Lagrangian points are 18th century stuff, asteroids are 19th century stuff, combining them and calling the result "trojans" is more 20th century or late 20th century stuff so that makes it advanced and recent. Better editing would have introduced the "lagrangian point" term before mentioning L4 and L5, which are lagrangian points. The robotic mining part is space nuttery (why not mine from the giant planet itself?, there's more stuff and it's a cool idea too)
Temash has 3.5W to 5.9W TDP, that's the max power use for a CPU+GPU+southbridge. Low end Kabini is 9W. Haswell at 10W. So yes I say fast ARM and slow x86 meet at a similar point, a few years ago you had an Atom smartphone which was fast and worked. You have a Toshiba tablet with Tegra 4 that overheats, though it's bad design and that ARM SoC is a semi-failure.
Note that "idle" on a modern desktop is not so much 0 to 1% CPU use, I have firefox using 30 to 50% of one CPU core right now doing who knows what. To idle my desktop I have to shut it down, stand by or close firefox.
Re:The OS is good, but the hardware pushes me away
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Inside OS X Mavericks
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Every desktop now is a workstation, or vice versa, and it has been so since Windows XP Home and OSX 10.1 were released. Or maybe you would want to set the distinction at another level : fast disk I/O and lots of disk, done with SATA and then SSD ; huge monitor and 3D acceleration : done since the 90s. Multiple CPUs? Now multicore is enough, even dual socket rigs have been killed by socket 2011 and the i7 3930K. 64bit arch? done.
At the least, you can build a $1000 PC tower (peripherals and OS not included), it will be a desktop but frankly it is a workstation as well. Have a GTX 650 or GT640 w/ gddr5 as the vid card, that will do workstation stuff.
I'd consider an ARM desktop if there actually were motherboards to buy! I only know of one, it's 349 euros and has a Tegra 3 which is outdated but has PCIe. Tegra 4 is a better fit for a desktop, CPU wise, but doesn't have PCIe. http://shop.seco.com/gpudevkit/gpudevkit-detail.html
What you would need is a Tegra 5 which will just come with desktop graphics, so the feature level and driver support will both be easier. Just use nvidia driver or nouveau, presumably, and have real OpenGL not OpenGL ES. But we don't know if it will be available with PCIe. Funny that the "fuck you!" company is the only one that is building the chip you wish for.
As you can see ARM desktop is just a specialty item with a price that makes it useless. And when it becomes fast (e.g. Cortex A15 cores and not throttled down when it's put to use) ARM goes into 5W to 10W territory, meeting with the x86 guys (Atom, Jaguar, even Haswell/Ivy Bridge!)
ISA doesn't matter that much, low power x86 gives you a desktop. The current problem is Atom 32nm has no GPU drivers other than giving you raw X11 at correct res (given the GPU is a PowerVR, which is maybe the major brand of GPU for ARM SoCs, we can see that indeed the GPU support is indeed non existant in ARM land). And Kabini has been paper launched but we're waiting for the motherboards. Kabini/New Atom mostly solve your desktop needs and even then Celeron 847 and Intel NUC have been available too.
That doesn't always work. If you buy a better sound card, you will get worse linux drivers, as ALSA devs are busy supporting Intel HDA and Realtek ALC instead.
The Windows user can fix it himself by double-clicking a setup.exe stored on a CD-ROM or USB stick, provided by Broadcom or TP-Link or D-Link etc. ; the Debian user needs sysadmin skills , wired connection to the internet and knowledge about what a "firmware blob image" is.
I've seen working 3D in Virtualbox for the first time!.. On a Windows XP host (ubuntu 12.04 derivate guest). The vid card was a recent nvidia too, geforce GT 630 (i.e. GT 430) Nothing needed to be done for it to work. Of course, if you don't run XP and a recent nvidia card, don't count on being able to replicate that lol. No fucking idea what hardware or OS works.
If you have many grands and watthours to burn, maybe a future 12-core Macintosh Pro will run a linux guest decently, using a shit ton of CPU power to run llvmpipe so you get your 3D support.
