Big whoop indeed. How often do you buy some expensive shit that doesn't work after only five years? A typical computer gets about a decade of support, that's what Microsoft does at least. Even then, once the official support runs out, you can still get software running on that computer. e.g. you can download tens of thousands MS-DOS apps and games, if that's what you want. That makes the 5-year-old gizmo less capable than a 386 which is a bit ridiculous.
Some people have suffered unequal opportunities. Some can't read, some can't use a computer and some have over troubles with skills we call basic skills and take for granted. Some dude couldn't figure out that Asian, Europe, Africa, and South America are four continents not three.
This is something I don't understand. If something is tied, or lays on the desk, how the hell is it accelerating at -9.8 m.s^-2 ? I'm sitting on a chair, but I'm not in really in freefall, since my ass doesn't fly through the chair, then floors, then crust and upper mantle till I'm dwelling at the center of the Earth. And the story is about angular sensors anyway.
This is nice and all but the cars I drove in my life were about 45 mpg (non hybrid cars from the 1980s and 90s). I find that to be too much fuel use to my liking. It's polluting too much and we can't much reduce GHG emissions by 80% with that. Right now a regular car does 50 mpg. So (ignoring the problem that people will drive longer and more often)
50 MPG regular car = 6 gallons consumed 100 MPG research car = 3 gallons consumed 300 MPG super-car = 1 gallon consumed
3 gallons saved comes from the 50 MPG jump from 50 MPG to 100 MPG. 2 gallons saved comes from the 200 MPG jump from 100 MPG to 300 MPG.
50.0% of the fuel savings comes from the 50-100 MPG jump 33.3% of the fuel savings comes from the 100-300 MPG jump
Deploying Firefox as a pseudo OS on millions (maybe) of computer phones will give them an incentive to fix/improve their javascript host, at least. Which they have been doing for years already.
I don't have too many troubles with flash plugin, in fact if my browser is slow and my computer is swapping I can always do a killall -9 plugin-container, which I find myself doing in hard situations but not often at all. If you're auto-loading every flash object (which is the default) while browsing on over 100 tabs you're asking for trouble. Flashblock fixes any flash plugin problem I might have and you can whitelist that one site (e.g. I whitelist soundcloud.com, on another computer I whitelisted deezer as well)
It is able to crash. Sometimes it will crash once a day or more, sometimes it never crashes. That's with few and benign add-ons (though the most "heavy" of them is Session Manager) including Flashblock with tends to improve stability and resource usage by not auto-loading flash all the time.
They did, it doesn't leak memory anymore. The browser still pegs CPU and still crashes, but crashes orders of magnitude less often than Netscape 4.x. That's because the web is horrible, it's a platform for automatic execution of perfectly portable interpreted code of varying and terrible quality and I don't bother filtering it (barring Flashblock).
I couldn't find the price of the ZTE Open yet, I mean unlocked, without SIM and without dealing with an operator at all. The Alcatel One Touch Fire is the other Firefox OS phone for now but I don't know how much it costs.
I guess if it's cheap enough it could be used as a PDA and media player only, or as a phone with no data plan and use wifi, SD, USB only. But I'm fine with my small clamshell Samsung phone too (with no secondary display, no camera, no anything), long battery life and perfect form factor. It would be a pain to carry a rectangle everyday in one of my pants pocket (I carry enough crap already : tobacco, cigarette paper, keys, lighter, smartcards, corkscrew, a small purse with cash coins and USB drive)
The first Game Boy Zelda game was nice (though it didn't have Zelda in it). It's the closest game to Link to the Past really. Maybe the outsourced games and GBA games are shit, I don't have to care about them.
Why fork it? It still exists;). It will probably be maintained for years, or dormant but still working. I bet there are quite many gtk2 apps. You can still use motif apps nowadays (well, lesstif) like nedit.
