After all, you have to take into consideration the energy expended in gathering and transporting the urine to the robot. The article also mentions using waste water - waste water from what?
You have to take these considerations, but the alternative ones too : it means you don't need batteries (rechargeable - with limited lifespan - or disposable), or don't need a solar panel, or a significant infrastructure. People around it make do, be it in a small african or indian village, or a very remote area. Building a battery or solar panel and shipping it to the area of interest uses a ton of energy too. I'm more concerned about the fuel cell, which would have to be cheap, durable and without maintenance, and not much energy intensive to build. If that can be achieved that'd be great news. If the fuel cell is worse than using an AA battery or something, just use the battery.
A commenter said this stuff is cyclical. Well, I learned a few weeks ago that romans did collect urine from public pots and urinals. Rather than pump it into fuel cells, they just waited till it breaks down to ammonia (our bodies are smart enough to convert ammonia to urea for safe internal storage). Then it was used to maintain clothes or for teeth whitening! ugh. I'm tempted to put ammonia in my mouth but that could be a bit dangerous.
Also why modern urinals were named after a Roman Emperor (Paris, 19th century). He came up with a pee tax, paid when buying urine at the public toilets - a place where endless thousands would come and go each day to piss, fart, shit and socialize. Maybe we'll go back to something similar too - there's a lot of unused piss and shit and rotten things around, but the supply of it is actually limited.
That's really pointless and a waste of precious CPU, memory and hard disk resources. Not to mention you now have to let happen two different sets of OS, antivirus, application updates happen. What if both Windows are updating at the same time, over wifi, while dad is working on his photos while uploading a few of them in the background.:D congrats you've turned a powerful computer to a 486 with dial up and PIO hard drive.
Better to keep one Windows, fully patched, install Firefox and delete all IE shortcuts.. Vista is a slight variant of Windows 7 anyway, with some of it backported even.
The ARM servers will come 2014, it's called ARMv8. It brings what you find on old PCs, like 64bit computing and virtualization extensions. Look up AMD Seattle for an exemple server chip, and it surely has similar competitors. Stuff like 16 cores, four 10GbE and an incredibly fast on-die bus plus coprocessors. Else, of course ARM is mostly used in low grade NAS (even the better consumer NAS tend to use an Atom instead), cell phones, embedded and shitboxes like the Pi.
But ARMv8 will probably be used in generic web tasks, storage, networking, rented VMs (I've always wanted a $1/month box, hell that could be a nice place to self-host the server side for Firefox OS cell phone apps you use). In fact ARM could do the front end and infrastructure stuff while x86 would be relegated to back end tasks where they're still needed (because legacy, 2x/3x higher single-thread performance or whatever). There will still be a shit tons of them but more like when the big Unix servers were used for that and the generic x86 boxes did the lighter, simpler things.
Web Audio seems to be about actually generating audio i.e. synth, mixing, filters, in javascript games or apps. That's different from providing dumb playback of sound files. OSS or ALSA would come after it in the chain, hopefully with the work they're doing the output sound server would end up being transparently selectable, i.e. choosing between ALSA, Pulseaudio, OSS, dummy, other..
BTW I tried to like OSS but have a few issues. No panel applet for xfce, mate, lxde etc., doesn't seem to work with my Xonar, and if I can't have an OSS + Pulseaudio system just by installing a package. It would take me a week or a month to learn how to modify distro scripts or crap like that.
More registers is about the only thing better for a browser. More than 4 gig of memory is a waste for a browser.
You can routinely go over 1GB if you're a heavy user or the pages themselves are heavy. Sometimes it's tab hoarding, I'm beginning to roll that back. But I can reach the 32bit 2GB limit without problem and with a 64bit linux, 3GB ram, 1.9GB swap, 64bit firefox I managed to fill everything up. The best reason to use a 32bit firefox on a 64bit system would be so it cannot possibly fill up all your memory and send you to swap hell.
Also, Chrome is a lot more memory hungry and can always fill up all RAM, because it uses many spawned processes. You can need 8GB ram for web browsing alone these days. I do no ad-blocking and no javascript blocking, because I don't want to deal with blacklists/whitelists constantly. I get the full experience lol, though I use flashblock so the computer doesn't suffer denial of service by too many flash objects.
