I've just found on the web an €630 PC laptop that comes with no OS (store brand, so the make and model wouldn't be meaningful, it's as if it'd be a Newegg branded laptop). Core i3-6100H : same die as in the 13" MacBook Pro, 35 watts version, no turbo clocks. 2.7GHz! Intel graphics! 17.3" 1600x900, matte panel with anti-glare. TN panel though. I've just checked this before posting! 4GB RAM 2TB 5400 rpm HDD gigabit RJ45 ethernet DVD drive! (can be space for HDD or cheap 2.5" SSD) four USB type A HDMI and VGA empty M.2 PCie 2x slot i.e. Mac Book Pro storage class, albeit "only" 1GB/s. Bluetooth, wifi n not ac.
Weighs 3.1 kg (get rid of HDD and DVD if you want to make it lighter) Supports not only 32GB of RAM, but many storage options. Up to three SSD or one SSD and two HDD, plus the slot for a huge SD card.
I did read a story about such an ad-supported PC, incidentally. IIRC a real PC, but an all-in-one with something like 4MB flash instead of a hard drive ; it booted into some browser thing that got you on the dial up Internet, but not without the company that made that offer as a middleman, and some obscene amount of screen space for advertising. People hacked the PC to run something else, but the company went out of business quickly anyway. (the story said the BIOS was somehow hardcoded into booting the flash and it was only practical for such things as linux with the / on NFS. but in the day a low end PC still cost serious money, so that was a great deal)
Get a dock and you will never have to plug anything into your laptop again!... but you still have to plug them things into the dock. You sound like you delight yourself when you're cleaning your food processor parts for an hour, after telling up everyone how great a time saver it is. Hope you're finished soon, so you can go empty the dishwasher, maintain the leaf blower you need for that 3m long driveway, and code up the server back end for that smart kettle that doesn't boil water yet.
The future is a 7" laptop, and not a 7" with wasted space as on early netbooks! The laptop only has letters and the space bar on the keyboard, but all the other keys are available on a couple touch rows. On the second touch row, the missing 50 keys scroll by at a high speed and you hit the virtual key you need when it comes by.
There is no storage inside, except for the firmware and a SIM card. You can store the OS on a USB or Thunderbolt drive connected to the single USB-C port - if you're a luddite and don't use the cloud or something wifi to boot your OS from! If you plug a mouse instead, you'll be able to use it in the firmware configuration program. I like peripherals, so I plug my laptop into a 42U rack. It solves the problem so elegantly. I've got everything in there : speakers, monitor, printer, scanner, hard drives, SD reader and the legacy mouse!
There's just one power cable to the 42U, and one cable from the 42U to the laptop. But I heard they're working on the iDesk, which has a wireless charging surface built-in and soon you won't need a cable between the laptop and 42U anymore! $2399 for the laptop, $1999 for the iDesk and $3499 for the 42U(*)
(*) speakers, monitor, printer, scanner, hard drives, SD reader or legacy mouse not included.
Won't there be two kinds of such cables? USB-C can provide either Displayport, or HDMI. So if your computer provides Displayport (like this mac) then the cable will need a Displayport to HDMI converter built-in. But if your computer (let's say a phone) provides HDMI then you need not that converter (will the converter's presence make it fail or will it have some smarts to let the HDMI through? I don't know but hopefully the latter) If your USB-C provides no video signal at all, then you can do it but with a USB display adapter (such as DisplayLink chips).
So, here are three sorts of cables afterall, and god forbid you get an active one that is cheap and only supports 1080p. Also, if you need to connect to a ceiling mounted video projector and the cable is short, have fun
Perhaps using more hemp for paper and less wood pulp may be useful too. Pulp factories are fairly disgusting. I'm not sure about the economics of recycling cardboard : could be good. But recycling paper is funnily fairly polluting (the chemicals printed on the paper were the main reason to make that paper to begin with). You might burn the paper, if that powers a municipal heat network it's not too bad.
I agree that we need some sort of guiding principles. As a matter of course, industry has the best access to media and advertising. So "green" solutions tend to be about buying a hybrid car or a 50" LED backlit TV, and we're asked to marvel at the efficiency. Well why the f.. would you need a 50" TV in the first place.
Another one : in Firefox, click on the bread sandwich and on "Customize..." right in the bottom. Drag'n'drop the zooming controls left to the bread sandwich button. Now it's a single click to zoom (or a few), and a single click on the zoom size brings it back to 100% too.