But, this does depend a bit upon the strength of the antenna, you can get up to 26db on some of them, which shouldn't require too many units. But, the OP is going to need power and Ethernet running to them. Or at least power.
Or there is, you guessed it, power over ethernet:)
Seattle being a major town with a known tech history, there's indeed a community wireless ISP, called "Seattle Wireless" and I'm sure they can be helpful. Or even have some people there quite interested
Wifi is great to first get your internet connection. Simplest if you have an accomplice in a near-by building with line of sight, preferably with a fiber, non crippled internet access on that side. Set a wireless link between your festival and the building with something like a pair of Ubiquity Nanostation. As it's wifi 5.5GHz, it's unlicensed and has a broad, not much used spectrum. Doesn't go through walls as easily as 2.4GHz, too. You have to respect some emission power limit of course but you get a stable and easy connection.
I used such a thing and would have 3 to 5 megabits symetrical, 100 meters or maybe more, and I guess that faster is doable (or just longer range and get that speed) If line of sight or range is an issue I guess you can use a repeater (just a bridge with two wifi 5.5GHz interfaces)
On the festival end you could distribute it with wifi 2.4GHz, with maybe cat5 cables (up to 100 meters) to access points (or can they use wifi 5.5GHz to network with other APs?). And you can use wired ethernet for your own stuff. You probably need to set up a proxy with a captive portal, that's useful : you get caching, so lots of bandwith saved when ten people are hitting the same web page or watch the same video ("check this out"). Ads filtering too! and if you're nasty (but reasonabe) people are given only web access through the proxy, no internet access. Do you need QoS and is it easy I don't know.
If there's a small local wireless ISP (a non profit one why not), the better.
XP Mode was really XP in a VM, meaning it will get unsupported and EOL very soon just like the standalone Windows XP is. It's not a real solution because keeping it means supporting the entire XP codebase forever, so I don't see the gains much.
As for netbooks, let us have them thanks. Besides low end hardware is dual core, comes with 4GB and uses less power. When the current gen of Atom will be phased out it will be impossible to buy bad x86 hardware (even then they're mosly fine, the worst is the bad driver support for its GPU)
You're right and it's weird I find myself defending javascript, which is horrible. It's a bit like buying a computer in the 80s to only run BASIC. Maybe I'd learn and write some stuff in Coffeescript. It's not "all in cloud", you have off-line apps I think and the phones have SD storage (which on some phones is a "confusing" feature apparently, so it's left out) Mind you I'm anally retentive and tin foil hat wearer and lazy, I don't use facebook and android mini-games that you download randomly like Windows software scare me a bit (I used a friend's galaxy note. you click on the game to install it and it says "this app will read such, such and such of your data" but I don't see the checkboxes to remove privileges lol)
Interestingly we have a precedent about Firefox : if you modify the settings or compilation flags too much you can't call it Firefox (so you have alternate debian and GNU brandings). If Firefox OS is dealt with the same way, an OEM would have to call it something else, like Scrooge OS or Weasel Words OS. So maybe an OEM would only bundle some html apps, which you can proceed to uninstall by whatever the UI equivalent of right-clicking or dragging to the trash.
Isn't Plasma Active for 10" tablets?, and no one knows about Replicant (Plasma Active has very low notoriety already and I thought it was in alpha or beta)
I don't know, maybe I'm missing something here, but android is already FOSS, hell you can take most phones and install your own image from Cyanogenmod or AreaRomQ or wherever there is one that works on your particular hardware (a problem MozPhone won't solve as it all comes down to the drivers) and pretty much do what you want with it, oh and its free as in beer as well, so what EXACTLY is the advantage for the user to get a MozPhone over an Android or an iPhone?
What about not needing to mod the phone in the first place to get freedom?, or updates which you quickly won't get anyway. Also the Google app store is totally not FOSS, and gmail is not by any stretch of the imagination. What I've seen is it's full of spyware applications anyway. What people get into with the security model is horrifying, they get like a couple of years of updates or less and slow at that, amirite?, if they want security they need to be tied into the 2-year contracts for renewal or buy phone on their own at full price every couple years, not on their choice. I call that ransomware.