No, the USA would rather choose to mine and process their own rare earths. China has a monopoly on it because it's dirty and messy, not because rare earth metals are actually rare. They're rare in the sense you need to crush millions tons of rocks and do whatever nasty things to retrieve a trickle of them, then deal with the garbage (i.e. let it poison the region's water supply, or whatever)
How many others mentioned that in 2003? I happen to know for a fact that the weaponization of drones was done in great haste by a few people in the post 9/11 period leading up to the invasion of Afghanistan. It was not a cleverly thought out plan that took several years to carefully execute, it was hacked together by a handful of air force personnel and a civilian armorer. Very few people were predicting the explosion in drone operations we have seen in the last six to seven years back in 2003.
In 2004 the weaponised drones were publicly known and deployed already. I remember the little experiment back then too (in Iraq) of putting a machine gun on a "Packbot" little robot. So I guess I assumed there would be some drone warfare, which conceptually isn't that much different from using missiles and smartbombs anyway. You order a strike somewhere and it quickly happens through screens and buttons, without people hiking or driving all the way to the destination.
What you mostly need for patrolling killer drones is a lawless, desolate area where you can get away with it.
OS update adds the console gaming functionality to a gaming console, that's fascinating. I hope other platforms follow suite, e.g. that Mozilla Firefox 25 brings web browsing to the table, or that Windows 8.1's notepad can write to files.
That's good, if you pay attention to gddr5 vs ddr3 ; the former is much better even on the lowest card. i.e. look only at 1GB cards with explicit gddr5, even for radeon R7 240, 250, 7730, 7750.
I tried Xubuntu 13.10 a few days ago : it comes with Abiword and Gnumeric (to me, that's diminished software you install on a computer with 128MB RAM). The "System" entry on the start menu has two entries I think, one of them is "Gigolo". This means a male whore in my language. Is that a program I can use to order paid-for gay sex?, or do the male prostitutes accept women customers only.
I thought they would have that little "Gigolo" thing fixed by now. Imagine you install and demo this to a vital business client, to your grandma, a battered women shelter, an influent, old and very pious catholic italian family or as a solution for all of a country's school libraries. On the login screen you can click on "login", "reboot", "shutdown", "change user" etc., "get your dick sucked", "get your pussy lick", "click this to get fucked in the ass". There's a problem LOL. Xubuntu is ruined. They risk even endangering Xfce's reputation. In fact, I'll forget about every official Ubuntu derivate from now (I tried Lubuntu 13.10, it's still ugly and still comes with games that look like they were rejected from Windows 3.1). It's a shame as I won't try Kubuntu then, which was maybe interesting - I'm too ignorant about KDE.
ROFL, then what, you learn Chinese to be able to fix the computer?
Languages issues is also a pain, where you install a modern distro in French and half the software still is in English, notably Firefox. So I have to do apt-cache search firefox, followed by apt-get install firefox-locale-fr. Then there's libreoffice, which language it was in I don't remember. Installing the translation is more complicated, which of the eight packages do I really need? I install inkscape and scribus : one is in French and the other one in English.
On my own PC I install the whole OS in English to escape such problems (this can be better anyway as all man pages and command line error messages are in English then, stuff is easier to find or reference, no mixed languages, no bad or varying translations)
They do use the nouveau by default, which is pretty good for an open source driver but maybe not very usable on latest gen hardware. Funnily nvidia recommends you to use the VESA driver, then install the proprietary driver if you want something better than that. That's what they officially support. But the distro knows better, it takes all such decisions for you. That shit was probably fixable, if you know about the CLI.. and experience about configuring Xorg.
Not a single good desktop distro.. Yeah I agree. I still long for a damn start menu where it's easy to create shortcuts, folders and move stuff around like we could in frigging Windows 98 and XP. And have it be *fast*. And have a special, sluggish menu editing interface as an option, not an obligation. And really, creating shortcuts was easier in Windows 95. Why can't I just right-click or drag any binary, folder, script whatever to add it to the start menu, no instead I first have to go in one of three special interfaces where I can create a "launcher", then create it, with no hope of being able to sensibly browse the available icons unless I was lucky to use the right piece of software.
