What about Linux : the major version number doesn't stand for anything special. Long gone are the days you had 2.0, 2.2, 2.4 as the *major* version number - see, you should bitch about that because 2.2 ought to be 3.0 and 2.4 ought to be 4.0. But at some point in the 2.6 series, they fucked up even that. They went on chaning the 2.6.x series and still called it that instead of having a 2.8. So come 2.6.38, 2.6.39 and then fuck it!, we're doing 3.0, 3.1, 3.2.. 3.11 and still counting. If you dropped the officially meaningless "3." it would mean we've had Linux 9, Linux 10, Linux 11 released in short order and still going up.
The difference is Linux kernel versions get security patches and Chrome and Firefox don't - though Firefox does, it's called the ESR version (it got owned in Windows recently by some targetted spy or criminal malware I don't remember). The browser vendors quit patching every older version because this stuff costs many millions dollars and human/knowledge capital.
Or you can use Internet Explorer and stop bitching! But it's not available on Free OSes. A new browser project would have to be launched (who funds it? Red Hat? maybe they can't) or Firefox ESR has to improve, it does, Firefox 17 is a lot better than Firefox 10 but maybe at some point ESR can receive a bit more focus and longer support.
To me, the Winamp clone was Audacious (down to the winamp 2.x UI clone compatible with skins, like winamp 5.x). Then I got fed up with it. I still recommend it if your window manager doesn't have the bug with the sub windows in winamp 2 mode (developers says it's the window managers's fault and wontfix, and they appear to be technically right but it sucks on Mate or LXDE or at least last times I tried it). The worst stuff is what they pay attention to, the gtk3 interface, (non skinnable) looks good but sucks donkey balls : you can't resize the columns. They wontfix either and think we'll have to like it, but this mean you can't even have a file manager and the playlist side by side on a 1280 wide display, and be able to read shit!
tl;dr : I now use deadbeef which is like a clone of Audacious gtk3 but with more usability. Slight weird thing, shuffle is under "playback" drop-down menu and "order" rather than click on a shuffle button.
Vinegar is a nice and very cheap chemical product, specifically white vinegar which is kind of the pure form (dissolved in water). It cleans and disinfect stuff. I even cleaned red wine on a shirt with 25% vinegar, 25% alcohol and 50% cool water, it just all went away and I wore it without washing it further.
I've been wanting it in a spray but did not find empty spray bottles yet, I didn't look for it much either, in supermarkets they just sell them but full of some crap I don't need. Though, I stumbled upon a wine vinegar spray but don't want to pay 2 euros for it. I want to spray some in an old pair of sneakers with a horrible smell to see if that kills the life that's in it.
One advantage of solar power is that it is distributed, which helps with redundancy on the grid.
Sorry, being a power source with variable or intermittent output, with much of variability (weather events) depending on the geographical location, I would say it does bad things to your power grid not good things. Though it's probably a lot better than wind. You need to add grid upgrades, storage, backup gazeous gas plants, smart grids etc. so the "distributed" or "decentralized" benefits are nil, unless you're particularly concerned with down time / failure of major power plants.
While you're poking fun the actual phone only includes 512MB flash:). Things are pretty lightweight when you don't provide real APIs, libraries and stuff.
That joke has made linux desktops more usable, thanks! Now we get to have an updated browser with apt-get upgrade or the graphical wizard. When I started using linux on a regular basis people were stuck with Firefox 2.0 or 3.0 for years, with all the slowness and bugs that come with it. Mozilla announced already Firefox OS would get the upgrade treatment, security patch every six weeks and upgrade every three monthes. This means you get at least security updates, which aren't necessarily available on Android phones meaning there's no way I can consider getting a low end Android device.
However, I've always found it strange that companies do that - if you are going to make a low-end device, wouldn't you want to make the most efficient use of the hardware resources you have by running native code even more than if you had plenty of CPU cycles and RAM to burn?