Instead, I wonder what you gain from using Android with these issues and the complexity of the OS, while the platform is inherently crippled anyway (because it mostly consists in poking fingers on a small handheld keyboardless computer). Native or close to native performance, sure, but those silly unplayable 3D racer games are worthless to me. I'm thus fine with getting rid of Android SDK, APIs, Java virtual machine etc. (which lock you into Android. If it's that free why haven't I heard of running Android apps in desktop linux or BSD or Windows yet?)
With that stuff gone I'd rather invest time and resources into hosting my data myself and be able to access/update it with Free html applets. Mozilla stated explicitly that users would be expected to use multiple app stores (or what we call repositories), no need to "root" or "mod" anything. So it will probably be easy to add real FOSS friendly "app stores" or your own. Though, all that stuff will probably run in Android.
For many people, or an imperial shitload of them this could be their first computer, the same way netbooks were and are first computers for millions. And here I'm thinking not only of the general population in the countries you cite, but also homeless people in the first world, and the third/fourth world, bottom of the barrel like Afghanistan and Ethiopia, places were people lack access to sanitation and clean water. Lowest price, lack of vendor lock-in and clean state without spyware, security and performance updates are all useful stuff.
Actually there's huge volume of dumbphones in rich countries too. Me I'd be tempted to get a Firefox phone and use it with no SIM card, wifi only, assuming I really need it which is not a done deal yet. My dumbphone with insanely cheap voice only / free SMS plan would permanently stay in my pocket or very near me the way it is now.
And I wonder if they're going to make coal gas to burn that in the plants. Or they can always cosy up with the Russians to get more natural gas. Ah, good job Gerhard Schröder!
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Lagrangian points are 18th century stuff, asteroids are 19th century stuff, combining them and calling the result "trojans" is more 20th century or late 20th century stuff so that makes it advanced and recent.
Better editing would have introduced the "lagrangian point" term before mentioning L4 and L5, which are lagrangian points. The robotic mining part is space nuttery (why not mine from the giant planet itself?, there's more stuff and it's a cool idea too)
Temash has 3.5W to 5.9W TDP, that's the max power use for a CPU+GPU+southbridge. Low end Kabini is 9W. Haswell at 10W.
So yes I say fast ARM and slow x86 meet at a similar point, a few years ago you had an Atom smartphone which was fast and worked. You have a Toshiba tablet with Tegra 4 that overheats, though it's bad design and that ARM SoC is a semi-failure.
Note that "idle" on a modern desktop is not so much 0 to 1% CPU use, I have firefox using 30 to 50% of one CPU core right now doing who knows what. To idle my desktop I have to shut it down, stand by or close firefox.
Every desktop now is a workstation, or vice versa, and it has been so since Windows XP Home and OSX 10.1 were released. Or maybe you would want to set the distinction at another level : fast disk I/O and lots of disk, done with SATA and then SSD ; huge monitor and 3D acceleration : done since the 90s. Multiple CPUs? Now multicore is enough, even dual socket rigs have been killed by socket 2011 and the i7 3930K. 64bit arch? done.
At the least, you can build a $1000 PC tower (peripherals and OS not included), it will be a desktop but frankly it is a workstation as well. Have a GTX 650 or GT640 w/ gddr5 as the vid card, that will do workstation stuff.
I'd consider an ARM desktop if there actually were motherboards to buy!
I only know of one, it's 349 euros and has a Tegra 3 which is outdated but has PCIe. Tegra 4 is a better fit for a desktop, CPU wise, but doesn't have PCIe.
http://shop.seco.com/gpudevkit/gpudevkit-detail.html
What you would need is a Tegra 5 which will just come with desktop graphics, so the feature level and driver support will both be easier. Just use nvidia driver or nouveau, presumably, and have real OpenGL not OpenGL ES. But we don't know if it will be available with PCIe. Funny that the "fuck you!" company is the only one that is building the chip you wish for.
