There already exist some Fire Pro branded cards with the virtualization features. One is based around the Radeon R9 380's GPU, and is quite very expensive but you pay a "Fire Pro" premium akin to a "Quadro" premium mostly. (Substitute FireGL / Fire Pro / Pro) It's the counterpart to nvidia's Geforce Grid (or formerly VGX), one redeeming quality is nvidia has sold complete Geforce Grid systems as in pre-built rackable servers while AMD will sell you the card only.
I'll say it's a licensing issue : on a similar note, nothing could have stopped Windows XP Home from being able to run thirty thin clients if that's you wish. Except they asked you to run Windows Server 2000 or Server 2003 and pay expensive per seat licenses instead. (XP Home did actually come with an RDP server and multi-user support, only these were labeled "remote assistance" and "fast user switching" respectively)
What I wanted to reply to the parent : it's not like a one dimensional analog signal either. This leaves out chemicals and finer details of what's happening in dendrites and axon and whatever stuff I can't name. The idea you can map out the high level electrical brain and only that, and get a brain is a fallacy. It's like we're stuck in the late 90s and Ray Kurweil's ideas of the brain ; I reckon it's the main limit to transhumanism or singularity philosophies. Computer neural networks do have their own uses though, obviously.
If you're running Ubuntu 16.04 though, kernel 4.8 still is a feature released in February and a future, to be defined kernel is supported a good six months after that. Did annoying notice this? According to that schedule at least, so that you can upgrade with a long and semi-obscure apt-get command.
I'd sure like to upgrade to a GCN card. The low end, low power ones are all GCN 1.0 (Cape Verde and Oland GPUs). A nine month wait for official support is much. And I'm counting from now! Note that you can call it "older" all you want : there's no replacement yet for AMD R7 240 graphics cards.
No, that's kind of advertisement and perhaps a bait to get a few users going to the Windows store, and there was a story that the GPO policy which can control that is only available on Windows 10 Enterprise, not Pro.
18.1 uses the 4.4 kernel, same as 18.0 and Ubuntu 16.04.0 and 16.04.1, so I think you need to wait for 18.2 or mess around with Ubuntu kernel ppa etc. Ubuntu "LTS enablement stack" is slated to bring Ubuntu 16.10 kernel and Xorg to Ubuntu 16.04, with February 2017 as a proposed release date : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel... So you can upgrade 18.1 like that in a semi-supported way, but not now.
In all, 16.04 is a bit of a sucky release. Needs a kernel/Xorg upgrade for Skylake or very recent Intel hardware, would need a downgrade available for AMD Radeon users, and about the only user visible benefit I could really see is GTK3 has improved (damning with a faint praise). In Mate's file manager, you can middle-click to close a tab. That's a good thing, a tiny new feature that doesn't break anything. Also Mint removed the conflict between gedit 2.x and gedit 3.x, not that I care that much.
I agree the upgrading gets tiring although $2000 is quite the exaggeration these days. Other way around though, if I can't game it sucks to upgrade the PC just because javascript / firefox runs slow and the video is unaccelerated, but not have any games to show it off. Eventually, I hope we can get some full blown PC emulator where I can get some Windows 95, 98 or XP running (or even Windows ME) and get old games running 60fps at 800x600 at least. Emulator, not virtualization where nothing 3D accelerated ever works.
If you've caused a panic yelling "FIRE" without an intent, it might still be gross negligence or criminal negligence. A crowd in panic might be extremely deadly causing at worst dozens or hundreds of deaths, so perhaps it's about similar to telling your children to go play on rail tracks.
I find it hard enough to play 720p h264 in a web browser. Decent at best but not always smooth. Youtube 1080p, forget it. Sure, go use a Core 2 Duo E8500, under Windows, with Google Chrome, and nothing else running in the browser. That may be fine but I thought we cared about non-Windows too.