Usually yes but who wants another incompatible ecosystem? If you launched a new phone today with a lightweight system, let's say based on Amiga OS and ran cute fast native applications.. You would end up with a phone that has a web browser, media players and hardly anything else. Web browser and media players are already included in Firefox OS. Other benefits are web stuff is adapted to resolution scaling (I hope), no more "this old style phone app supports 128x128 displays", and total vendor independance : you can have a MIPS phone or the wrong ARM instruction set and not suffer any incompatibility at all (even though Android's Dalvik will get you significant partial compatibilty)
Otherwise, yes Javascript is horrible for performance and it will stay that way getting at most incremental improvements. If a smartphone is used infrequently to check some web site or interface, and to have some light use of some apps well at least the apps perform similar to the websites.. The other one killer feature I can see is you presumably get updates (browser and OS) rather than stay on Android 2.1 or whatever. Better for both security and app support.
I thought it looked like Gnome 3, with maybe a custom dock they've written. A top status bar, zooming windows, GTK3 and otherwise featureless design, that must be Gnome 3 right? At least it looks pleasing.
I'm not too familiar with the Apple OS so I don't get why everyone jumps on it and say this copies Apple. I don't give a shit thanks. A bar on top, well, it was copied in the 1980s by the Atari ST and Dosshell already and the dock, a bunch of icons, available before OSX.. who gives a shit? I'm waiting for LXDE-Qt, now using a boring-looking Xfce 4.8, I'm not into the GTK3 stuff much but it doesn't hurt me too much some people are playing with it.
The truth is the US is a country with low upwards mobility, and is totally in denial about it. When you adjust wages for inflation and stop describing healthcare as "benefits" maybe the bottom hundred million Americans will be in a better shape to "succeed".
Umm.... dude..... it IS a tablet. An oversized PDA with a keyboard attached and a version of Win8 ported to ARM.
Outlook is an e-mail client and PIM package. It's not a "basic tool" everyone needs. There's lots of other E-Mail clients with comparable feature sets that are compatible and quite nice.
Wow.. Only a fool would run PIM software on a PDA? When PDAs were basically invented to serve as PIMs? Thank you for your instructive comment.
All you say is true except the last part I don't agree with. A PC from 2003 is still useful, or let's put the line at something with PCIe, SATA and upgraded to at least 2GB ram. My five-year-old PC still works great, it has a couple warts that can be easily fixed and it's mostly the significantly older monitor that sucks. It's actually more powerful than new stuff that comes out (like Celeron 1.1GHz laptops). I think that 10 years from now you will have trouble finding a 2013 Windows 8 PC that is slow and sucks, unless laden with malware or shit software. Or maybe it'll run fast with malware, if it has an SSD.
Lately the controls have been sliding out incorrectly when going full screen, the top of the time bar stays visible and functional. I can't get the bar back with mouse over so I have to exit full screen mode to change sound. I can trick it to stay up by mousing over before it half disappears, or try going back and forth between window and full screen.
This happened when I switch to Opera (12.16) but back on Firefox (22) the bug is there so it must have been a coincidence and Google updated their code. It's running on Flash 12.2, because that's all that is available. I have a feeling Google doesn't test their stuff on 12.2, as there was some other breakage before : the obnoxious sound volume control bug, which would deafen you at 100% volume, after you unmuted, after you muted by error / because of the bug of the auto-hide slider that didn't pop out on mouse over.
I don't have or use an OS or browser with Flash 15 or 16 or whatever it is to know how it behaves. I even want to believe it's a conspiracy to make me move to Chrome or Windows but that's probably just bad support. Chromium seemed to use system-wide flash by default on my OS, by the way. I still prefer flash to html5 video somehow (or worse, stumbling on a raw file randomly opened by totem or mplayer plugin).
Setting the thermostat seems good. Went on a trip and forgot/didn't bother to turn heat off?, you can do it. Coming back home in the freezing winter?, turn it on some hours before you get back home or even have something like "I want 19C by 8:00 PM" and the computerized system figures out how to make it happen cheapest.
At the least I'd like to be able to know how much my stuff is consuming electricity (global wattage, fridge, water heater..) and figure out if anything is not working properly (such as the fridge eating too much) and be able to fucking read it from my desktop. With daily, weekly, monthly ect power usage charts. Computer security is a big problem with stuff like that, sure.
