My router was linux, but flashing it was done from a Windows.exe program on my (then) Windows PC. Then the messing with the box was to set it up in an unadvertised way (simple bridge wifi extender), but the flashing was Windows based and through USB (PC as host, router as device).
So at least in theory a tablet, which is a linux based computer that can act as a USB device just like that old router, could be very easy to flash. Maybe I'm naïve.
Linux probably makes it harder. I've never flashed a cell phone/tablet, but I've flashed various stuff like an old modem/router, a couple microcontrollers (in school), a Game Boy flash cartridge where you can put a couple dozen stolen game ROMs in there, and of course computers BIOS and various bits of firmware for internal PC components. All in DOS or Windows : it invariably consists in downloading an.exe and running it, and telling it what image file to flash (and at worst choosing between LPT1/LPT2 or selecting a USB device).
Sometimes flashing is the easy part, with my router I had to edit silly stuff, telnetted in, with some version of vi included in the router (I was knowledgeable enough to use only h/j/k/l, escape, i,:wq and:q!, try explaining that to a lay user). For some cyanogen, mobile Ubuntu, or stuff with silly names like "mer", "peego", "taizen", "openEunux", maybe there's some hard stuff about building an image but that's why you google for e.g. "ubuntu image for nexus 7" and download a ready-made one. A hard part could be needing to prepare a microSD card (I'm not talking of any specific device, I don't have one) and you simply lack a micro SD card, a SD reader, a micro SD to SD adapter, or you're on linux and have to do it manually with standard tools - on Windows to do such a thing you would download a freeware and click a few things.
Someone who is still running XP probably isn't that interested in modern games or modern leading-edge applications. Maybe they still run XP because they don't like paying for software upgrades that they consider pointless for their own use. Maybe they even run a hacked copy of Microsoft Office, for example.
It's not just about modern games, you lose all the old ones too. Linux is fine if you want to run a couple select games, Windows allows you to have a hundred arbitrary ones installed or otherwise present on disk, all working.
USB is not notoriously shit for audio quality, you have audiophile nuts spending grands on USB DACs right now - and getting ripped off, but at least it sounds good. It has mostly replaced firewire for audio interfaces (e.g. stuff to record eight channels at 192KHz/24bit, XLR inputs etc.) Lastly for about $100 there's the Asus Xonar U7 for instance which is probably a good enough sound card for 99% people, that gives 7.1 analog outputs (so goes your "even PCM"), headphone amp and mic input.
The USB flash drive was really obvious : use a general purpose data + power standard for storage. About as impressive as a PCMCIA memory card or a ZIP drive on a parallel port. Other stuff on the list is more interesting but other countries do that kind of stuff too, and Israel is basically a western country with lots of foreign support formed in the aftermath of WW2 which was an immense and high tech war. I'm sure you can take other small countries like the Nederlands, Belgium, Austria or one US state and compile a similar list.
We can argue about that premise. If it's false in a given society, that society doesn't even deserve to be called as such or at the least isn't worth living in.
If people took better care of themselves and, as smart consumers able to vote with thier loud voices (and thick wallets) for better food and medical choices to start with, they would be healthier to begin with and not need nanny government to wipe their noses and butts for them.
You're awesome. Why not write "If people had more money, then they would be wealthier and thus would have less medical problems and afford any insurance plan". So your idea is, let's make everyone rich, nice fantasy but hardly doable, what are you suggesting exactly to do that? And anyway let's say you're a guy that earns $20K (apparently a salary you can consider yourself lucky to get in the US nowadays), have sound food and health choices (like cycling to work, spending a third on your income on food - funded by lack of car, cable TV and phone data), have no debt. You can still get something like cancer or kidney failure or whatever thing which puts you into bankruptcy or death and guess what private insurance covers those "accidents".. It's healthcare insurance.
***Again, open, but at the cost of taxdollars, and for people that don't want the health insurance because they don't really need it, like young healthy adults***
Mandatory insurance is perfectly reasonable, it's quite the norm for vehicles already so you could imagine it's acceptable to have it for your liver and other body parts if a fucking car has to be covered already. Irresponsible people can pay the penalty (as wikipedia tells me, this is an option for your car in Virginia), or leave the US. So they're still free to not get covered.