Some sites switch to a mobile version when I zoom in, and I have to zoom back to get the desktop version. Or even zoom back one step in the first place, when the site thinks the window size or monitor resolution is too small.
Not always annoying but you have to know to zoom out to make the site easier to navigate / more informative again.
The worst, saddest thing I can say about your idea is it would play into Clinton's war card... depending on what you call the war card.
Not every schedule is about the US election but recently, we've got the Pentagon's assault on Deir Ezzor (a thorough slaughter of Syrian troops), and then the assault on Mosul (which entails destruction of all water and power infrastructure, as part of "humanitarian" warfare). If the attacks on a humanitarian convoy was a false flag, then that's some hard core stuff there. White helmets already are something of a "reverse false flag" - many monthes ago there were severe hints they are Jihadi who put on some clothes and/or helmet. Some newspaper I've read still pretends the rebels are "Free Syrian Army", about the story about Kurds being bombed by Turkey slight North-West of Aleppo in order to make room for the "rebels".
In all likehoodness or hopefully, the "West" is bluffing. They want to scare us afterall (i.e. the West scares itself). The Empire reaches several objectives : to bolster the Jihadi, get right-wing governments elected in Europe and North America, and increase weapon sales.
I'll bring a hardware argument. Being generous on numbers, what fits in the AI's 1 gigabyte/s networked hard drives (or the whole internet) won't fit in its 1 terabyte/s L1 cache, to say nothing of the latency. Make the AI's storage a billion times bigger, and it'll be a million times slower (or whatever it be) There's a similar problem if you make your AI from a billion CPU and they need communicate to get things done. We do certainly have natural examples, like flying animals prove flight is possible but that doesn't really make it less hard. Perhaps some cognitive processes could take years, and we'd witness a slow motion AI, exactly to the contrary of the notion that an AI would be a million times faster than a human mind.
I would have say, just pick up a desktop on the streets on your way home, but if it's fully working the OS on it has become even more worthles than it used to (Windows XP, or later Windows already full of malware).
As another who beat me to it says, the poorest tend to use a smartphone now. So if you don't have a smartphone, be glad you can afford it lol. Also why I find those phones despicable. You can buy a $50 one or a $80 one, but to stay afloat on security updates you'd have to buy one every year as soon as it comes out, and that's probably highly generous. If you still use Vista, that may have more life left than a cheap phone you'll buy tomorrow.
Well, if not the cops I would expect they call the fire brigade instead. Now, if you have one of those new-fangled buildings with a very flat roof and stairs or a trap door to access it, that'll be easier, maybe just a trespass.
In a north facing flat, you find yourself unable to have line of sight with the goddamned Sun. Neighbours may also call the cops if they see you trying to climb the roof, and running the cable from what you've put on the roof be it solar panel or satellite dish to your window is untidy.
One of the old Roman authors wrote that at any one time, e.g. your slave might slit your throat while in the middle of shaving you. I think the message was something like "Deal with it" (in the internet memes sense)
Some countries have "speed tiers" for DSL courtesy of the ISP, but some countries don't. Fixing a broken phone line here and there or simply enticing people to sign up will bring a lot of people to 10 to 15 megabits on ADSL2+. Rural 4G in some places might do it. If you have to bring some new fixed Internet, that will be fiber which is at least able of 1 Gbps. So there isn't a lot of point in trying to bring 1 Mbps to unwashed masses. Sure, let me show you my tax receipt and build me a T1 for free and I'll like it, but even 100/10 fiber will be vastly cheaper.
Even video can be done in some manner at 1 Mbps, except some live streaming that doesn't offer a low enough quality. But well, not owning any TV is a lot more common nowadays, now that analog broadcast was switched off (In France, they've doubled down by ceasing digital SD broadcast, so the dingy little tuner boxes and second remote have returned)
Also, 1 Mbps doesn't really exist except for some rural lines (nothing really wrong with e.g. Seattle's DSL, it's just that 65 year-old-phone lines are rare outside the US) ; if you've got 1 Mbps it's likely because you're mooching from some wifi hotspot that will have availability problems. Congestion may mean pings less than 100ms are only achievable at 3 AM. For UK in particular, I guess rain and mist ruin it pretty often. 1 Mbps up/down with 100% availability and low ping and zero jitter would be pretty nice actually, although still not usable for everything.