Funnily the crapper maybe can be networked so it reports a leak! It doesn't need two-way communication though, just send a signal to the central computer.
Don't take that so seriously, or feel free to do so, I was just exploring a "what if?" and I think the idea is dumb anyway, whether it's a suicide mission or not. I believe that mild fascination in the context of a totally unrealistic and unreachable scenario is harmless. Remember that tale where a girl gets eaten by a talking wolf? It's even a cultural thing.
You never thought about silly things like which execution method would you prefer?, I would totally not do electric chair, gas chamber or injection but I'd be curious to know how hanging or guillotine feels like. Never read stories about crashes in the newspaper, or whatever? If you didn't resist your curiosity to read the news you must be mad I guess.
True that, the matter of debate was where you put that split i.e. could have been 768K + 256K or something else (incompatible machines could do that choice and have more than 640K max RAM). If max memory had been higher than 640K we might have had trouvles from lack of non-RAM address space anyway and still be stuck well below 1MB anyway. And by the time we could afford that RAM we had 386s and 486s with Windows 3.x and 32bit DOS extenders. It's mostly the 286 mode that didn't get much support by mainstream OSes and applications.
You seem to have no idea either : multitasking is some time-sharing scheme and may often happily run on a single core. Waiting for calls, bluetooth daemon, input threads are stuff that will use 0.1% of one core. Back in the days your 486 or pentium on win 95 would run solitaire, minesweeper, notepad and explorer.exe just fine, thanks.
Camera/webcam processing? done on DSP. Video game rendering? Not that much multi-threaded. But there may be rare exceptions like Crysis 3. Speech recognition? That's old tech, and it would work properly by know if throwing computer power at it fixed it.
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But they don't beat their own Athlon II/Phenom II gen which ran at only 3GHz.
What about Linux : the major version number doesn't stand for anything special. Long gone are the days you had 2.0, 2.2, 2.4 as the *major* version number - see, you should bitch about that because 2.2 ought to be 3.0 and 2.4 ought to be 4.0. .. 3.11 and still counting. If you dropped the officially meaningless "3." it would mean we've had Linux 9, Linux 10, Linux 11 released in short order and still going up.
But at some point in the 2.6 series, they fucked up even that. They went on chaning the 2.6.x series and still called it that instead of having a 2.8. So come 2.6.38, 2.6.39 and then fuck it!, we're doing 3.0, 3.1, 3.2
The difference is Linux kernel versions get security patches and Chrome and Firefox don't - though Firefox does, it's called the ESR version (it got owned in Windows recently by some targetted spy or criminal malware I don't remember). The browser vendors quit patching every older version because this stuff costs many millions dollars and human/knowledge capital.
Or you can use Internet Explorer and stop bitching! But it's not available on Free OSes. A new browser project would have to be launched (who funds it? Red Hat? maybe they can't) or Firefox ESR has to improve, it does, Firefox 17 is a lot better than Firefox 10 but maybe at some point ESR can receive a bit more focus and longer support.
It's the beef that'll make us starve. Eating poultry, vegan or eggs puts a shit ton less pressure on food resources.
To me, the Winamp clone was Audacious (down to the winamp 2.x UI clone compatible with skins, like winamp 5.x). Then I got fed up with it. I still recommend it if your window manager doesn't have the bug with the sub windows in winamp 2 mode (developers says it's the window managers's fault and wontfix, and they appear to be technically right but it sucks on Mate or LXDE or at least last times I tried it). The worst stuff is what they pay attention to, the gtk3 interface, (non skinnable) looks good but sucks donkey balls : you can't resize the columns. They wontfix either and think we'll have to like it, but this mean you can't even have a file manager and the playlist side by side on a 1280 wide display, and be able to read shit!
tl;dr : I now use deadbeef which is like a clone of Audacious gtk3 but with more usability.
Slight weird thing, shuffle is under "playback" drop-down menu and "order" rather than click on a shuffle button.
I would like consumer stuff to work properly too, like the Xonar DX.