But 16bit@22bit was great:D, coupled with 32bit compressed textures on a voodoo5. Smokes looked good while tanking less the performance. The other feature was sparse grid supersampling, working in all games. A decade later AMD and nvidia implemented it but I can't find where it is applicable (DX9 only, or DX10/DX11 only, and what about OpenGL and linux..)
Else yes it was good riddance for everybody else, too bad the company wasted precious time (should have skipped at least one product, Banshee or Voodoo3), made an insane retarted blunder (moving to producing all the cards themselves, going the way of Matrox or the old ATI). They committed suicide like Atari and Amiga. And they had a handful of working DirectX 8 cards by the time of their demise.
At the time OpenGL implementations were mostly garbage, though most vendors rushed to have "Quake only" OpenGL that sort of worked. Then 3dfx opened up Glide but no one used it, they did that too late. In fairness I was a 3dfx fanboy and the Voodoo2 was just great, usable up to four years after its release (very competent board for Counterstrike 1.5)
If a lightbulb has a temperature of 3000K and I'm curious about how much that is in everyday units, I can simply know the answer instantly in my head. No need to reach a google prompt. Or I can memorize that liquid nitrogen boils at 77K and relate that to negative Celsius temperatures.
I liked the hunt for drivers (hardly needed those days). Just downloading and installing a driver is nice, instead of installing a whole new distro version. Cross platform compatibility is very simple, you download a setup.exe for gimp or scribus or whatever and run it. There are solutions for more complicated stuff. Regarding updating, I think there's WSUS (but needs a windows server, which is too expensive), Autopatcher (freeware), else for apps well you can let the vendor updater processes run (I'm not bothered by some java updater thing using 0.01% CPU in a while) or there are 3rd party tools again.
Still, I use linux, to eat my own dog foot (I push it to friends, acquaintances because of the security and because it's hard to fuck up by clicking around, and also giving it away is legal). I'd be probably more happy with Windows 8.1, I'm missing on the games and freeware. Except for the reboots, and I'm peeved the old classic UI was sacked.
Thanks! svga seems to be the old school interface, not really safe to muck with on modern hardware/modern distro when there's the "framebuffer driver" or vesafb already. But I have the option of ruining everything then salvaging it with ssh:-). I never knew 80x25 and 80x50 were the same mode (at least monitor wise), all those years I thought one was 640x200 pixels and the other one double the res.. In truth both are 720x400. It's all bog standard VGA.
Indeed, the complaint was more about anaglyph than the driver per se. You don't even need a driver, you can look at stuff right from image search results. The comments about blood flow in the eyes from other posters are damn interesting too, this means there are probably no long term effects.
About shutter glasses, they don't deal with colors and theoretically would not affect them. They darken the picture and give an unwanted blue tint, but that's because the LCDs are far from perfect. With the old style PC gaming technology (late 90s, then sold into the 00s) gamma correction was simply enabled to brighten up the picture back, but still with that bluish tint, looking-through-sunglasses effect. The current gaming tech is mostly the same, using a 120Hz LCD monitor instead of a CRT, and better, lighter LCD shutter glasses. The monitor itself goes into a special overbright mode when you enable the stereo driver, this ought to give you a brighter and more color-accurate picture, similar to not using stereo. I didn't try that particular feature.
Unrelated to the technical aspects, nvidia tried or achieved cornering the market on that occasion, relaunching it as "3D Vision". They want you to believe only nvidia approved glasses work and it's kind of what they enforced in their driver. They did some asshole driver-crippling there. No one noticed the canning of support for old tech shutter glasses, which used a little device with VGA passthrough and worked with fast refresh CRT. That was a rare nerd curiosity at the time. About anaglyph, I don't know how much they crippled it or if it's been removed entirely, I remember reading at a point they disabled choosing the colors (you might have red-green, red-blue, red-cyan or arbitrary)
No, Steamroller is a new core that supposedly fixes the slow performance, desperate fans expect an up to 30% improvment - well, maybe it's 5 to 20% better, and that's not counting it's 4-core only, not 8. So I'm hoping it works somewhat, allowing AMD to climb out of Core2/Phenom II performance and into Sandy Bridge performance. The APUs themselves will be hardly useful for linux gaming, but are a much cheaper alternative to Iris 5200 in Windows laptops, I guess. A Kaveri with disabled GPU plus a nvidia graphics card will be an option for those who assemble their own desktop.