The Left is all about Big State solutions, which comes under the rubrik of "Statist Collectiivism" at the state level and "globalism" at the international level. The Right (at least in the US, but increasingly internationally) is all about Individual Liberty. Since there can be no Individual Liberty without decreasing State power it means the Right is about limiting the power of government and letting citizens and the Free Market of voluntary exchange work out solutions. This is because power (the ability to enforce your will on the unwilling) is a zero sum game - the State only gets power by taking it from individuals, and vice versa
I find this to be a weird narrative, although very common in the US it seems. What if the State wrestles power from corporations and other supranational or transnational entities? E.g., let's say the State takes over the healthcare industry and cleans it up big time, slashes costs dramatically, gets closer to universal coverage (like, you can get Medicaid if you earn under $200k, I don't know, that's an example). I would say this gives more power both to the State and the individuals. (there's always more supplementary coverage to buy, anyway).
Also, that the Left is both collectivist and globalist is weird, perhaps you can pull that off in the US but in other places these are entirely at odds (e.g., globalism in the form of treaties, EU etc. dictates you privatize most assets like dams, rail ways and other). More likely you have an "official" Left or "governing" Left (like the US democrats) that is actually right-wing and thus, globalist.
As of a few years ago, French government was beginning to increase taxes on diesel fuel (which for decades has been deliberately cheaper). I could read in the press this is due to modern refining capacities : more gasoline (or stuff usable as gasoline) comes out of the processes than used to. No word on this on TV or in the political realm.
Perhaps more energy and material are used on processing, I have no idea about that. But that's a good, and "environmental" enough reason to use more and small, efficient gasoline engine and less diesel. What apprehension I have against diesel is mostly that recent modern ones are so complicated, high pressure and whatever, that they're rather unreliable and repairs cost a ton. That may be a huge waste. Similarly, hybrid cars are so costly to build they may be a waste overall. Lastly, I believe that ideally a car ought to not be used for daily commute. What about keeping one for two decades, not put many miles on it, have low and cheap maintenance. Also gasoline engine have interesting recent developments, more powerful but still small 3 cylinder and even 3 cylinder turbocharged.
Eventually, when mass unemployment becomes permanent and the wages depressed, things just get harder. Like not being able to find a minimum wage job, or such thing as skilled minimum wage jobs - that's what happens with a high minimum wage maybe, but I'm unsure about that. Low minimum wage and high unemployment seems to describe the current situation in the US.
Now, what if this goes on for three decades. Low level positions such as the garbage man or street sweeper are jobs you can only dream of, as you need the family connections to get them. You try to apply for whatever entry job (although most of the ads says they would like someone with one or two years experience) but find yourself competing against people who had a job before, or early twenty-something who never worked yet but still are very modestly supported by their parents. That is, you try to get the job but out of dozens who apply, some can afford mechanical laundry, heating, hair dresser, two meals every day, data plan even and you're not one of them. That's what happens with "generous" welfare maybe, get "trapped" into that existence. But well, if the welfare is universal and a bit better, thus so there is no bureaucrat who can't decide you're not a "good poor" anymore or that you're aren't poor enough if you do find some work, then at least you have a better ability to do better. Else, sure, spend that money you need to eat on hair dresser, laundry, printing a few documents and eating more before a job interview and you have a vague chance of achieving something but after you got nothing of it, you're more broke and that's all.
A cheap Windows tablet with about the same hardware would do about the job with a decade of updates, me think. But Windows is free as beer for 7.9 inches and under, is that it? As if a dealer pushing one free serving of dope.
With higher specs - 1GB on the low/mid end, better flash, better OS (maybe) and some lightweight enough malware, perhaps the performance won't be so poor. We used to have excruciatingly slow Windows XP computers loaded with malware (funny, given how a clean Windows XP on mid 2000s vintage computer is really fast), and we now have quick running Windows 7 computers with some background malware (that isn't always that clever, as search page hijacking etc. gives it away)
The malware could stay off 3G/4G and steal bandwith on wifi, which will not be very noticeable. Left is the battery life stealing, that would be the biggest issue.
Wow. Crap. Asus is a long-renowned motherboard vendor, a major PC vendor and I somehow thought they would know a bit about support. They know things about firmware and user-facing documentation and downloads. It's no surprise the Android crap division doesn't support their products, I guess everyone may know it by inquiring a little on the internets but if Asus won't support their hardware, who will with their own? It's like a tragedy of commons, not quite the right term but I wonder how you should call it, where everyone does the same as the very low or negative margins depend on it (and thus whatever accounting salads and stock market things). So, no one makes a move. Some might expect 3 years of updates / support to be reasonable, and I dare say 5 years is more reasonable still for the consumer.