Vinegar is a nice and very cheap chemical product, specifically white vinegar which is kind of the pure form (dissolved in water). It cleans and disinfect stuff. I even cleaned red wine on a shirt with 25% vinegar, 25% alcohol and 50% cool water, it just all went away and I wore it without washing it further.
I've been wanting it in a spray but did not find empty spray bottles yet, I didn't look for it much either, in supermarkets they just sell them but full of some crap I don't need. Though, I stumbled upon a wine vinegar spray but don't want to pay 2 euros for it.
I want to spray some in an old pair of sneakers with a horrible smell to see if that kills the life that's in it.
One advantage of solar power is that it is distributed, which helps with redundancy on the grid.
Sorry, being a power source with variable or intermittent output, with much of variability (weather events) depending on the geographical location, I would say it does bad things to your power grid not good things. Though it's probably a lot better than wind.
You need to add grid upgrades, storage, backup gazeous gas plants, smart grids etc. so the "distributed" or "decentralized" benefits are nil, unless you're particularly concerned with down time / failure of major power plants.
While you're poking fun the actual phone only includes 512MB flash :). Things are pretty lightweight when you don't provide real APIs, libraries and stuff.
That joke has made linux desktops more usable, thanks! Now we get to have an updated browser with apt-get upgrade or the graphical wizard. When I started using linux on a regular basis people were stuck with Firefox 2.0 or 3.0 for years, with all the slowness and bugs that come with it.
Mozilla announced already Firefox OS would get the upgrade treatment, security patch every six weeks and upgrade every three monthes. This means you get at least security updates, which aren't necessarily available on Android phones meaning there's no way I can consider getting a low end Android device.
However, I've always found it strange that companies do that - if you are going to make a low-end device, wouldn't you want to make the most efficient use of the hardware resources you have by running native code even more than if you had plenty of CPU cycles and RAM to burn?
Usually yes but who wants another incompatible ecosystem? If you launched a new phone today with a lightweight system, let's say based on Amiga OS and ran cute fast native applications.. You would end up with a phone that has a web browser, media players and hardly anything else. Web browser and media players are already included in Firefox OS.
Other benefits are web stuff is adapted to resolution scaling (I hope), no more "this old style phone app supports 128x128 displays", and total vendor independance : you can have a MIPS phone or the wrong ARM instruction set and not suffer any incompatibility at all (even though Android's Dalvik will get you significant partial compatibilty)
Otherwise, yes Javascript is horrible for performance and it will stay that way getting at most incremental improvements.
If a smartphone is used infrequently to check some web site or interface, and to have some light use of some apps well at least the apps perform similar to the websites.. The other one killer feature I can see is you presumably get updates (browser and OS) rather than stay on Android 2.1 or whatever. Better for both security and app support.
And yet it supports 32GB storage vs 8 or 16GB on your typical iphone.
I thought it looked like Gnome 3, with maybe a custom dock they've written.
A top status bar, zooming windows, GTK3 and otherwise featureless design, that must be Gnome 3 right? At least it looks pleasing.
I'm not too familiar with the Apple OS so I don't get why everyone jumps on it and say this copies Apple. I don't give a shit thanks. A bar on top, well, it was copied in the 1980s by the Atari ST and Dosshell already and the dock, a bunch of icons, available before OSX.. who gives a shit?
I'm waiting for LXDE-Qt, now using a boring-looking Xfce 4.8, I'm not into the GTK3 stuff much but it doesn't hurt me too much some people are playing with it.
The truth is the US is a country with low upwards mobility, and is totally in denial about it. When you adjust wages for inflation and stop describing healthcare as "benefits" maybe the bottom hundred million Americans will be in a better shape to "succeed".
Umm.... dude..... it IS a tablet. An oversized PDA with a keyboard attached and a version of Win8 ported to ARM.
Outlook is an e-mail client and PIM package. It's not a "basic tool" everyone needs. There's lots of other E-Mail clients with comparable feature sets that are compatible and quite nice.
Wow.. Only a fool would run PIM software on a PDA? When PDAs were basically invented to serve as PIMs?
Thank you for your instructive comment.