BTW it's up to you to use another window manager (compiz?) and this is easy, change a line in lxsession's configuration file. LXDE is not really a DE, as you can use any component interchangeably. You can for instance use only pcmanfm. Or use everything LXDE but not use pcmanfm. It's mostly true of something like mate or xfce as well, but here the dependencies are pretty minimal.
I fixed a brand new laptop yesterday, dual core 32nm Atom with PowerVR graphics and 1GB ram. It can only do X11 (not even xv). On a desktop from 1999 (pentium 3 with ATI Rage Pro) you will get xv but no OpenGL still.
If it takes one second to print a square nanometer, then printing a whole square meter will take 10^18 seconds, that's more than 3x 10^8 years which is 300 million years. Then you need many, many layers to make e.g. a thin crust pizza.
Of course, maybe it can be faster, maybe you can use ten thousands nanoprinters/picoprinters in parallel or more but that's the main objection I have for now about printing macro objects on the nano scale. I do realize the existence of regular food means the concept isn't totally unworkable, it gives an indication of the "scale up" factor as well. How many millions, billions or trillions of cells are involved in making a grain of rice or an egg?, I have no clearly accurate idea.
A more pessimistic estimate would say Moore's law only gets you a doubling every 3 years nowadays, so a factor of 32 would take 15 years to work out. See the troubles there were for e.g. TSMC moving to 28nm, and now 20nm. An exaflops supercomputer would still be possible, with a 10x boost from Moore's law over 10 years and building a 3x bigger supercomputer.
I fail to see it as detrimental. Nvidia deals with it by pouring tons of money and engineers and competent overseeing on their drivers, it's one of their biggest asset. Among the "useless" stuff they have done is support for stereo ten years before there were 3DTVs, stable driver for linux, BSD, even Solaris (well they have portability covered), ten years of driver support or more for a given GPU (even on linux), or recently support for game profiles on linux so you can at last have different AA, filtering, vsync etc. options depending on the game you run, without manually changing driver settings every time (sadly my 7600GT doesn't get this, being on legacy support. But that card will gets updates so that it runs on newer linux and Xorg for years).
Such a feature was needed anyway and already exists. It's also the stuff behind the "Geforce GRID" (racked servers with GPUs that stream 3D accelerated software, like CAD, GIS, visualization or games to multiple thin clients, compatible with desktop virtualization, with choice between a "geforce" or "quadro" software configuration for each user)
Kepler GPUs include a H264 encoder used for that streaming purpose. Dumping to disk is a simple and interesting option, which I hadn't thought about but is obviously useful as well.
I find having a second browser is useful, such as Chromium, Midori or Epiphany - using the latter one lately. That way if you have to be stuck running a browser while you're out of ram and swapping you can quit or kill -9 the pig browser and still have some browser shit running in the secondary browser.
With 1GB, you ought to run a lightweight OS / environment (Windows XP, but it's deprecated, or LXDE, or some non xubuntu XFCE at best) and look for a memory upgrade unless you're on an old maxed out computer.
True that. In my experience, Chrome is faster than Firefox, but uses too much RAM. Firefox "leaks" CPU and Chrome "leaks" memory - it doesn't really leak, it wastes memory by the ton because it was design that way. Sadly I don't have 8GB or 16GB so I can run Chrome or Chrome + Firefox, so I just run Firefox.
I run Epiphany on the side (lamely renamed "Web" by the Gnome team) which is fast, lean, almost has a really great layout, and is annoying like hell for not allowing to scroll the tab bar with the scroll wheel (I read the gtk bug reports, the feature was dropped from gtk in 2010 because one developer had a faulty scroll wheel and the devs convinced each others a scroll wheel confuses noobs)
I've just learnt today on this slashdot page that Google Voice was restricted to the US and if I had ever wanted to use it I would have been unable to do so. I didn't even know what it did anyway (be some sort of Skype, connecting to real old phone networks), I supposed it was some sort of Voice mail of voice chat for Google Talk. Seeing that Google Talk is deprecated, that's two Google services I will never have to worry about anyway.