The irony (flame about misuse of 'irony') is Asus sells graphics cards at a +10% margin next to their competitors, just because. Now perhaps the Android hardware industry can grow up a bit : 16nm or 14nm SoC going mainstream, USB-C, UFS flash memory, RAM sizes similar to low end PC, this is somewhat laptop class hardware. I think we can pay +10%, +20% whatever for 5 years of support meaning basic security (and 5 years is compromising much. You can be current on a PC from 1999 or 2001)
I find it impressive in a way that it works. So there were actual geeks working at Apple, and they're pissing away some advantages they had from vertical integration.
In fact I wish we could get Windows 8 with the Vista GUI. Windows 7 has about the same taskbar as 8 and 10, this is where they went a bit more application oriented and a bit less document oriented. Windows 8 has a better kernel (6.2 or 6.3 vs 6.0 and 6.1) Also, Vista had : quick toolbar, 95/NT4/2000 small start menu, classic theme with color schemes.
Vista was fine, it was just a bit early as the RAM requirements shot up by 8x overnight and the consumers weren't quite prepared for it, even the non technical ones.
There's still the Mac mini I guess? Before you puke in horror, that's the most desktop-ish machine left it seems. Oh crap, 16GB RAM on the base model is a +$300 upgrade so that's $800 for a low end high RAM machine. Twice the storage of a Macbook Pro, though, because it uses a low end hard drive.
and revert entirely to Linux and then run Windows as a VM with PCI passthrough for the GPU if the Linux subsystem does not work out.
I'm very wary of this working on a laptop or a Surface lapblettop, I am thinking this requires BIOS support and hypervisor support and I don't know if it's that mundane of a feature today. Maybe it's decently available on "gaming" and plain desktop motherboards (bought on their own, not as part of a branded desktop). Maybe I'm overly cautious and modern UEFI makes it more widely available? It's something I'd have to triple-check if I want to get hardware to do it.
It may be that I'm not American, but I see nothing wrong with that. The pissing contest was in the 60s as well and while human flights always make for good national pride and propaganda I can't see what great strategic importance they have relative to the huge costs. I mean, in the 90s to early 00s it still felt nice with the space plane lookalike and the Mir station and building ISS but there isn't really anything new that can be accomplished and I wished the US just pull the plug on the manned flights and e.g. canceled the SLS or all manned-related aspects of the program. And if two countries that carry out manned flights used to be enough, well we still have two countries doing that. Hell, we only have one LHC at the CERN and make do with that. Somehow the countries decided to build just one LHC, and not one per big or wealthy country.
Not sure it would require a lot of resources if you run e.g. an average 15-year-old Windows application. Back then PC came out with 128MB RAM, I also had one with 80MB RAM (Windows 98SE) which I upgraded a bit and wow the most ridiculous thing is we could do everything back then we can do today (web browsing, IM, playing movies and music on the computer, video games). Well, there was MSN chat and the video games were better.
Thunderbolt to serial/parallel little boxes might be a useful solution, if they're available at all. [*] Obviously I would look for Windows laptops with Thunderbolt not Macs, since if anything is wrong or missing in OS/driver/firmware, your adapter will be worse than useless.
This is what I think a yet untold story : you have that latest and greatest connector that can do anything, from VGA 640x480 to 5K displayport, or from 19200 bps RS232 to 2.5 GB/s SSD but can you believe every manufacturer of little hardware for industry-specific needs will support the Macs instead of only Windows? I doubt so.
[*] Something ridiculous I think can done is to use a Thunderbolt enclosure for graphics card, put a PCIe card that does dual RS232 + parallel in there ; can you use it without the greatly overpowered external PSU that's needed if you use it with a graphics card, I dont' know.
