That gives a lowball 15 watts figure at 5 volts, which is pretty nice given I have a few 2.5 watt USB chargers around (and a mains-to-USB adapter that gives only 2.5 watts as well) The worst case is a useful metric, it seems to define applications other than your specialty mobile computing device : e-cigs and other little things. The standard would be a nice 6x increase, if USB C is on both ends (and some minimal electronics handle it in the device)
You'll be able to power a meaningful amplified speaker with that level of power output.. Or going to 12V, you have enough for a class D amplifier that will fill the room with sound if connected to an adequate set of speakers. I do actually have an amplifier powered by a 12V, 3A power supply, use hifi-styled speakers with 90dB sensibilty and it's loud enough for movies, parties, whatever (sound quality and clarity ridiculously high as well). Up ti 20V operation would be good for amps that take 24 volts but can work at 19V (laptop PSU) or less.
I hope it's made clear that you can still transmit data when power is at 12 volt, because you know, if you are going to output sound from a laptop it'd better be through USB audio.
So being responsible == having enough income to make high savings?
Even then, what if you have a $30k income (that would be about a typical US american income) and save $3k per year, and then you have a $250k surgery (uh, that's probably very generous).. With 30 years of savings you're short by $160k. Sounds about doable if you move into a trailer, slash your expenditures on food and other products, and pay debt for a couple decades. Unless you have a fully paid off, owned house which you can sell to pay for the surgery, but that's asking much if you have $30K income and savings. But it sounds barely doable.
Now, what if the surgery and treatment is $750k.. hahahaha
Why go to great lengthes to find obscure industrial mobos on websites where the price is "fill a form to ask for a quote"? Here's a list of easily available stuff (sadly all the Intel stuff is crippled to having a PCIe 1x or PCI slots, except for server grade Atom stuff with 4x or 8x PCIe) http://www.ldlc.com/informatiq...
Or PCIe 2.0 1x is a limit you can live with (500MB/s theoretical)
I don't understand that netbook meme on slashdot, they were hugely successful and ran real software, not cell phone/PDA/Psion stuff. They made laptops affordable, for the better or the worse. There are probably more people running Photoshop on netbooks than playing with their Raspberry Pee. You're slightly wrong about the CPU power, an old netbook's CPU is around 3x more powerful than a Raspberry's one I think. The newly announced MinnowBoard is perhaps the first "single board computer" that surpasses a first-gen netbook.
When you install a recent iso like Ubuntu 12.04.4 you get updated linux and Xorg server, when you use 12.04.0 or 12.04.1 you have the older ones (and then you get security non destructive updates)
There are some solutions to that problem. CentOS backports features into older kernels, Ubuntu has the LTS enablement stack, which is included in installation media as Ubuntu 12.04.2, 12.04.3, 12.04.4 etc. In this case though, the Xorg server is updated which is what we wanted to avoid.
Older gens of hardware parts can still be bought new, like a Sandy Bridge Pentium or Celeron, or a 760G motherboard and Sempron 145, or an AMD E-350 Pentium. Graphics cards like Geforce 210 still sold. Tech from 2009 to 2011 roughly. So for a desktop at least, it's very easy to get stuff that should be supported as long as you choose the components yourself (the store can assemble it and ship it for you) ; small "nettop" computers are good to go as well if you choose the right hardware (i.e. not AMD Kabini or Intel 22nm Atom/Celeron)
Some distros are supported for a long time, like CentOS, Ubuntu LTS and others (I dont' know them) and debian is half-decent with three years. So it's easy to install a distro based on Ubuntu 12.04, you get support till 2017 so that buys you time till the bug is fixed! (or even some Wayland and graphics driver that work well enough, if the accessibility feature is implemented)
Debian wheezy uses Xorg 1.12.4 (I've just checked) and works till 2016, it has many derivates too (like Crunchbang) I don't know too much about the rpm world, if not for CentOS, it is dated but has very long support. till 2020.
I would even run dillo on cygwin (if built successfully) or elinks/links/lynx etc. Lynx at least has a Windows version.
Even then I would have trouble trusting it. Near every service would have to be disabled, hack to prevent any execution of mshtml.dll and whatever things, no internet access other than by proxy and you still could get owned by a vulnerability in some jpeg or png rendering library or whatever stupid thing.
You have transient threats instead:) I wonder if malware will target such "clever" uses of Windows. You boot your XP VM, get owned in 5 minutes and then the malware has a 10 hour or so window to do some malware stuff. Next day you start anew.