I don't have a gmail btw, still using the same Yahoo webmail account since 2001. With the NSA shitnitz, I've stopped logging in to youtube (which only serves to pretend you're an adult so you can watch videos flagged as fap material) and this way I'm not logged in to Google against my wish.
Overages? In my country SMS have become free, but that took a new cell phone operator to come to the market. Before that they would gorge themselves with a cost of about 10 to 15 euro cents per SMS sent, though you could get unlimited SMS as part of a contract or option, or had a set of about 100 or 1000 SMS you can send before you have to pay per message.
What the fuck is WebRTC? (rethorical question, since I had to google and wikipedia it) And if it works, will it be secure or will any random javascript garbage you get by browsing the web be able to listen to what reaches your microphone? "Free" voice chat services that are recorded? (if only so the admin can fap at sex chat)
For the record, I was running a geforce 8400GS and Radeon 7000 PCI on linux mint 13 Mate (i.e. Ubuntu 12.04 with Gnome 2's fork). The 8400GS could only do one VGA output for some reason. Ten years ago I got a Voodoo5 5500, S3 Virge DX and S3 Virge running together on 98SE (just to try it out, then I used dual display a bit). Even videos would display on two screens at once when windows media player 6.0's overlapped the border, which I found was unexpected and impressive.
I can get that it was probably nvidia's fault.
Maybe Wayland/Mir are an opportunity to clean this all up and X11 windows can be used like any other window on the deskop. Just like Xming allows to run remote X11 apps seamlessly on Windows (works fine on 98, XP and 7)
It's weird to hear Canonical boasting that they've run an entire desktop in a window by the way, that's a more limited result. Yet there may be situations where it's useful:) (Running an android PowerVR driver instead of a linux one, getting around some stupid bug, displaying another computer's desktop)
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Big whoop indeed. How often do you buy some expensive shit that doesn't work after only five years? A typical computer gets about a decade of support, that's what Microsoft does at least. Even then, once the official support runs out, you can still get software running on that computer. e.g. you can download tens of thousands MS-DOS apps and games, if that's what you want. That makes the 5-year-old gizmo less capable than a 386 which is a bit ridiculous.
Some people have suffered unequal opportunities. Some can't read, some can't use a computer and some have over troubles with skills we call basic skills and take for granted. Some dude couldn't figure out that Asian, Europe, Africa, and South America are four continents not three.
This is something I don't understand. If something is tied, or lays on the desk, how the hell is it accelerating at -9.8 m.s^-2 ?
I'm sitting on a chair, but I'm not in really in freefall, since my ass doesn't fly through the chair, then floors, then crust and upper mantle till I'm dwelling at the center of the Earth. And the story is about angular sensors anyway.
This is nice and all but the cars I drove in my life were about 45 mpg (non hybrid cars from the 1980s and 90s). I find that to be too much fuel use to my liking. It's polluting too much and we can't much reduce GHG emissions by 80% with that. Right now a regular car does 50 mpg. So (ignoring the problem that people will drive longer and more often)
50 MPG regular car = 6 gallons consumed
100 MPG research car = 3 gallons consumed
300 MPG super-car = 1 gallon consumed
3 gallons saved comes from the 50 MPG jump from 50 MPG to 100 MPG.
2 gallons saved comes from the 200 MPG jump from 100 MPG to 300 MPG.
50.0% of the fuel savings comes from the 50-100 MPG jump
33.3% of the fuel savings comes from the 100-300 MPG jump
Deploying Firefox as a pseudo OS on millions (maybe) of computer phones will give them an incentive to fix/improve their javascript host, at least. Which they have been doing for years already.