Slashdot Mirror
There already exist some Fire Pro branded cards with the virtualization features. One is based around the Radeon R9 380's GPU, and is quite very expensive but you pay a "Fire Pro" premium akin to a "Quadro" premium mostly. (Substitute FireGL / Fire Pro / Pro)
It's the counterpart to nvidia's Geforce Grid (or formerly VGX), one redeeming quality is nvidia has sold complete Geforce Grid systems as in pre-built rackable servers while AMD will sell you the card only.
I'll say it's a licensing issue : on a similar note, nothing could have stopped Windows XP Home from being able to run thirty thin clients if that's you wish. Except they asked you to run Windows Server 2000 or Server 2003 and pay expensive per seat licenses instead.
(XP Home did actually come with an RDP server and multi-user support, only these were labeled "remote assistance" and "fast user switching" respectively)
What I wanted to reply to the parent : it's not like a one dimensional analog signal either. This leaves out chemicals and finer details of what's happening in dendrites and axon and whatever stuff I can't name.
The idea you can map out the high level electrical brain and only that, and get a brain is a fallacy. It's like we're stuck in the late 90s and Ray Kurweil's ideas of the brain ; I reckon it's the main limit to transhumanism or singularity philosophies. Computer neural networks do have their own uses though, obviously.
If you're running Ubuntu 16.04 though, kernel 4.8 still is a feature released in February and a future, to be defined kernel is supported a good six months after that. Did annoying notice this? According to that schedule at least, so that you can upgrade with a long and semi-obscure apt-get command.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel...
I'd sure like to upgrade to a GCN card. The low end, low power ones are all GCN 1.0 (Cape Verde and Oland GPUs). A nine month wait for official support is much. And I'm counting from now! Note that you can call it "older" all you want : there's no replacement yet for AMD R7 240 graphics cards.
No, that's kind of advertisement and perhaps a bait to get a few users going to the Windows store, and there was a story that the GPO policy which can control that is only available on Windows 10 Enterprise, not Pro.
18.1 uses the 4.4 kernel, same as 18.0 and Ubuntu 16.04.0 and 16.04.1, so I think you need to wait for 18.2 or mess around with Ubuntu kernel ppa etc.
Ubuntu "LTS enablement stack" is slated to bring Ubuntu 16.10 kernel and Xorg to Ubuntu 16.04, with February 2017 as a proposed release date :
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel...
So you can upgrade 18.1 like that in a semi-supported way, but not now.
In all, 16.04 is a bit of a sucky release. Needs a kernel/Xorg upgrade for Skylake or very recent Intel hardware, would need a downgrade available for AMD Radeon users, and about the only user visible benefit I could really see is GTK3 has improved (damning with a faint praise).
In Mate's file manager, you can middle-click to close a tab. That's a good thing, a tiny new feature that doesn't break anything. Also Mint removed the conflict between gedit 2.x and gedit 3.x, not that I care that much.
I agree the upgrading gets tiring although $2000 is quite the exaggeration these days. Other way around though, if I can't game it sucks to upgrade the PC just because javascript / firefox runs slow and the video is unaccelerated, but not have any games to show it off.
Eventually, I hope we can get some full blown PC emulator where I can get some Windows 95, 98 or XP running (or even Windows ME) and get old games running 60fps at 800x600 at least. Emulator, not virtualization where nothing 3D accelerated ever works.
If you've caused a panic yelling "FIRE" without an intent, it might still be gross negligence or criminal negligence. A crowd in panic might be extremely deadly causing at worst dozens or hundreds of deaths, so perhaps it's about similar to telling your children to go play on rail tracks.
I find it hard enough to play 720p h264 in a web browser. Decent at best but not always smooth. Youtube 1080p, forget it.
Sure, go use a Core 2 Duo E8500, under Windows, with Google Chrome, and nothing else running in the browser.
That may be fine but I thought we cared about non-Windows too.
The Left is all about Big State solutions, which comes under the rubrik of "Statist Collectiivism" at the state level and "globalism" at the international level.
The Right (at least in the US, but increasingly internationally) is all about Individual Liberty. Since there can be no Individual Liberty without decreasing State power it means the Right is about limiting the power of government and letting citizens and the Free Market of voluntary exchange work out solutions. This is because power (the ability to enforce your will on the unwilling) is a zero sum game - the State only gets power by taking it from individuals, and vice versa
I find this to be a weird narrative, although very common in the US it seems. What if the State wrestles power from corporations and other supranational or transnational entities? E.g., let's say the State takes over the healthcare industry and cleans it up big time, slashes costs dramatically, gets closer to universal coverage (like, you can get Medicaid if you earn under $200k, I don't know, that's an example).