Since the Jules Vernes times, we've learnt that no civilizations exist on Mars and Venus. Two or three habitable planets in the same solar system would have been awesome and we'd be there already, but too bad.
A patent on what, nvidia's thermal and power management features that they call GPU Boost 3.0 or something?
The dock is also some cheap $5 thing that I expect they'll sell at a moderate (perhaps) mark up. Have two TV and a desktop monitor in a large home : can have a dock for each.
Let's say, it would be possible to allow the console to run at a higher temperature when it is docked. Or to clock it lower to save on battery. But I doubt they'd do, as it complicates things and doesn't help with the point they make.
No one knows about that feature with the middle button, and the trackpoint requires you to go mess with mouse speed settings if it's too jumpy.
Also, no one has experience with these old $3000 or $4000 Thinkpads, because they used to cost $3000 or $4000. So, Thinkpads may be strong with IT professionals who use a decommissioned business laptops, or order them on ebay, and businessmen in suits may have used them in the late 90s and early aughts. But to the general public they're rare. On the other hand, everyone has experience in using a touchpad on someone else's laptop at least and as a kind of finger mouse rather than a finger joystick, it's easier to pick up.
The single good thing about GTK3 I know of is HiDPI support i.e. 200% scaling of applications (or 300%, though that is useless). Linux Mint is porting various stuff to GTK3 (like the Update Manager, etc.) or adding Hi DPI support if those were already using GTK3. So Mint 18.1 Cinnamon might be something of a show case while keeping a real desktop with File Edit View.. menu bars, although if you have e.g. a 2560x1440 monitor this kind of turns it into a 1280x720 one. Sucks balls but one day you'll be able to get a 4K monitor and a low end desktop for not too much monies. And I hope Wayland will be ready for 2018, but I'm not sure about that.
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I've just found on the web an €630 PC laptop that comes with no OS (store brand, so the make and model wouldn't be meaningful, it's as if it'd be a Newegg branded laptop).
Core i3-6100H : same die as in the 13" MacBook Pro, 35 watts version, no turbo clocks. 2.7GHz!
Intel graphics!
17.3" 1600x900, matte panel with anti-glare. TN panel though. I've just checked this before posting!
4GB RAM
2TB 5400 rpm HDD
gigabit RJ45 ethernet
DVD drive! (can be space for HDD or cheap 2.5" SSD)
four USB type A
HDMI and VGA
empty M.2 PCie 2x slot i.e. Mac Book Pro storage class, albeit "only" 1GB/s.
Bluetooth, wifi n not ac.
Weighs 3.1 kg (get rid of HDD and DVD if you want to make it lighter)
Supports not only 32GB of RAM, but many storage options. Up to three SSD or one SSD and two HDD, plus the slot for a huge SD card.
I did read a story about such an ad-supported PC, incidentally. IIRC a real PC, but an all-in-one with something like 4MB flash instead of a hard drive ; it booted into some browser thing that got you on the dial up Internet, but not without the company that made that offer as a middleman, and some obscene amount of screen space for advertising.
People hacked the PC to run something else, but the company went out of business quickly anyway.
(the story said the BIOS was somehow hardcoded into booting the flash and it was only practical for such things as linux with the / on NFS. but in the day a low end PC still cost serious money, so that was a great deal)
Get a dock and you will never have to plug anything into your laptop again! ... but you still have to plug them things into the dock.
You sound like you delight yourself when you're cleaning your food processor parts for an hour, after telling up everyone how great a time saver it is. Hope you're finished soon, so you can go empty the dishwasher, maintain the leaf blower you need for that 3m long driveway, and code up the server back end for that smart kettle that doesn't boil water yet.
PS : when the iDesk comes out the laptop will have no ports whatsoever left, naturally.
The future is a 7" laptop, and not a 7" with wasted space as on early netbooks!
The laptop only has letters and the space bar on the keyboard, but all the other keys are available on a couple touch rows. On the second touch row, the missing 50 keys scroll by at a high speed and you hit the virtual key you need when it comes by.
There is no storage inside, except for the firmware and a SIM card. You can store the OS on a USB or Thunderbolt drive connected to the single USB-C port - if you're a luddite and don't use the cloud or something wifi to boot your OS from! If you plug a mouse instead, you'll be able to use it in the firmware configuration program.