You can do it, it's called VGA passthrough using an IOMMU, need two graphics cards, the right CPU (any AMD, any Intel where it isn't disabled on purpose by Intel) and the right motherboard (compatible chipset, mobo vendor serious about supporting their BIOS like Asrock and Gigabyte)
You have to use a bare metal hypervisor too (Xen or VMWare ESXi), and at worst you'll fail to have the other graphics card in the linux VM (which would require you to use second display or KVM or a monitor's second input, anyway) so you can be forced, or choose to have the Windows desktop as your primary/only desktop and accessing your linux VM by ssh-ing into it (or VNC, xrdp, whatever). That sucks a bit but on the plus side you can reboot your Windows while leaving your linux alone.
With Silverlight dead, XNA dead (which was a multimedia and gaming thing), one might be under the impression that XAML is dead too and that WPF will be deprecated and.NET will end up being just server stuff like Java. A gross misconception from someone outside the.NET ecosystem maybe but that's perception.. Also the fact it's mostly only used on Windows desktops and servers.
Thanks, where I might be wrong is hoping the GPU is on "2D clock" frequency if it has a crap driver, unlikely yes. But maybe it boots at slow clock (no point of high clock when your life starts in VGA or VESA mode) then lack of reclocking would mean it stays slow. Overlay, xv? that's a nice feature thanks. It used to use a fixed fonction scaler I think, at least in S3 Virge, ATI Rage Pro, and took YUV as input. It's what made our PCs smooth at full screen video till flash video tried to ruin it, requiring a 1GHz and faster CPU to play low quality vids. Did they remove the old scaler, while adding new fixed function stuff? (h264 etc.). That would feel stupid to me.
Anyway I prefer to use binary blob (or usable open source) AND a non composited desktop because knowing the desktop can run on any PC (and some non PC even) is more worth to me that knowing the graphical back end is so flexible that my windows could be rotated (yeah, right. Why not have them fly like planes with a dopplerized buzzing sound, as well)
Nice to read current status about that:), and that the end user might have some control over it. I actually use Firefox because it's still single process, the memory savings are huge. I'd be inclined to run 90% of stuff in a single process the old way and whitelist or one-time spawn some web sites, pages or apps into another process (i.e. game, heavy app, porn site or ultra heavy commercial/media site)
I could not get accelerated graphics working on the desktop. It still looked good enough, even without accelerated graphics but I suspect this also had the other disadvantage of greatly lowering my battery life, by running everything in software.
This is something I don't understand much. If you're running a desktop without compositing and without animations when minimizing windows (e.g. Xfce, Mate, LXDE) then aren't you *saving* power? The GPU can stay in a 2D only, low powered state (hopefully). If you're piping the whole desktop through OpenGL for no benefit you'd be likely to waste power, since not only you draw the application contents (which had to be drawed already), but you pipe all the bitmaps through the OpenGL subsystem and GPU. If the GPU driver is inefficient, you will waste a lot of CPU cycles and the GPU power management may be bad or non existent, so maybe it'll run at full voltage/clocks even for that miserable desktop drawing task.
Android and Windows Vista/7/8 get away by not using Xorg and exclusively using proprietary drivers.
Nice Unreal tech demo (your first link). But : - it's probably running on a 4GHz Intel CPU, we don't all have that. (there are little pauses too, relatively short and infrequent) - Firefox singletasking. Do anything else in the same browser instance and stuff will get slow and annoying. As an end user you need to juggle with profiles with "firefox -p" and reconfigure stuff from a blank profile. And well I'm trying it with firefox already open, doesn't work, it opens a new window and not a new instance (even with ssh -X localhost. I have to ssh from another machine) - How much memory does that use? Launching heavy stuff on a 32bit firefox that already uses over 1GB will fail. - Everything is written in C++ and stuff, then compiled in a restricted javascript subset. So, Javascript/HTML/CSS is great! Just don't use any Javascript, HTML or CSS feature.
In effect it looks like kind of running a program that targets the JVM in your browser, but without needing the Oracle plugin and with different limitations. And you still.. a framework to build your application in.
That said I'm devil's advocate here, it's impressive stuff. For one thing it'll be useful on Firefox OS devices.