I would say this gives more power both to the State and the individuals. (there's always more supplementary coverage to buy, anyway).
Also, that the Left is both collectivist and globalist is weird, perhaps you can pull that off in the US but in other places these are entirely at odds (e.g., globalism in the form of treaties, EU etc. dictates you privatize most assets like dams, rail ways and other).
More likely you have an "official" Left or "governing" Left (like the US democrats) that is actually right-wing and thus, globalist.
As of a few years ago, French government was beginning to increase taxes on diesel fuel (which for decades has been deliberately cheaper). I could read in the press this is due to modern refining capacities : more gasoline (or stuff usable as gasoline) comes out of the processes than used to. No word on this on TV or in the political realm.
Perhaps more energy and material are used on processing, I have no idea about that. But that's a good, and "environmental" enough reason to use more and small, efficient gasoline engine and less diesel.
What apprehension I have against diesel is mostly that recent modern ones are so complicated, high pressure and whatever, that they're rather unreliable and repairs cost a ton. That may be a huge waste. Similarly, hybrid cars are so costly to build they may be a waste overall. Lastly, I believe that ideally a car ought to not be used for daily commute. What about keeping one for two decades, not put many miles on it, have low and cheap maintenance. Also gasoline engine have interesting recent developments, more powerful but still small 3 cylinder and even 3 cylinder turbocharged.
That's ridiculous. Not everyone buys new hardware every year.
Nothing much different? I believe a charger is a tiny computer, is there a 4bit or 8bit CPU in there that negotiates current output to the device?
Eventually, when mass unemployment becomes permanent and the wages depressed, things just get harder. Like not being able to find a minimum wage job, or such thing as skilled minimum wage jobs - that's what happens with a high minimum wage maybe, but I'm unsure about that. Low minimum wage and high unemployment seems to describe the current situation in the US.
Now, what if this goes on for three decades. Low level positions such as the garbage man or street sweeper are jobs you can only dream of, as you need the family connections to get them. You try to apply for whatever entry job (although most of the ads says they would like someone with one or two years experience) but find yourself competing against people who had a job before, or early twenty-something who never worked yet but still are very modestly supported by their parents. That is, you try to get the job but out of dozens who apply, some can afford mechanical laundry, heating, hair dresser, two meals every day, data plan even and you're not one of them.
That's what happens with "generous" welfare maybe, get "trapped" into that existence. But well, if the welfare is universal and a bit better, thus so there is no bureaucrat who can't decide you're not a "good poor" anymore or that you're aren't poor enough if you do find some work, then at least you have a better ability to do better. Else, sure, spend that money you need to eat on hair dresser, laundry, printing a few documents and eating more before a job interview and you have a vague chance of achieving something but after you got nothing of it, you're more broke and that's all.
Newsflash : Space isn't a Shuttle.
A cheap Windows tablet with about the same hardware would do about the job with a decade of updates, me think. But Windows is free as beer for 7.9 inches and under, is that it? As if a dealer pushing one free serving of dope.
With higher specs - 1GB on the low/mid end, better flash, better OS (maybe) and some lightweight enough malware, perhaps the performance won't be so poor. We used to have excruciatingly slow Windows XP computers loaded with malware (funny, given how a clean Windows XP on mid 2000s vintage computer is really fast), and we now have quick running Windows 7 computers with some background malware (that isn't always that clever, as search page hijacking etc. gives it away)
The malware could stay off 3G/4G and steal bandwith on wifi, which will not be very noticeable. Left is the battery life stealing, that would be the biggest issue.
Wow. Crap.
