in a single mask ROM.
If the 300 books are worth reading that's decent but not only that, they're all properly bought/licensed. The collective value of the book's data is probably more than that of the hardware itself, ignoring price gouging and low runs.
So there's no 4000 books, but even at $1 a piece a 4000 book device would cost $4000, multiplied by hundreds of units. We can joke at the list of "approved material". It's a bit easier to navigate a list of 300 books than 4000 or 50000, too.
There's the option of releasing new "editions" of the e-book with another selection of content .
Fun fact : more people have access to a cell phone than to decent water and sanitation.
Maybe that $40 phone is so much crap that even africans don't want it.
When you're poor you can't afford to buy throw-away stuff. If the phone gets unusably slow, orphaned in six monthes (or right of the bat) and subject to malware that would be quite a bad buy. Of course in the first world you can put it in a drawer or use a full blown PC to re-flash it.
One other aspect is shipping, and a strong money doesn't hurt. With the sheer infrastructure and logistics you benefit from, your Walmart is probably the cheapest place on Earth you can buy that thing.
I have just RTFA : they use a router with 3G modem. That's cheap and tiny, gives you a wifi and wired ethernet network.
The choice of OS is interesting, Android 4.4. They run a cell phone / tablet OS on a desktop.
It's slightly weird but it works, at least. Android laptops and desktops AIO are coming on the market so there'll be software support for it.
The benefit is obvious : a screen big enough to show a page of text, and a keyboard.
There's some hardware worth using that can't boot from USB, Pentium 3 with 440BX chipset mainly. I was still using some not long ago. More powerful than a Raspberry Pi, reliable and much less power hungry than a Pentium 4, and run pretty quick on a recent Debian or Ubuntu with LXDE desktop. But they have USB1 unless you add a USB2 card.
Some Athlon XP systems are a lot faster but they tend to be junked or dead already, heard only those with nforce 2 chipset were still reliable.
Else maybe the target hardware needs to be laptops from Pentium M / underclocked Athlon 64 and up, including netbooks. Now that's easier to ship and lowish power. Africans can probably open up and clean them, change thermal paste etc. but hard drives will fail and crappy or borked/corrupted Windows installation is another big hurdle.
Doesn't rule out tethering or directly using a 3G modem on a PC.
Even with dial up and a crap PC Africans can at least access English and French Wikipedia - those two languages are lingua franca for most of the continent, even a common native language. That is useful. A browser or extension that would display images on request (show the image frame with ALT text and show the image when clicking on it) would further reduce bandwith and RAM utilisation. Adblocking is another option.
Then you have forums, mail, slashdot and whatever home-grown services that can tell about market prices and such.
A cyclist tends to have a very good vision of his surroundings, much unobstructed except by big vehicles
You probably won't ever notice if you use less than 100% of your memory and with a very fast CPU (like sandy bridge and up) there would be even less a reason to. If you're using something 150% of your physical memory (running a computer with 2GB or less and Firefox using well over 1GB) that's another story, it does take time to release resources when they are in hundreds of megabytes of swap.
It does do that. When quitting a heavy session with lots of active/loaded tabs, just the task of exiting and releasing resources etc. can be quite long esp. if a lot of the process's memory resides in swap. Even when all UI windows are closed there's still a firefox process doing that work. At least it did that pre-29. In case like this you can watch it with top in a terminal window, look at the CPU use, and the "RES" memory use going down.
If you don't want to baby sit Firefox I can recommend the "Restartless restart" extension. It gives you a restart, "restartless" refers to the fact that you don't have to restart to enable the extension :).
.. a well crafted and up to date hosts file helps to deal with that!
Please, extremely long tunnels already exist such as the one between Hokkaido and Honshu.
I like the new UI (importantly, it still has the classic menu bar) and the extension to get a fully customisable UI back was available monthes before the official release of FF29.
That's interesting. It would be partially solved by boosting the processor to full speed when JIT compiling code, then instantly going back to lower power operation for the rest of the experience.
You solve the problem with brute force.. That's what Firefox OS is essentially doing, it takes advantage of even low end hardware having 1.x GHz ARM. In several years low end stuff will have updated CPUs on 20nm process. There can be good incremental progress. But code bloat will eat it up?
That's why you don't let Doctor Bashir play with the ship's phasers or the self-destruct sequence. There are other qualified high-rank officers to do that kind of work (when they're not mind-controlled by aliens or trapped in another plane of existence)
Why do we need an OS at all on a phone? Dumbphones work well with a simple firmware.
I don't really want a phone with an OS. Most smartphones are barely usable because they're touchscreen based, and they need a PC and cable to flash them.
Firefox OS gives the base stuff and a browser. Maybe that's fake simplicity since all the stuff is moved to an extremely complex browser. But the browser needed to be there anyway.
Funnily, some phones do support output to a projector (via some micro HDMI or MHL thing, perhaps Displayport in the future) and Windows Phone uses .NET - perhaps that not worse than feature phones using Java a decade ago.
There's quite some public and semi-public (needing codes, leeching from ISP customers) wifi where I live but it may be unreliable, may be too slow or disconnect and of course will be plain unavailable if you're not at the right place.
It may work.. But how do you receive calls? Only would work when you connect to access points and have reliable service. So you're uncallable most of the time and rely on others having a real mobile phone so you can call them. But it's an interesting way to deal with the absence of pay phones.
Original PC was 16bit and had an optional FPU that computes on 80 bits internally. PC means "IBM PC" not Apple II, PET, CP/M, ZX81 etc.
Latin is even more terse than English and the words can be placed where the fuck you want. It can be well ambiguous enough!, but that's because I studied poetic latin a bit in high school. Declensions on every word save it, but mean you can really abuse it. Then being a dead language noone knows how to say "yes", "no", "hello", "thanks", "how are you doing?" and such little things.
In 17th/18th century French replaced it, with less declensions and more grammar. (and you had other such artifical national languages such as German, Italian and English)
English goes a bit too far, it's a pain to write a sentence with the word "could" which can both be read as being in the past tense or in present conditional, and no way to tell between the two (similar thing with "would". And you can't even write "I will can")