But a GPS system could be entirely internal. Crappy pseudocode to illustrate it :
while (true) {
if (GPSsaysPublicRoad()) then TaxedMiles += (CurrentOdometer() - LastSecondsOdometer());
sleep(1); }
You don't need to communicate the GPS coords to the outside, hell, better have it a sealed system anyway.. And you don't even need to record them. The maps (or rather digested geospatial data) would have to be regularly updated though, maybe yearly when you do a TaxedMiles read out. That's assuming they don't build hardware/software that stores all GPS data anyway. Also, I wonder about people who will jam the GPS (default to tax miles if no GPS signal is received?) or even feed it fake GPS info if that's doable. In all, what a headache.
You have a point, I didn't know that 'CSM' would get omitted. Options are numerous though at least on the traditional desktop, many motherboards to choose from. The low end retail ones especially are conservative, high volume/high availability, well supported esp. Asrock and Gigabyte ones (lots of BIOS settings : it's still dead easy to find a mobo with dual PS/2, on latest gen hardware. Even LPT and RS232 if you really want it, the full ports or at least headers.
The mobo from 2003 I had before still allowed to configure 5.25" floppy drives, with choice between 1.2M and 360KB. My current one from 2007 or 2008 only allows 3.5" floppy (I don't use floppy lol, if I have to find myself needing to boot a floppy I'd rather set up another computer, build or obtain an.img file, and beam it to my PC's network card via PXE and memdisk)
I'm guessing the Microsoft Surface Pro is relatively free/open, LOL. Really, the platform where we always had the most freedom is the PC compatible. More than on a Raspberry Pi for example. Maybe some weird stuff has more theoretical freedom, like Richard Stallman's MIPS laptop (but how many vendors are there for that?, likely just one).
It helps that the PC has so many users, so much reverse engineering, and you can always fall back on pretending you're a 8086 or 486 with a 80x25 text display and do as if your storage were a hard drive from the 80s, even if it's really a USB drive or a mask ROM or an iSCSI target. It's almost impossible to brick unless you overwrite firmware with random crap.
This article is interesting and eye opening, it talks a lot too of Amazon replicating many APIs or services for their own Android fork. I wonder if Ubuntu being in bed with Amazon has something to do with this.
Slashdot Mirror
After all, you have to take into consideration the energy expended in gathering and transporting the urine to the robot. The article also mentions using waste water - waste water from what?
You have to take these considerations, but the alternative ones too : it means you don't need batteries (rechargeable - with limited lifespan - or disposable), or don't need a solar panel, or a significant infrastructure. People around it make do, be it in a small african or indian village, or a very remote area. Building a battery or solar panel and shipping it to the area of interest uses a ton of energy too. I'm more concerned about the fuel cell, which would have to be cheap, durable and without maintenance, and not much energy intensive to build. If that can be achieved that'd be great news. If the fuel cell is worse than using an AA battery or something, just use the battery.
A commenter said this stuff is cyclical. Well, I learned a few weeks ago that romans did collect urine from public pots and urinals. Rather than pump it into fuel cells, they just waited till it breaks down to ammonia (our bodies are smart enough to convert ammonia to urea for safe internal storage). Then it was used to maintain clothes or for teeth whitening! ugh. I'm tempted to put ammonia in my mouth but that could be a bit dangerous.
Also why modern urinals were named after a Roman Emperor (Paris, 19th century). He came up with a pee tax, paid when buying urine at the public toilets - a place where endless thousands would come and go each day to piss, fart, shit and socialize.
Maybe we'll go back to something similar too - there's a lot of unused piss and shit and rotten things around, but the supply of it is actually limited.
That's really pointless and a waste of precious CPU, memory and hard disk resources. Not to mention you now have to let happen two different sets of OS, antivirus, application updates happen. What if both Windows are updating at the same time, over wifi, while dad is working on his photos while uploading a few of them in the background. :D congrats you've turned a powerful computer to a 486 with dial up and PIO hard drive.
Better to keep one Windows, fully patched, install Firefox and delete all IE shortcuts.. Vista is a slight variant of Windows 7 anyway, with some of it backported even.
The ARM servers will come 2014, it's called ARMv8. It brings what you find on old PCs, like 64bit computing and virtualization extensions. Look up AMD Seattle for an exemple server chip, and it surely has similar competitors. Stuff like 16 cores, four 10GbE and an incredibly fast on-die bus plus coprocessors. Else, of course ARM is mostly used in low grade NAS (even the better consumer NAS tend to use an Atom instead), cell phones, embedded and shitboxes like the Pi.