I don't have too many troubles with flash plugin, in fact if my browser is slow and my computer is swapping I can always do a killall -9 plugin-container, which I find myself doing in hard situations but not often at all. If you're auto-loading every flash object (which is the default) while browsing on over 100 tabs you're asking for trouble. Flashblock fixes any flash plugin problem I might have and you can whitelist that one site (e.g. I whitelist soundcloud.com, on another computer I whitelisted deezer as well)
It is able to crash. Sometimes it will crash once a day or more, sometimes it never crashes. That's with few and benign add-ons (though the most "heavy" of them is Session Manager) including Flashblock with tends to improve stability and resource usage by not auto-loading flash all the time.
They did, it doesn't leak memory anymore. The browser still pegs CPU and still crashes, but crashes orders of magnitude less often than Netscape 4.x. That's because the web is horrible, it's a platform for automatic execution of perfectly portable interpreted code of varying and terrible quality and I don't bother filtering it (barring Flashblock).
I couldn't find the price of the ZTE Open yet, I mean unlocked, without SIM and without dealing with an operator at all. The Alcatel One Touch Fire is the other Firefox OS phone for now but I don't know how much it costs.
I guess if it's cheap enough it could be used as a PDA and media player only, or as a phone with no data plan and use wifi, SD, USB only.
But I'm fine with my small clamshell Samsung phone too (with no secondary display, no camera, no anything), long battery life and perfect form factor. It would be a pain to carry a rectangle everyday in one of my pants pocket (I carry enough crap already : tobacco, cigarette paper, keys, lighter, smartcards, corkscrew, a small purse with cash coins and USB drive)
The first Game Boy Zelda game was nice (though it didn't have Zelda in it). It's the closest game to Link to the Past really. Maybe the outsourced games and GBA games are shit, I don't have to care about them.
Why fork it? It still exists ;). It will probably be maintained for years, or dormant but still working. I bet there are quite many gtk2 apps. You can still use motif apps nowadays (well, lesstif) like nedit.
BTW it's up to you to use another window manager (compiz?) and this is easy, change a line in lxsession's configuration file.
LXDE is not really a DE, as you can use any component interchangeably. You can for instance use only pcmanfm. Or use everything LXDE but not use pcmanfm. It's mostly true of something like mate or xfce as well, but here the dependencies are pretty minimal.
I fixed a brand new laptop yesterday, dual core 32nm Atom with PowerVR graphics and 1GB ram. It can only do X11 (not even xv). On a desktop from 1999 (pentium 3 with ATI Rage Pro) you will get xv but no OpenGL still.
I thought it was the Renault 16. It's earlier when you look at the dates on wikipedia.
If it takes one second to print a square nanometer, then printing a whole square meter will take 10^18 seconds, that's more than 3x 10^8 years which is 300 million years. Then you need many, many layers to make e.g. a thin crust pizza.
Of course, maybe it can be faster, maybe you can use ten thousands nanoprinters/picoprinters in parallel or more but that's the main objection I have for now about printing macro objects on the nano scale. I do realize the existence of regular food means the concept isn't totally unworkable, it gives an indication of the "scale up" factor as well. How many millions, billions or trillions of cells are involved in making a grain of rice or an egg?, I have no clearly accurate idea.
A more pessimistic estimate would say Moore's law only gets you a doubling every 3 years nowadays, so a factor of 32 would take 15 years to work out. See the troubles there were for e.g. TSMC moving to 28nm, and now 20nm.
An exaflops supercomputer would still be possible, with a 10x boost from Moore's law over 10 years and building a 3x bigger supercomputer.
1 exponentiated to the 18th power is still 1.
I fail to see it as detrimental. Nvidia deals with it by pouring tons of money and engineers and competent overseeing on their drivers, it's one of their biggest asset. Among the "useless" stuff they have done is support for stereo ten years before there were 3DTVs, stable driver for linux, BSD, even Solaris (well they have portability covered), ten years of driver support or more for a given GPU (even on linux), or recently support for game profiles on linux so you can at last have different AA, filtering, vsync etc. options depending on the game you run, without manually changing driver settings every time (sadly my 7600GT doesn't get this, being on legacy support. But that card will gets updates so that it runs on newer linux and Xorg for years).