I like peripherals, so I plug my laptop into a 42U rack. It solves the problem so elegantly. I've got everything in there : speakers, monitor, printer, scanner, hard drives, SD reader and the legacy mouse!
There's just one power cable to the 42U, and one cable from the 42U to the laptop. But I heard they're working on the iDesk, which has a wireless charging surface built-in and soon you won't need a cable between the laptop and 42U anymore!
$2399 for the laptop, $1999 for the iDesk and $3499 for the 42U(*)
(*) speakers, monitor, printer, scanner, hard drives, SD reader or legacy mouse not included.
Won't there be two kinds of such cables?
USB-C can provide either Displayport, or HDMI. So if your computer provides Displayport (like this mac) then the cable will need a Displayport to HDMI converter built-in. But if your computer (let's say a phone) provides HDMI then you need not that converter (will the converter's presence make it fail or will it have some smarts to let the HDMI through? I don't know but hopefully the latter)
If your USB-C provides no video signal at all, then you can do it but with a USB display adapter (such as DisplayLink chips).
So, here are three sorts of cables afterall, and god forbid you get an active one that is cheap and only supports 1080p.
Also, if you need to connect to a ceiling mounted video projector and the cable is short, have fun
Perhaps using more hemp for paper and less wood pulp may be useful too. Pulp factories are fairly disgusting.
I'm not sure about the economics of recycling cardboard : could be good. But recycling paper is funnily fairly polluting (the chemicals printed on the paper were the main reason to make that paper to begin with). You might burn the paper, if that powers a municipal heat network it's not too bad.
I agree that we need some sort of guiding principles. As a matter of course, industry has the best access to media and advertising. So "green" solutions tend to be about buying a hybrid car or a 50" LED backlit TV, and we're asked to marvel at the efficiency. Well why the f.. would you need a 50" TV in the first place.
Another one : in Firefox, click on the bread sandwich and on "Customize..." right in the bottom. Drag'n'drop the zooming controls left to the bread sandwich button.
Now it's a single click to zoom (or a few), and a single click on the zoom size brings it back to 100% too.
Some sites switch to a mobile version when I zoom in, and I have to zoom back to get the desktop version. Or even zoom back one step in the first place, when the site thinks the window size or monitor resolution is too small.
Not always annoying but you have to know to zoom out to make the site easier to navigate / more informative again.
The worst, saddest thing I can say about your idea is it would play into Clinton's war card...
depending on what you call the war card.
Not every schedule is about the US election but recently, we've got the Pentagon's assault on Deir Ezzor (a thorough slaughter of Syrian troops), and then the assault on Mosul (which entails destruction of all water and power infrastructure, as part of "humanitarian" warfare). If the attacks on a humanitarian convoy was a false flag, then that's some hard core stuff there. White helmets already are something of a "reverse false flag" - many monthes ago there were severe hints they are Jihadi who put on some clothes and/or helmet.
Some newspaper I've read still pretends the rebels are "Free Syrian Army", about the story about Kurds being bombed by Turkey slight North-West of Aleppo in order to make room for the "rebels".
In all likehoodness or hopefully, the "West" is bluffing. They want to scare us afterall (i.e. the West scares itself). The Empire reaches several objectives : to bolster the Jihadi, get right-wing governments elected in Europe and North America, and increase weapon sales.
I'll bring a hardware argument. Being generous on numbers, what fits in the AI's 1 gigabyte/s networked hard drives (or the whole internet) won't fit in its 1 terabyte/s L1 cache, to say nothing of the latency.
Make the AI's storage a billion times bigger, and it'll be a million times slower (or whatever it be)
There's a similar problem if you make your AI from a billion CPU and they need communicate to get things done. We do certainly have natural examples, like flying animals prove flight is possible but that doesn't really make it less hard. Perhaps some cognitive processes could take years, and we'd witness a slow motion AI, exactly to the contrary of the notion that an AI would be a million times faster than a human mind.
I would have say, just pick up a desktop on the streets on your way home, but if it's fully working the OS on it has become even more worthles than it used to (Windows XP, or later Windows already full of malware).
As another who beat me to it says, the poorest tend to use a smartphone now. So if you don't have a smartphone, be glad you can afford it lol.
Also why I find those phones despicable. You can buy a $50 one or a $80 one, but to stay afloat on security updates you'd have to buy one every year as soon as it comes out, and that's probably highly generous.