But ARMv8 will probably be used in generic web tasks, storage, networking, rented VMs (I've always wanted a $1/month box, hell that could be a nice place to self-host the server side for Firefox OS cell phone apps you use). In fact ARM could do the front end and infrastructure stuff while x86 would be relegated to back end tasks where they're still needed (because legacy, 2x/3x higher single-thread performance or whatever). There will still be a shit tons of them but more like when the big Unix servers were used for that and the generic x86 boxes did the lighter, simpler things.
Web Audio seems to be about actually generating audio i.e. synth, mixing, filters, in javascript games or apps. That's different from providing dumb playback of sound files. OSS or ALSA would come after it in the chain, hopefully with the work they're doing the output sound server would end up being transparently selectable, i.e. choosing between ALSA, Pulseaudio, OSS, dummy, other..
BTW I tried to like OSS but have a few issues. No panel applet for xfce, mate, lxde etc., doesn't seem to work with my Xonar, and if I can't have an OSS + Pulseaudio system just by installing a package. It would take me a week or a month to learn how to modify distro scripts or crap like that.
More registers is about the only thing better for a browser. More than 4 gig of memory is a waste for a browser.
You can routinely go over 1GB if you're a heavy user or the pages themselves are heavy. Sometimes it's tab hoarding, I'm beginning to roll that back. But I can reach the 32bit 2GB limit without problem and with a 64bit linux, 3GB ram, 1.9GB swap, 64bit firefox I managed to fill everything up.
The best reason to use a 32bit firefox on a 64bit system would be so it cannot possibly fill up all your memory and send you to swap hell.
Also, Chrome is a lot more memory hungry and can always fill up all RAM, because it uses many spawned processes. You can need 8GB ram for web browsing alone these days.
I do no ad-blocking and no javascript blocking, because I don't want to deal with blacklists/whitelists constantly. I get the full experience lol, though I use flashblock so the computer doesn't suffer denial of service by too many flash objects.
No, the USA would rather choose to mine and process their own rare earths. China has a monopoly on it because it's dirty and messy, not because rare earth metals are actually rare. They're rare in the sense you need to crush millions tons of rocks and do whatever nasty things to retrieve a trickle of them, then deal with the garbage (i.e. let it poison the region's water supply, or whatever)
How many others mentioned that in 2003? I happen to know for a fact that the weaponization of drones was done in great haste by a few people in the post 9/11 period leading up to the invasion of Afghanistan. It was not a cleverly thought out plan that took several years to carefully execute, it was hacked together by a handful of air force personnel and a civilian armorer. Very few people were predicting the explosion in drone operations we have seen in the last six to seven years back in 2003.
In 2004 the weaponised drones were publicly known and deployed already. I remember the little experiment back then too (in Iraq) of putting a machine gun on a "Packbot" little robot. So I guess I assumed there would be some drone warfare, which conceptually isn't that much different from using missiles and smartbombs anyway. You order a strike somewhere and it quickly happens through screens and buttons, without people hiking or driving all the way to the destination.
What you mostly need for patrolling killer drones is a lawless, desolate area where you can get away with it.
OS update adds the console gaming functionality to a gaming console, that's fascinating. I hope other platforms follow suite, e.g. that Mozilla Firefox 25 brings web browsing to the table, or that Windows 8.1's notepad can write to files.
That's good, if you pay attention to gddr5 vs ddr3 ; the former is much better even on the lowest card. i.e. look only at 1GB cards with explicit gddr5, even for radeon R7 240, 250, 7730, 7750.
I tried Xubuntu 13.10 a few days ago : it comes with Abiword and Gnumeric (to me, that's diminished software you install on a computer with 128MB RAM). The "System" entry on the start menu has two entries I think, one of them is "Gigolo". This means a male whore in my language. Is that a program I can use to order paid-for gay sex?, or do the male prostitutes accept women customers only.
I thought they would have that little "Gigolo" thing fixed by now. Imagine you install and demo this to a vital business client, to your grandma, a battered women shelter, an influent, old and very pious catholic italian family or as a solution for all of a country's school libraries. On the login screen you can click on "login", "reboot", "shutdown", "change user" etc., "get your dick sucked", "get your pussy lick", "click this to get fucked in the ass".