Asus is a long-renowned motherboard vendor, a major PC vendor and I somehow thought they would know a bit about support. They know things about firmware and user-facing documentation and downloads. It's no surprise the Android crap division doesn't support their products, I guess everyone may know it by inquiring a little on the internets but if Asus won't support their hardware, who will with their own? It's like a tragedy of commons, not quite the right term but I wonder how you should call it, where everyone does the same as the very low or negative margins depend on it (and thus whatever accounting salads and stock market things). So, no one makes a move. Some might expect 3 years of updates / support to be reasonable, and I dare say 5 years is more reasonable still for the consumer.
The irony (flame about misuse of 'irony') is Asus sells graphics cards at a +10% margin next to their competitors, just because. Now perhaps the Android hardware industry can grow up a bit : 16nm or 14nm SoC going mainstream, USB-C, UFS flash memory, RAM sizes similar to low end PC, this is somewhat laptop class hardware. I think we can pay +10%, +20% whatever for 5 years of support meaning basic security (and 5 years is compromising much. You can be current on a PC from 1999 or 2001)
Yet another reason I wished TV had stayed on 4:3, there would be room for speakers on the sides, built-in or not.
I find it impressive in a way that it works.
So there were actual geeks working at Apple, and they're pissing away some advantages they had from vertical integration.
In fact I wish we could get Windows 8 with the Vista GUI. Windows 7 has about the same taskbar as 8 and 10, this is where they went a bit more application oriented and a bit less document oriented. Windows 8 has a better kernel (6.2 or 6.3 vs 6.0 and 6.1)
Also, Vista had : quick toolbar, 95/NT4/2000 small start menu, classic theme with color schemes.
Vista was fine, it was just a bit early as the RAM requirements shot up by 8x overnight and the consumers weren't quite prepared for it, even the non technical ones.
There's still the Mac mini I guess? Before you puke in horror, that's the most desktop-ish machine left it seems. Oh crap, 16GB RAM on the base model is a +$300 upgrade so that's $800 for a low end high RAM machine. Twice the storage of a Macbook Pro, though, because it uses a low end hard drive.
and revert entirely to Linux and then run Windows as a VM with PCI passthrough for the GPU if the Linux subsystem does not work out.
I'm very wary of this working on a laptop or a Surface lapblettop, I am thinking this requires BIOS support and hypervisor support and I don't know if it's that mundane of a feature today. Maybe it's decently available on "gaming" and plain desktop motherboards (bought on their own, not as part of a branded desktop). Maybe I'm overly cautious and modern UEFI makes it more widely available? It's something I'd have to triple-check if I want to get hardware to do it.
It may be that I'm not American, but I see nothing wrong with that. The pissing contest was in the 60s as well and while human flights always make for good national pride and propaganda I can't see what great strategic importance they have relative to the huge costs. I mean, in the 90s to early 00s it still felt nice with the space plane lookalike and the Mir station and building ISS but there isn't really anything new that can be accomplished and I wished the US just pull the plug on the manned flights and e.g. canceled the SLS or all manned-related aspects of the program. And if two countries that carry out manned flights used to be enough, well we still have two countries doing that. Hell, we only have one LHC at the CERN and make do with that. Somehow the countries decided to build just one LHC, and not one per big or wealthy country.
Not sure it would require a lot of resources if you run e.g. an average 15-year-old Windows application. Back then PC came out with 128MB RAM, I also had one with 80MB RAM (Windows 98SE) which I upgraded a bit and wow the most ridiculous thing is we could do everything back then we can do today (web browsing, IM, playing movies and music on the computer, video games). Well, there was MSN chat and the video games were better.
Thunderbolt to serial/parallel little boxes might be a useful solution, if they're available at all. [*]
Obviously I would look for Windows laptops with Thunderbolt not Macs, since if anything is wrong or missing in OS/driver/firmware, your adapter will be worse than useless.
This is what I think a yet untold story : you have that latest and greatest connector that can do anything, from VGA 640x480 to 5K displayport, or from 19200 bps RS232 to 2.5 GB/s SSD but can you believe every manufacturer of little hardware for industry-specific needs will support the Macs instead of only Windows? I doubt so.
[*] Something ridiculous I think can done is to use a Thunderbolt enclosure for graphics card, put a PCIe card that does dual RS232 + parallel in there ; can you use it without the greatly overpowered external PSU that's needed if you use it with a graphics card, I dont' know.