All you say is true except the last part I don't agree with. A PC from 2003 is still useful, or let's put the line at something with PCIe, SATA and upgraded to at least 2GB ram. My five-year-old PC still works great, it has a couple warts that can be easily fixed and it's mostly the significantly older monitor that sucks. It's actually more powerful than new stuff that comes out (like Celeron 1.1GHz laptops).
I think that 10 years from now you will have trouble finding a 2013 Windows 8 PC that is slow and sucks, unless laden with malware or shit software. Or maybe it'll run fast with malware, if it has an SSD.
There's MIPS too, and other stuff used in micro-controllers like AVR.
Lately the controls have been sliding out incorrectly when going full screen, the top of the time bar stays visible and functional.
I can't get the bar back with mouse over so I have to exit full screen mode to change sound. I can trick it to stay up by mousing over before it half disappears, or try going back and forth between window and full screen.
This happened when I switch to Opera (12.16) but back on Firefox (22) the bug is there so it must have been a coincidence and Google updated their code. It's running on Flash 12.2, because that's all that is available. I have a feeling Google doesn't test their stuff on 12.2, as there was some other breakage before : the obnoxious sound volume control bug, which would deafen you at 100% volume, after you unmuted, after you muted by error / because of the bug of the auto-hide slider that didn't pop out on mouse over.
I don't have or use an OS or browser with Flash 15 or 16 or whatever it is to know how it behaves. I even want to believe it's a conspiracy to make me move to Chrome or Windows but that's probably just bad support. Chromium seemed to use system-wide flash by default on my OS, by the way. I still prefer flash to html5 video somehow (or worse, stumbling on a raw file randomly opened by totem or mplayer plugin).
It's the freaking FBI. That's not exactly a secret rogue agency.
Well, I'm sure the Cigarette Smoking Man knows more about this than you or I do.
Wrong, a mobile i5 is dual core not quad core, though with four threads.
Setting the thermostat seems good. Went on a trip and forgot/didn't bother to turn heat off?, you can do it. Coming back home in the freezing winter?, turn it on some hours before you get back home or even have something like "I want 19C by 8:00 PM" and the computerized system figures out how to make it happen cheapest.
At the least I'd like to be able to know how much my stuff is consuming electricity (global wattage, fridge, water heater..) and figure out if anything is not working properly (such as the fridge eating too much) and be able to fucking read it from my desktop. With daily, weekly, monthly ect power usage charts. Computer security is a big problem with stuff like that, sure.
Funnily the crapper maybe can be networked so it reports a leak! It doesn't need two-way communication though, just send a signal to the central computer.
Don't take that so seriously, or feel free to do so, I was just exploring a "what if?" and I think the idea is dumb anyway, whether it's a suicide mission or not. I believe that mild fascination in the context of a totally unrealistic and unreachable scenario is harmless. Remember that tale where a girl gets eaten by a talking wolf? It's even a cultural thing.
You never thought about silly things like which execution method would you prefer?, I would totally not do electric chair, gas chamber or injection but I'd be curious to know how hanging or guillotine feels like. Never read stories about crashes in the newspaper, or whatever? If you didn't resist your curiosity to read the news you must be mad I guess.
True that, the matter of debate was where you put that split i.e. could have been 768K + 256K or something else (incompatible machines could do that choice and have more than 640K max RAM). If max memory had been higher than 640K we might have had trouvles from lack of non-RAM address space anyway and still be stuck well below 1MB anyway. And by the time we could afford that RAM we had 386s and 486s with Windows 3.x and 32bit DOS extenders. It's mostly the 286 mode that didn't get much support by mainstream OSes and applications.
You seem to have no idea either : multitasking is some time-sharing scheme and may often happily run on a single core. Waiting for calls, bluetooth daemon, input threads are stuff that will use 0.1% of one core. Back in the days your 486 or pentium on win 95 would run solitaire, minesweeper, notepad and explorer.exe just fine, thanks.
TFA is about a real 8-core made by "MediaTek"
Camera/webcam processing? done on DSP.
Video game rendering? Not that much multi-threaded. But there may be rare exceptions like Crysis 3.
Speech recognition? That's old tech, and it would work properly by know if throwing computer power at it fixed it.