All i3 have SMT, too. In fact, if it's the mobile offering you're thinking about, there's hardly any difference between i3/i5/i7 (there's dual core i7), they're all crippled by TDP and you pay a premium for things like a 5% faster clock in some turbo mode. A desktop i3 is much faster than a mobile dual core i7, and compares favorably to a mobile quad core i7 even.
I always wanted a 80x50 real text mode (not graphic), I have no idea how to do that. I like the old IBM characters and reliability, and it was supported and very easy to use in MS-DOS and Windows XP. Sadly Vista/7/8 removed the text modes.
On linux, I once managed to change graphical text mode to real 80x25 text mode (it was running at 1600x1200 on a small CRT so very painful), another time I changed the graphical text resolution to 1024x768 (I don't know what character width/height that gives). But it is painful to do that, as I would just try some random grub parameters and stuff changes over time (Grub 2, or the warning that "vga=normal is deprecated")
I used that feature on a Geforce 2MX to try it out, a good while ago. No idea what you mean by "hacking" 3D support, you only had to press a hotkey to enable Stereo 3D in any game or app (with or without great results, but at least it's working or trying to). Five year laters I tried shutter glasses on Geforce 6/7 (too bad FSAA wasn't working, as I had to run at 640x480 or 800x600 on the old CRT to play with stereo).
Anaglyph was really shit though, it fucks your color vision (after using it for a hour your eyes or brain compensate, if you look away from the screen and close one eye, one eye sees in red and the other in blue! to this day my right eye seems to see in a warm tint and the left eye in a cold one)
What you're looking for is 22nm Atom, or maybe a board with a 9W Kabini. Or for a small board thing, the Minnowboard.. no 3D graphics driver (it's got a PowerVR GMA 600) and 1GB ddr2. You'll have to wait for a Minnowboard 2.
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My router was linux, but flashing it was done from a Windows .exe program on my (then) Windows PC.
Then the messing with the box was to set it up in an unadvertised way (simple bridge wifi extender), but the flashing was Windows based and through USB (PC as host, router as device).
So at least in theory a tablet, which is a linux based computer that can act as a USB device just like that old router, could be very easy to flash. Maybe I'm naïve.
Linux probably makes it harder. I've never flashed a cell phone/tablet, but I've flashed various stuff like an old modem/router, a couple microcontrollers (in school), a Game Boy flash cartridge where you can put a couple dozen stolen game ROMs in there, and of course computers BIOS and various bits of firmware for internal PC components. .exe and running it, and telling it what image file to flash (and at worst choosing between LPT1/LPT2 or selecting a USB device).
All in DOS or Windows : it invariably consists in downloading an
Sometimes flashing is the easy part, with my router I had to edit silly stuff, telnetted in, with some version of vi included in the router (I was knowledgeable enough to use only h/j/k/l, escape, i, :wq and :q!, try explaining that to a lay user). For some cyanogen, mobile Ubuntu, or stuff with silly names like "mer", "peego", "taizen", "openEunux", maybe there's some hard stuff about building an image but that's why you google for e.g. "ubuntu image for nexus 7" and download a ready-made one.
A hard part could be needing to prepare a microSD card (I'm not talking of any specific device, I don't have one) and you simply lack a micro SD card, a SD reader, a micro SD to SD adapter, or you're on linux and have to do it manually with standard tools - on Windows to do such a thing you would download a freeware and click a few things.
At least they had fuses.
Someone who is still running XP probably isn't that interested in modern games or modern leading-edge applications. Maybe they still run XP because they don't like paying for software upgrades that they consider pointless for their own use. Maybe they even run a hacked copy of Microsoft Office, for example.
It's not just about modern games, you lose all the old ones too. Linux is fine if you want to run a couple select games, Windows allows you to have a hundred arbitrary ones installed or otherwise present on disk, all working.
There is global warming and it hasn't even stopped for the past 15 years.
It's conceivable to use the headset only for communications and have the game play on whatever speakers you're using.
USB is not notoriously shit for audio quality, you have audiophile nuts spending grands on USB DACs right now - and getting ripped off, but at least it sounds good.