There's a problem LOL. Xubuntu is ruined. They risk even endangering Xfce's reputation. In fact, I'll forget about every official Ubuntu derivate from now (I tried Lubuntu 13.10, it's still ugly and still comes with games that look like they were rejected from Windows 3.1). It's a shame as I won't try Kubuntu then, which was maybe interesting - I'm too ignorant about KDE.
ROFL, then what, you learn Chinese to be able to fix the computer?
Languages issues is also a pain, where you install a modern distro in French and half the software still is in English, notably Firefox. So I have to do apt-cache search firefox, followed by apt-get install firefox-locale-fr. Then there's libreoffice, which language it was in I don't remember. Installing the translation is more complicated, which of the eight packages do I really need?
I install inkscape and scribus : one is in French and the other one in English.
On my own PC I install the whole OS in English to escape such problems (this can be better anyway as all man pages and command line error messages are in English then, stuff is easier to find or reference, no mixed languages, no bad or varying translations)
They do use the nouveau by default, which is pretty good for an open source driver but maybe not very usable on latest gen hardware. Funnily nvidia recommends you to use the VESA driver, then install the proprietary driver if you want something better than that. That's what they officially support. But the distro knows better, it takes all such decisions for you. That shit was probably fixable, if you know about the CLI.. and experience about configuring Xorg.
Not a single good desktop distro.. Yeah I agree. I still long for a damn start menu where it's easy to create shortcuts, folders and move stuff around like we could in frigging Windows 98 and XP. And have it be *fast*. And have a special, sluggish menu editing interface as an option, not an obligation. And really, creating shortcuts was easier in Windows 95. Why can't I just right-click or drag any binary, folder, script whatever to add it to the start menu, no instead I first have to go in one of three special interfaces where I can create a "launcher", then create it, with no hope of being able to sensibly browse the available icons unless I was lucky to use the right piece of software.
You can do it, it's called VGA passthrough using an IOMMU, need two graphics cards, the right CPU (any AMD, any Intel where it isn't disabled on purpose by Intel) and the right motherboard (compatible chipset, mobo vendor serious about supporting their BIOS like Asrock and Gigabyte)
You have to use a bare metal hypervisor too (Xen or VMWare ESXi), and at worst you'll fail to have the other graphics card in the linux VM (which would require you to use second display or KVM or a monitor's second input, anyway) so you can be forced, or choose to have the Windows desktop as your primary/only desktop and accessing your linux VM by ssh-ing into it (or VNC, xrdp, whatever). That sucks a bit but on the plus side you can reboot your Windows while leaving your linux alone.
Restarting Linux? Only a fool would do that. What about my uptime!
With Silverlight dead, XNA dead (which was a multimedia and gaming thing), one might be under the impression that XAML is dead too and that WPF will be deprecated and .NET will end up being just server stuff like Java. A gross misconception from someone outside the .NET ecosystem maybe but that's perception.. Also the fact it's mostly only used on Windows desktops and servers.
Thanks, where I might be wrong is hoping the GPU is on "2D clock" frequency if it has a crap driver, unlikely yes. But maybe it boots at slow clock (no point of high clock when your life starts in VGA or VESA mode) then lack of reclocking would mean it stays slow.
Overlay, xv? that's a nice feature thanks. It used to use a fixed fonction scaler I think, at least in S3 Virge, ATI Rage Pro, and took YUV as input. It's what made our PCs smooth at full screen video till flash video tried to ruin it, requiring a 1GHz and faster CPU to play low quality vids. Did they remove the old scaler, while adding new fixed function stuff? (h264 etc.). That would feel stupid to me.
Anyway I prefer to use binary blob (or usable open source) AND a non composited desktop because knowing the desktop can run on any PC (and some non PC even) is more worth to me that knowing the graphical back end is so flexible that my windows could be rotated (yeah, right. Why not have them fly like planes with a dopplerized buzzing sound, as well)
Nice to read current status about that :), and that the end user might have some control over it. I actually use Firefox because it's still single process, the memory savings are huge. I'd be inclined to run 90% of stuff in a single process the old way and whitelist or one-time spawn some web sites, pages or apps into another process (i.e. game, heavy app, porn site or ultra heavy commercial/media site)
I could not get accelerated graphics working on the desktop. It still looked good enough, even without accelerated graphics but I suspect this also had the other disadvantage of greatly lowering my battery life, by running everything in software.