As you can see ARM desktop is just a specialty item with a price that makes it useless. And when it becomes fast (e.g. Cortex A15 cores and not throttled down when it's put to use) ARM goes into 5W to 10W territory, meeting with the x86 guys (Atom, Jaguar, even Haswell/Ivy Bridge!)
ISA doesn't matter that much, low power x86 gives you a desktop. The current problem is Atom 32nm has no GPU drivers other than giving you raw X11 at correct res (given the GPU is a PowerVR, which is maybe the major brand of GPU for ARM SoCs, we can see that indeed the GPU support is indeed non existant in ARM land). And Kabini has been paper launched but we're waiting for the motherboards.
Kabini/New Atom mostly solve your desktop needs and even then Celeron 847 and Intel NUC have been available too.
This has been known for a couple months or three months, and even then was not a big surprise as the original target was "H2 2013" with no commitment.
If you want lots of PCIe the Intel 4820K is coming, somewhat soon.
Buy better hardware...
That doesn't always work. If you buy a better sound card, you will get worse linux drivers, as ALSA devs are busy supporting Intel HDA and Realtek ALC instead.
The Windows user can fix it himself by double-clicking a setup.exe stored on a CD-ROM or USB stick, provided by Broadcom or TP-Link or D-Link etc. ; the Debian user needs sysadmin skills , wired connection to the internet and knowledge about what a "firmware blob image" is.
I've seen working 3D in Virtualbox for the first time!.. On a Windows XP host (ubuntu 12.04 derivate guest). The vid card was a recent nvidia too, geforce GT 630 (i.e. GT 430)
Nothing needed to be done for it to work.
Of course, if you don't run XP and a recent nvidia card, don't count on being able to replicate that lol. No fucking idea what hardware or OS works.
If you have many grands and watthours to burn, maybe a future 12-core Macintosh Pro will run a linux guest decently, using a shit ton of CPU power to run llvmpipe so you get your 3D support.
One example : user installs Debian, can't see the wifi networks. What did he do wrong?
But, this does depend a bit upon the strength of the antenna, you can get up to 26db on some of them, which shouldn't require too many units. But, the OP is going to need power and Ethernet running to them. Or at least power.
Or there is, you guessed it, power over ethernet :)
(replying to myself)
Seattle being a major town with a known tech history, there's indeed a community wireless ISP, called "Seattle Wireless" and I'm sure they can be helpful. Or even have some people there quite interested
Wifi is great to first get your internet connection. Simplest if you have an accomplice in a near-by building with line of sight, preferably with a fiber, non crippled internet access on that side. Set a wireless link between your festival and the building with something like a pair of Ubiquity Nanostation. As it's wifi 5.5GHz, it's unlicensed and has a broad, not much used spectrum. Doesn't go through walls as easily as 2.4GHz, too. You have to respect some emission power limit of course but you get a stable and easy connection.
I used such a thing and would have 3 to 5 megabits symetrical, 100 meters or maybe more, and I guess that faster is doable (or just longer range and get that speed)
If line of sight or range is an issue I guess you can use a repeater (just a bridge with two wifi 5.5GHz interfaces)
On the festival end you could distribute it with wifi 2.4GHz, with maybe cat5 cables (up to 100 meters) to access points (or can they use wifi 5.5GHz to network with other APs?). And you can use wired ethernet for your own stuff.
You probably need to set up a proxy with a captive portal, that's useful : you get caching, so lots of bandwith saved when ten people are hitting the same web page or watch the same video ("check this out"). Ads filtering too! and if you're nasty (but reasonabe) people are given only web access through the proxy, no internet access.
Do you need QoS and is it easy I don't know.
If there's a small local wireless ISP (a non profit one why not), the better.
I agree. Why a mesh though? (and how do you set that up)
XP Mode was really XP in a VM, meaning it will get unsupported and EOL very soon just like the standalone Windows XP is. It's not a real solution because keeping it means supporting the entire XP codebase forever, so I don't see the gains much.