It has mostly replaced firewire for audio interfaces (e.g. stuff to record eight channels at 192KHz/24bit, XLR inputs etc.)
Lastly for about $100 there's the Asus Xonar U7 for instance which is probably a good enough sound card for 99% people, that gives 7.1 analog outputs (so goes your "even PCM"), headphone amp and mic input.
The USB flash drive was really obvious : use a general purpose data + power standard for storage. About as impressive as a PCMCIA memory card or a ZIP drive on a parallel port.
Other stuff on the list is more interesting but other countries do that kind of stuff too, and Israel is basically a western country with lots of foreign support formed in the aftermath of WW2 which was an immense and high tech war. I'm sure you can take other small countries like the Nederlands, Belgium, Austria or one US state and compile a similar list.
We can argue about that premise. If it's false in a given society, that society doesn't even deserve to be called as such or at the least isn't worth living in.
If people took better care of themselves and, as smart consumers able to vote with thier loud voices (and thick wallets) for better food and medical choices to start with, they would be healthier to begin with and not need nanny government to wipe their noses and butts for them.
You're awesome. Why not write "If people had more money, then they would be wealthier and thus would have less medical problems and afford any insurance plan".
So your idea is, let's make everyone rich, nice fantasy but hardly doable, what are you suggesting exactly to do that?
And anyway let's say you're a guy that earns $20K (apparently a salary you can consider yourself lucky to get in the US nowadays), have sound food and health choices (like cycling to work, spending a third on your income on food - funded by lack of car, cable TV and phone data), have no debt. You can still get something like cancer or kidney failure or whatever thing which puts you into bankruptcy or death and guess what private insurance covers those "accidents".. It's healthcare insurance.
***Again, open, but at the cost of taxdollars, and for people that don't want the health insurance because they don't really need it, like young healthy adults***
Mandatory insurance is perfectly reasonable, it's quite the norm for vehicles already so you could imagine it's acceptable to have it for your liver and other body parts if a fucking car has to be covered already. Irresponsible people can pay the penalty (as wikipedia tells me, this is an option for your car in Virginia), or leave the US. So they're still free to not get covered.
But 16bit@22bit was great :D, coupled with 32bit compressed textures on a voodoo5. Smokes looked good while tanking less the performance.
The other feature was sparse grid supersampling, working in all games. A decade later AMD and nvidia implemented it but I can't find where it is applicable (DX9 only, or DX10/DX11 only, and what about OpenGL and linux..)
Else yes it was good riddance for everybody else, too bad the company wasted precious time (should have skipped at least one product, Banshee or Voodoo3), made an insane retarted blunder (moving to producing all the cards themselves, going the way of Matrox or the old ATI). They committed suicide like Atari and Amiga. And they had a handful of working DirectX 8 cards by the time of their demise.
It's an old ATI-only feature from before they put an actual HDMI connector on vid cards.
At the time OpenGL implementations were mostly garbage, though most vendors rushed to have "Quake only" OpenGL that sort of worked. Then 3dfx opened up Glide but no one used it, they did that too late. In fairness I was a 3dfx fanboy and the Voodoo2 was just great, usable up to four years after its release (very competent board for Counterstrike 1.5)
DVI support HDCP "protection" actually, when it's there.
If a lightbulb has a temperature of 3000K and I'm curious about how much that is in everyday units, I can simply know the answer instantly in my head. No need to reach a google prompt. Or I can memorize that liquid nitrogen boils at 77K and relate that to negative Celsius temperatures.
I liked the hunt for drivers (hardly needed those days). Just downloading and installing a driver is nice, instead of installing a whole new distro version.
Cross platform compatibility is very simple, you download a setup.exe for gimp or scribus or whatever and run it. There are solutions for more complicated stuff.
Regarding updating, I think there's WSUS (but needs a windows server, which is too expensive), Autopatcher (freeware), else for apps well you can let the vendor updater processes run (I'm not bothered by some java updater thing using 0.01% CPU in a while) or there are 3rd party tools again.
Still, I use linux, to eat my own dog foot (I push it to friends, acquaintances because of the security and because it's hard to fuck up by clicking around, and also giving it away is legal). I'd be probably more happy with Windows 8.1, I'm missing on the games and freeware. Except for the reboots, and I'm peeved the old classic UI was sacked.