Funnily the Pentium III systems tend to survive the newer Athlon/XP systems and some bad Pentium 4 ones (there were bad motherboards and VIA chipset for Pentium 4 too, and the high power draw may put some strain on the electric stuff on the motherboard)
Not many people still use Pentium III systems though. They are still decent (much better than a Raspberry Pi) but can't play fullscreen youtube video, which is apparently an extremely demanding task unless you use html5 + hardware acceleration.
If you have "only" 1GB RAM (which used to be an unfathomably high figure) and a not-that-great hard drive, Windows 7 will be a pig and XP will fly. It's fallacious to believe that because it runs great with your 4GB or whatever, then it runs great everywhere. (Like Chrome : nice on a computer with 16GB RAM, but with "only" 4GB or less it may be too much of a memory pig).
Still, I recommend upgrading a 1GB machine to 7 and live with the slowness (or live within the memory limitations)
The environment around software changes. 20 years ago we used computers that had no notion of users and services/daemons, javascript didn't exist and the computers didn't know what books you read, what music you listen to and what movies you watch (among other things)
Just use warez Windows 7. You torrent an iso and it's free, CD key baked in (you don't even need one), activated, "genuine" and receives updates. At this point it's getting more ethical to run non-legit Windows 7 than legit XP.. You will be endangering your family, friends, and also the internet at large as your computers are added to botnets. In the mean time watch for license deals, MS may have cheap Windows XP to 8.1 upgrade, "family plan" to install Windows 7 on three computers, whatever.
You can reconsider what's a box needed to run Windows 7. Anything with 1GHz or less and 1GB or more runs it, and Windows 7 32bit has vast compatibilty with software and even some XP/2000 drivers. Most software that doesn't run on it wouldn't run on XP either. RAM upgrades are possible and hard drives can be shuffled around. If a computer still can't run Windows 7 after that, it probably isn't able to play youtube videos decently. You might as well put Windows 98SE or ME on such a computer to run 90s/early 00s games on it, or use a linux distro with LXDE if you want to browse the web and other networked tasks.
I see you're running MS-DOS 7.10, great version, with fat32 support, really easy to get over 600K of conventional memory for playing games. I think it will run in nearly every PC, but doesn't support a hard drive bigger than 2 TiB.
DOS is also very easy to run on arbitrary hardware. Boot it ; done. That was easy! You don't even need a hard drive or floppy anymore as it will run from flash, USB and other options. On latest hardware you probably have to turn BIOS emulation on in the UEFI setup.
Servers are now immensely more powerful and loaded with memory, the various software and hardware buffers are bigger, the software more robust, the would-be slashdotters are served a static page etc. For technical reasons alone sites can't be slashdotted by slashdot anymore. That's what I read on slashdot several years ago already.
My computer from 2002 ran most of the games at the right speed. Stuff from the 1980s is wrong but not all of it, Arkanoid is fine. The occasional game from the 1990s was too fast as well. But by large in my experience the games got the timing right. DOS and the PC had timers, interrupts and a real time clock.
I still ran 98SE to be precise. Those were good times. I don't really enjoy the slowness of Dosbox or the fact the sound craps out if it is overloaded. I can hardly play doom (with external software midi synthesizer. But there my current linux distro's pulseaudio seems to use too much CPU or whatever). Dosbox is not good enough for me, I'd like to play 3D games that render at 640x480 or more, with a perfectly fast framerate and no glitch. Like I used to be able to.
Steep learning curve works if it represents amount of effort needed to progress further? i.e. let's take vi, imagine you're told right away how to quit (:q or:q!). It's very easy to open files, do the most basic scrolling, and mash ESC and:q! to get out. But you don't know how to do anything else. Then you learn how to use the i and a commands, edit text, move with hjkl or arrows, and hit ESC at the right time. Nice, but that was harder. Now you have to learn harder and harder tricks..
I've never seen a bicycle rider with a helmet cam yet. Security cameras are often not so obvious, they suck but hopefully what they film won't leak and be datamined.
And here comes Google which does proselytize and have a facebook-like attitude of preteding they're going to change and dictate the social rules. Of course we can bitch. We don't have to care about your irrational fear of "bias" (go waste your time reading creationist arguments and watch Fox News "fair and balanced") Even then, Google advertised itself as "Do no evil" and now they want to rape their users by forcing a centralized, real name account on them (instead of having the freedom to have a youtube account, gmail account, google account, android account etc.). So they want to be another facebook. I'm not interested into your facebooks thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
That gives a lowball 15 watts figure at 5 volts, which is pretty nice given I have a few 2.5 watt USB chargers around (and a mains-to-USB adapter that gives only 2.5 watts as well)
The worst case is a useful metric, it seems to define applications other than your specialty mobile computing device : e-cigs and other little things. The standard would be a nice 6x increase, if USB C is on both ends (and some minimal electronics handle it in the device)
You'll be able to power a meaningful amplified speaker with that level of power output.. Or going to 12V, you have enough for a class D amplifier that will fill the room with sound if connected to an adequate set of speakers. I do actually have an amplifier powered by a 12V, 3A power supply, use hifi-styled speakers with 90dB sensibilty and it's loud enough for movies, parties, whatever (sound quality and clarity ridiculously high as well).