As for netbooks, let us have them thanks. Besides low end hardware is dual core, comes with 4GB and uses less power. When the current gen of Atom will be phased out it will be impossible to buy bad x86 hardware (even then they're mosly fine, the worst is the bad driver support for its GPU)
It's just like Windows 7 without the funny squares.
Rather than burning a 486 with lots of ram which can run linux, which I find evil, a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda will do.
You're right and it's weird I find myself defending javascript, which is horrible. It's a bit like buying a computer in the 80s to only run BASIC. Maybe I'd learn and write some stuff in Coffeescript.
It's not "all in cloud", you have off-line apps I think and the phones have SD storage (which on some phones is a "confusing" feature apparently, so it's left out)
Mind you I'm anally retentive and tin foil hat wearer and lazy, I don't use facebook and android mini-games that you download randomly like Windows software scare me a bit (I used a friend's galaxy note. you click on the game to install it and it says "this app will read such, such and such of your data" but I don't see the checkboxes to remove privileges lol)
Interestingly we have a precedent about Firefox : if you modify the settings or compilation flags too much you can't call it Firefox (so you have alternate debian and GNU brandings). If Firefox OS is dealt with the same way, an OEM would have to call it something else, like Scrooge OS or Weasel Words OS. So maybe an OEM would only bundle some html apps, which you can proceed to uninstall by whatever the UI equivalent of right-clicking or dragging to the trash.
Isn't Plasma Active for 10" tablets?, and no one knows about Replicant (Plasma Active has very low notoriety already and I thought it was in alpha or beta)
I don't know, maybe I'm missing something here, but android is already FOSS, hell you can take most phones and install your own image from Cyanogenmod or AreaRomQ or wherever there is one that works on your particular hardware (a problem MozPhone won't solve as it all comes down to the drivers) and pretty much do what you want with it, oh and its free as in beer as well, so what EXACTLY is the advantage for the user to get a MozPhone over an Android or an iPhone?
What about not needing to mod the phone in the first place to get freedom?, or updates which you quickly won't get anyway.
Also the Google app store is totally not FOSS, and gmail is not by any stretch of the imagination. What I've seen is it's full of spyware applications anyway.
What people get into with the security model is horrifying, they get like a couple of years of updates or less and slow at that, amirite?, if they want security they need to be tied into the 2-year contracts for renewal or buy phone on their own at full price every couple years, not on their choice. I call that ransomware.
Instead, I wonder what you gain from using Android with these issues and the complexity of the OS, while the platform is inherently crippled anyway (because it mostly consists in poking fingers on a small handheld keyboardless computer). Native or close to native performance, sure, but those silly unplayable 3D racer games are worthless to me. I'm thus fine with getting rid of Android SDK, APIs, Java virtual machine etc. (which lock you into Android. If it's that free why haven't I heard of running Android apps in desktop linux or BSD or Windows yet?)
With that stuff gone I'd rather invest time and resources into hosting my data myself and be able to access/update it with Free html applets.
Mozilla stated explicitly that users would be expected to use multiple app stores (or what we call repositories), no need to "root" or "mod" anything. So it will probably be easy to add real FOSS friendly "app stores" or your own.
Though, all that stuff will probably run in Android.
For many people, or an imperial shitload of them this could be their first computer, the same way netbooks were and are first computers for millions.
And here I'm thinking not only of the general population in the countries you cite, but also homeless people in the first world, and the third/fourth world, bottom of the barrel like Afghanistan and Ethiopia, places were people lack access to sanitation and clean water. Lowest price, lack of vendor lock-in and clean state without spyware, security and performance updates are all useful stuff.
Actually there's huge volume of dumbphones in rich countries too.
Me I'd be tempted to get a Firefox phone and use it with no SIM card, wifi only, assuming I really need it which is not a done deal yet.
My dumbphone with insanely cheap voice only / free SMS plan would permanently stay in my pocket or very near me the way it is now.
He also won't have the same finger prints and iris patterns and some other things like spots on the skin and I don't know what.
And I wonder if they're going to make coal gas to burn that in the plants. Or they can always cosy up with the Russians to get more natural gas. Ah, good job Gerhard Schröder!