Thanks! :-).
svga seems to be the old school interface, not really safe to muck with on modern hardware/modern distro when there's the "framebuffer driver" or vesafb already. But I have the option of ruining everything then salvaging it with ssh
I never knew 80x25 and 80x50 were the same mode (at least monitor wise), all those years I thought one was 640x200 pixels and the other one double the res.. In truth both are 720x400. It's all bog standard VGA.
Indeed, the complaint was more about anaglyph than the driver per se. You don't even need a driver, you can look at stuff right from image search results. The comments about blood flow in the eyes from other posters are damn interesting too, this means there are probably no long term effects.
About shutter glasses, they don't deal with colors and theoretically would not affect them. They darken the picture and give an unwanted blue tint, but that's because the LCDs are far from perfect. With the old style PC gaming technology (late 90s, then sold into the 00s) gamma correction was simply enabled to brighten up the picture back, but still with that bluish tint, looking-through-sunglasses effect.
The current gaming tech is mostly the same, using a 120Hz LCD monitor instead of a CRT, and better, lighter LCD shutter glasses. The monitor itself goes into a special overbright mode when you enable the stereo driver, this ought to give you a brighter and more color-accurate picture, similar to not using stereo. I didn't try that particular feature.
Unrelated to the technical aspects, nvidia tried or achieved cornering the market on that occasion, relaunching it as "3D Vision". They want you to believe only nvidia approved glasses work and it's kind of what they enforced in their driver. They did some asshole driver-crippling there.
No one noticed the canning of support for old tech shutter glasses, which used a little device with VGA passthrough and worked with fast refresh CRT. That was a rare nerd curiosity at the time. About anaglyph, I don't know how much they crippled it or if it's been removed entirely, I remember reading at a point they disabled choosing the colors (you might have red-green, red-blue, red-cyan or arbitrary)
The kernel module is an open source shims that is built on driver installation, and communicates with the proprietary software.
No, Steamroller is a new core that supposedly fixes the slow performance, desperate fans expect an up to 30% improvment - well, maybe it's 5 to 20% better, and that's not counting it's 4-core only, not 8. So I'm hoping it works somewhat, allowing AMD to climb out of Core2/Phenom II performance and into Sandy Bridge performance.
The APUs themselves will be hardly useful for linux gaming, but are a much cheaper alternative to Iris 5200 in Windows laptops, I guess. A Kaveri with disabled GPU plus a nvidia graphics card will be an option for those who assemble their own desktop.
All i3 have SMT, too.
In fact, if it's the mobile offering you're thinking about, there's hardly any difference between i3/i5/i7 (there's dual core i7), they're all crippled by TDP and you pay a premium for things like a 5% faster clock in some turbo mode. A desktop i3 is much faster than a mobile dual core i7, and compares favorably to a mobile quad core i7 even.
I always wanted a 80x50 real text mode (not graphic), I have no idea how to do that. I like the old IBM characters and reliability, and it was supported and very easy to use in MS-DOS and Windows XP. Sadly Vista/7/8 removed the text modes.
On linux, I once managed to change graphical text mode to real 80x25 text mode (it was running at 1600x1200 on a small CRT so very painful), another time I changed the graphical text resolution to 1024x768 (I don't know what character width/height that gives). But it is painful to do that, as I would just try some random grub parameters and stuff changes over time (Grub 2, or the warning that "vga=normal is deprecated")
I used that feature on a Geforce 2MX to try it out, a good while ago. No idea what you mean by "hacking" 3D support, you only had to press a hotkey to enable Stereo 3D in any game or app (with or without great results, but at least it's working or trying to). Five year laters I tried shutter glasses on Geforce 6/7 (too bad FSAA wasn't working, as I had to run at 640x480 or 800x600 on the old CRT to play with stereo).
Anaglyph was really shit though, it fucks your color vision (after using it for a hour your eyes or brain compensate, if you look away from the screen and close one eye, one eye sees in red and the other in blue! to this day my right eye seems to see in a warm tint and the left eye in a cold one)
What you're looking for is 22nm Atom, or maybe a board with a 9W Kabini. Or for a small board thing, the Minnowboard.. no 3D graphics driver (it's got a PowerVR GMA 600) and 1GB ddr2. You'll have to wait for a Minnowboard 2.