Up ti 20V operation would be good for amps that take 24 volts but can work at 19V (laptop PSU) or less.
I hope it's made clear that you can still transmit data when power is at 12 volt, because you know, if you are going to output sound from a laptop it'd better be through USB audio.
So being responsible == having enough income to make high savings?
Even then, what if you have a $30k income (that would be about a typical US american income) and save $3k per year, and then you have a $250k surgery (uh, that's probably very generous).. With 30 years of savings you're short by $160k. Sounds about doable if you move into a trailer, slash your expenditures on food and other products, and pay debt for a couple decades.
Unless you have a fully paid off, owned house which you can sell to pay for the surgery, but that's asking much if you have $30K income and savings. But it sounds barely doable.
Now, what if the surgery and treatment is $750k.. hahahaha
Why go to great lengthes to find obscure industrial mobos on websites where the price is "fill a form to ask for a quote"?
Here's a list of easily available stuff (sadly all the Intel stuff is crippled to having a PCIe 1x or PCI slots, except for server grade Atom stuff with 4x or 8x PCIe)
http://www.ldlc.com/informatiq...
Or PCIe 2.0 1x is a limit you can live with (500MB/s theoretical)
I don't understand that netbook meme on slashdot, they were hugely successful and ran real software, not cell phone/PDA/Psion stuff. They made laptops affordable, for the better or the worse. There are probably more people running Photoshop on netbooks than playing with their Raspberry Pee. You're slightly wrong about the CPU power, an old netbook's CPU is around 3x more powerful than a Raspberry's one I think. The newly announced MinnowBoard is perhaps the first "single board computer" that surpasses a first-gen netbook.
When you install a recent iso like Ubuntu 12.04.4 you get updated linux and Xorg server, when you use 12.04.0 or 12.04.1 you have the older ones (and then you get security non destructive updates)
Does Wayland run fast on software rendering, 2D output in VESA mode, on a single core slow CPU?
I now believe Wayland will be great afterall, but you don't always have OpenGL hardware, or drivers, or good enough of both.
It only buggered me when playing Prince of Persia (the 1989 game) on Windows XP with VDMSound. So, not very much at all.
Shift and Caps Lock don't necessarily have the same output!
On my keyboard, shift does 1234567890+ on the top row and Caps Lock does &É"'(-È_ÇÀ)=
There are some solutions to that problem. CentOS backports features into older kernels, Ubuntu has the LTS enablement stack, which is included in installation media as Ubuntu 12.04.2, 12.04.3, 12.04.4 etc. In this case though, the Xorg server is updated which is what we wanted to avoid.
Older gens of hardware parts can still be bought new, like a Sandy Bridge Pentium or Celeron, or a 760G motherboard and Sempron 145, or an AMD E-350 Pentium. Graphics cards like Geforce 210 still sold. Tech from 2009 to 2011 roughly. So for a desktop at least, it's very easy to get stuff that should be supported as long as you choose the components yourself (the store can assemble it and ship it for you) ; small "nettop" computers are good to go as well if you choose the right hardware (i.e. not AMD Kabini or Intel 22nm Atom/Celeron)
Some distros are supported for a long time, like CentOS, Ubuntu LTS and others (I dont' know them) and debian is half-decent with three years.
So it's easy to install a distro based on Ubuntu 12.04, you get support till 2017 so that buys you time till the bug is fixed! (or even some Wayland and graphics driver that work well enough, if the accessibility feature is implemented)
Debian wheezy uses Xorg 1.12.4 (I've just checked) and works till 2016, it has many derivates too (like Crunchbang)
I don't know too much about the rpm world, if not for CentOS, it is dated but has very long support. till 2020.
I would even run dillo on cygwin (if built successfully) or elinks/links/lynx etc. Lynx at least has a Windows version.
Even then I would have trouble trusting it. Near every service would have to be disabled, hack to prevent any execution of mshtml.dll and whatever things, no internet access other than by proxy and you still could get owned by a vulnerability in some jpeg or png rendering library or whatever stupid thing.
You have transient threats instead :)
I wonder if malware will target such "clever" uses of Windows. You boot your XP VM, get owned in 5 minutes and then the malware has a 10 hour or so window to do some malware stuff. Next day you start anew.