Such a feature was needed anyway and already exists. It's also the stuff behind the "Geforce GRID" (racked servers with GPUs that stream 3D accelerated software, like CAD, GIS, visualization or games to multiple thin clients, compatible with desktop virtualization, with choice between a "geforce" or "quadro" software configuration for each user)
Kepler GPUs include a H264 encoder used for that streaming purpose. Dumping to disk is a simple and interesting option, which I hadn't thought about but is obviously useful as well.
I find having a second browser is useful, such as Chromium, Midori or Epiphany - using the latter one lately. That way if you have to be stuck running a browser while you're out of ram and swapping you can quit or kill -9 the pig browser and still have some browser shit running in the secondary browser.
With 1GB, you ought to run a lightweight OS / environment (Windows XP, but it's deprecated, or LXDE, or some non xubuntu XFCE at best) and look for a memory upgrade unless you're on an old maxed out computer.
True that.
In my experience, Chrome is faster than Firefox, but uses too much RAM. Firefox "leaks" CPU and Chrome "leaks" memory - it doesn't really leak, it wastes memory by the ton because it was design that way. Sadly I don't have 8GB or 16GB so I can run Chrome or Chrome + Firefox, so I just run Firefox.
I run Epiphany on the side (lamely renamed "Web" by the Gnome team) which is fast, lean, almost has a really great layout, and is annoying like hell for not allowing to scroll the tab bar with the scroll wheel (I read the gtk bug reports, the feature was dropped from gtk in 2010 because one developer had a faulty scroll wheel and the devs convinced each others a scroll wheel confuses noobs)
Worst name ever, why did they pick a name that is a homonym of an already existing browser? They could as well have named it Goggle Craum or Nestcape.
I've just learnt today on this slashdot page that Google Voice was restricted to the US and if I had ever wanted to use it I would have been unable to do so. I didn't even know what it did anyway (be some sort of Skype, connecting to real old phone networks), I supposed it was some sort of Voice mail of voice chat for Google Talk.
Seeing that Google Talk is deprecated, that's two Google services I will never have to worry about anyway.
I don't have a gmail btw, still using the same Yahoo webmail account since 2001. With the NSA shitnitz, I've stopped logging in to youtube (which only serves to pretend you're an adult so you can watch videos flagged as fap material) and this way I'm not logged in to Google against my wish.
Overages?
In my country SMS have become free, but that took a new cell phone operator to come to the market. Before that they would gorge themselves with a cost of about 10 to 15 euro cents per SMS sent, though you could get unlimited SMS as part of a contract or option, or had a set of about 100 or 1000 SMS you can send before you have to pay per message.
What the fuck is WebRTC? (rethorical question, since I had to google and wikipedia it)
And if it works, will it be secure or will any random javascript garbage you get by browsing the web be able to listen to what reaches your microphone?
"Free" voice chat services that are recorded? (if only so the admin can fap at sex chat)
For the record, I was running a geforce 8400GS and Radeon 7000 PCI on linux mint 13 Mate (i.e. Ubuntu 12.04 with Gnome 2's fork). The 8400GS could only do one VGA output for some reason.
Ten years ago I got a Voodoo5 5500, S3 Virge DX and S3 Virge running together on 98SE (just to try it out, then I used dual display a bit). Even videos would display on two screens at once when windows media player 6.0's overlapped the border, which I found was unexpected and impressive.
I can get that it was probably nvidia's fault.
Maybe Wayland/Mir are an opportunity to clean this all up and X11 windows can be used like any other window on the deskop. Just like Xming allows to run remote X11 apps seamlessly on Windows (works fine on 98, XP and 7)
It's weird to hear Canonical boasting that they've run an entire desktop in a window by the way, that's a more limited result. Yet there may be situations where it's useful :) (Running an android PowerVR driver instead of a linux one, getting around some stupid bug, displaying another computer's desktop)