This is something I don't understand much. If you're running a desktop without compositing and without animations when minimizing windows (e.g. Xfce, Mate, LXDE) then aren't you *saving* power? The GPU can stay in a 2D only, low powered state (hopefully).
If you're piping the whole desktop through OpenGL for no benefit you'd be likely to waste power, since not only you draw the application contents (which had to be drawed already), but you pipe all the bitmaps through the OpenGL subsystem and GPU. If the GPU driver is inefficient, you will waste a lot of CPU cycles and the GPU power management may be bad or non existent, so maybe it'll run at full voltage/clocks even for that miserable desktop drawing task.
Android and Windows Vista/7/8 get away by not using Xorg and exclusively using proprietary drivers.
Nice Unreal tech demo (your first link). But :
- it's probably running on a 4GHz Intel CPU, we don't all have that.
(there are little pauses too, relatively short and infrequent)
- Firefox singletasking. Do anything else in the same browser instance and stuff will get slow and annoying. As an end user you need to juggle with profiles with "firefox -p" and reconfigure stuff from a blank profile. And well I'm trying it with firefox already open, doesn't work, it opens a new window and not a new instance (even with ssh -X localhost. I have to ssh from another machine)
- How much memory does that use? Launching heavy stuff on a 32bit firefox that already uses over 1GB will fail.
- Everything is written in C++ and stuff, then compiled in a restricted javascript subset. So, Javascript/HTML/CSS is great! Just don't use any Javascript, HTML or CSS feature.
In effect it looks like kind of running a program that targets the JVM in your browser, but without needing the Oracle plugin and with different limitations. And you still.. a framework to build your application in.
That said I'm devil's advocate here, it's impressive stuff. For one thing it'll be useful on Firefox OS devices.
But a GPS system could be entirely internal. Crappy pseudocode to illustrate it :
while (true) {
if (GPSsaysPublicRoad()) then TaxedMiles += (CurrentOdometer() - LastSecondsOdometer());
sleep(1);
}
You don't need to communicate the GPS coords to the outside, hell, better have it a sealed system anyway.. And you don't even need to record them. The maps (or rather digested geospatial data) would have to be regularly updated though, maybe yearly when you do a TaxedMiles read out.
That's assuming they don't build hardware/software that stores all GPS data anyway.
Also, I wonder about people who will jam the GPS (default to tax miles if no GPS signal is received?) or even feed it fake GPS info if that's doable.
In all, what a headache.
You have a point, I didn't know that 'CSM' would get omitted. Options are numerous though at least on the traditional desktop, many motherboards to choose from. The low end retail ones especially are conservative, high volume/high availability, well supported esp. Asrock and Gigabyte ones (lots of BIOS settings : it's still dead easy to find a mobo with dual PS/2, on latest gen hardware. Even LPT and RS232 if you really want it, the full ports or at least headers.
The mobo from 2003 I had before still allowed to configure 5.25" floppy drives, with choice between 1.2M and 360KB. My current one from 2007 or 2008 only allows 3.5" floppy (I don't use floppy lol, if I have to find myself needing to boot a floppy I'd rather set up another computer, build or obtain an .img file, and beam it to my PC's network card via PXE and memdisk)
I'm guessing the Microsoft Surface Pro is relatively free/open, LOL.
Really, the platform where we always had the most freedom is the PC compatible. More than on a Raspberry Pi for example. Maybe some weird stuff has more theoretical freedom, like Richard Stallman's MIPS laptop (but how many vendors are there for that?, likely just one).
It helps that the PC has so many users, so much reverse engineering, and you can always fall back on pretending you're a 8086 or 486 with a 80x25 text display and do as if your storage were a hard drive from the 80s, even if it's really a USB drive or a mask ROM or an iSCSI target. It's almost impossible to brick unless you overwrite firmware with random crap.
This article is interesting and eye opening, it talks a lot too of Amazon replicating many APIs or services for their own Android fork. I wonder if Ubuntu being in bed with Amazon has something to do with this.