Funnily the Pentium III systems tend to survive the newer Athlon/XP systems and some bad Pentium 4 ones (there were bad motherboards and VIA chipset for Pentium 4 too, and the high power draw may put some strain on the electric stuff on the motherboard)
Not many people still use Pentium III systems though. They are still decent (much better than a Raspberry Pi) but can't play fullscreen youtube video, which is apparently an extremely demanding task unless you use html5 + hardware acceleration.
If you have "only" 1GB RAM (which used to be an unfathomably high figure) and a not-that-great hard drive, Windows 7 will be a pig and XP will fly. It's fallacious to believe that because it runs great with your 4GB or whatever, then it runs great everywhere. (Like Chrome : nice on a computer with 16GB RAM, but with "only" 4GB or less it may be too much of a memory pig).
Still, I recommend upgrading a 1GB machine to 7 and live with the slowness (or live within the memory limitations)
The environment around software changes.
20 years ago we used computers that had no notion of users and services/daemons, javascript didn't exist and the computers didn't know what books you read, what music you listen to and what movies you watch (among other things)
Just use warez Windows 7. You torrent an iso and it's free, CD key baked in (you don't even need one), activated, "genuine" and receives updates. At this point it's getting more ethical to run non-legit Windows 7 than legit XP.. You will be endangering your family, friends, and also the internet at large as your computers are added to botnets.
In the mean time watch for license deals, MS may have cheap Windows XP to 8.1 upgrade, "family plan" to install Windows 7 on three computers, whatever.
You can reconsider what's a box needed to run Windows 7. Anything with 1GHz or less and 1GB or more runs it, and Windows 7 32bit has vast compatibilty with software and even some XP/2000 drivers. Most software that doesn't run on it wouldn't run on XP either.
RAM upgrades are possible and hard drives can be shuffled around. If a computer still can't run Windows 7 after that, it probably isn't able to play youtube videos decently. You might as well put Windows 98SE or ME on such a computer to run 90s/early 00s games on it, or use a linux distro with LXDE if you want to browse the web and other networked tasks.
I see you're running MS-DOS 7.10, great version, with fat32 support, really easy to get over 600K of conventional memory for playing games. I think it will run in nearly every PC, but doesn't support a hard drive bigger than 2 TiB.
Btw the just-launched AM1 platform from AMD comes with Windows XP support, which may seem assinine except for those industrial scenarios.
DOS is also very easy to run on arbitrary hardware. Boot it ; done. That was easy! You don't even need a hard drive or floppy anymore as it will run from flash, USB and other options.
On latest hardware you probably have to turn BIOS emulation on in the UEFI setup.
You could type "atril" if you wish so, it's Mate's version and will spare you having to use some GTK3 gunk to read documents.
Servers are now immensely more powerful and loaded with memory, the various software and hardware buffers are bigger, the software more robust, the would-be slashdotters are served a static page etc.
For technical reasons alone sites can't be slashdotted by slashdot anymore. That's what I read on slashdot several years ago already.
My computer from 2002 ran most of the games at the right speed. Stuff from the 1980s is wrong but not all of it, Arkanoid is fine. The occasional game from the 1990s was too fast as well. But by large in my experience the games got the timing right. DOS and the PC had timers, interrupts and a real time clock.
I still ran 98SE to be precise.
Those were good times. I don't really enjoy the slowness of Dosbox or the fact the sound craps out if it is overloaded. I can hardly play doom (with external software midi synthesizer. But there my current linux distro's pulseaudio seems to use too much CPU or whatever). Dosbox is not good enough for me, I'd like to play 3D games that render at 640x480 or more, with a perfectly fast framerate and no glitch. Like I used to be able to.
A bad task allows you to do the trivial, pointless things and after that you hit a wall.
Steep learning curve works if it represents amount of effort needed to progress further? i.e. let's take vi, imagine you're told right away how to quit ( :q or :q!). It's very easy to open files, do the most basic scrolling, and mash ESC and :q! to get out. But you don't know how to do anything else. Then you learn how to use the i and a commands, edit text, move with hjkl or arrows, and hit ESC at the right time. Nice, but that was harder. Now you have to learn harder and harder tricks..
I've never seen a bicycle rider with a helmet cam yet.
Security cameras are often not so obvious, they suck but hopefully what they film won't leak and be datamined.
And here comes Google which does proselytize and have a facebook-like attitude of preteding they're going to change and dictate the social rules. Of course we can bitch. We don't have to care about your irrational fear of "bias" (go waste your time reading creationist arguments and watch Fox News "fair and balanced")
Even then, Google advertised itself as "Do no evil" and now they want to rape their users by forcing a centralized, real name account on them (instead of having the freedom to have a youtube account, gmail account, google account, android account etc.). So they want to be another facebook. I'm not interested into your facebooks thanks.