If you still use Vista, that may have more life left than a cheap phone you'll buy tomorrow.
Well, if not the cops I would expect they call the fire brigade instead.
Now, if you have one of those new-fangled buildings with a very flat roof and stairs or a trap door to access it, that'll be easier, maybe just a trespass.
In a north facing flat, you find yourself unable to have line of sight with the goddamned Sun. Neighbours may also call the cops if they see you trying to climb the roof, and running the cable from what you've put on the roof be it solar panel or satellite dish to your window is untidy.
One of the old Roman authors wrote that at any one time, e.g. your slave might slit your throat while in the middle of shaving you.
I think the message was something like "Deal with it" (in the internet memes sense)
Some countries have "speed tiers" for DSL courtesy of the ISP, but some countries don't. Fixing a broken phone line here and there or simply enticing people to sign up will bring a lot of people to 10 to 15 megabits on ADSL2+. Rural 4G in some places might do it. If you have to bring some new fixed Internet, that will be fiber which is at least able of 1 Gbps. So there isn't a lot of point in trying to bring 1 Mbps to unwashed masses. Sure, let me show you my tax receipt and build me a T1 for free and I'll like it, but even 100/10 fiber will be vastly cheaper.
Even video can be done in some manner at 1 Mbps, except some live streaming that doesn't offer a low enough quality.
But well, not owning any TV is a lot more common nowadays, now that analog broadcast was switched off (In France, they've doubled down by ceasing digital SD broadcast, so the dingy little tuner boxes and second remote have returned)
Also, 1 Mbps doesn't really exist except for some rural lines (nothing really wrong with e.g. Seattle's DSL, it's just that 65 year-old-phone lines are rare outside the US) ; if you've got 1 Mbps it's likely because you're mooching from some wifi hotspot that will have availability problems. Congestion may mean pings less than 100ms are only achievable at 3 AM. For UK in particular, I guess rain and mist ruin it pretty often.
1 Mbps up/down with 100% availability and low ping and zero jitter would be pretty nice actually, although still not usable for everything.
I tried to come up with my own money designed and drawn by myself, but people weren't impressed.
At last, they got their "CHRP"! Albeit it runs Windows NT, Mac OS, Linux and BSD but AIX and OS/2 are nowhere to be seen.
Since the Jules Vernes times, we've learnt that no civilizations exist on Mars and Venus. Two or three habitable planets in the same solar system would have been awesome and we'd be there already, but too bad.
A patent on what, nvidia's thermal and power management features that they call GPU Boost 3.0 or something?
The dock is also some cheap $5 thing that I expect they'll sell at a moderate (perhaps) mark up. Have two TV and a desktop monitor in a large home : can have a dock for each.
Let's say, it would be possible to allow the console to run at a higher temperature when it is docked. Or to clock it lower to save on battery. But I doubt they'd do, as it complicates things and doesn't help with the point they make.
It is the internal bus, sort of, if you're willing to look at it that way
Sort of like PCMCIA more than USB or Firewire.
The main problem is cost, and the cost makes peripherals low volume/high margin affairs, so high cost snowballs into yet higher cost.
No one knows about that feature with the middle button, and the trackpoint requires you to go mess with mouse speed settings if it's too jumpy.
Also, no one has experience with these old $3000 or $4000 Thinkpads, because they used to cost $3000 or $4000. So, Thinkpads may be strong with IT professionals who use a decommissioned business laptops, or order them on ebay, and businessmen in suits may have used them in the late 90s and early aughts. But to the general public they're rare. On the other hand, everyone has experience in using a touchpad on someone else's laptop at least and as a kind of finger mouse rather than a finger joystick, it's easier to pick up.
The single good thing about GTK3 I know of is HiDPI support i.e. 200% scaling of applications (or 300%, though that is useless).
Linux Mint is porting various stuff to GTK3 (like the Update Manager, etc.) or adding Hi DPI support if those were already using GTK3. So Mint 18.1 Cinnamon might be something of a show case while keeping a real desktop with File Edit View.. menu bars, although if you have e.g. a 2560x1440 monitor this kind of turns it into a 1280x720 one. Sucks balls but one day you'll be able to get a 4K monitor and a low end desktop for not too much monies. And I hope Wayland will be ready for 2018, but I'm not sure about that.