It's SMR, and that is some weird kind of drive. You probably don't want to do clever things, the more clever things you do the more you'll cause write amplification, wholesale moving of large quantities of data. Even writing timestamps in an already written area seems a bad idea? You probably want it as dumb as possible, unless the clever file systems/volume managers etc. have been updated to support SMR drives and allow configurations that pander to them.
8TB SMR drives might be useful as cheap, glorified back up tapes for these huge and clever ZFS pools and zvols that store a small Library of Congress worth of checksummed and scrubbed data, but seemingly are impossible to back up.
Liking some storage options, so I would very much like a longer one that can take two 2.5" rotational hard drives, as well as the M.2 slot on motherboard. There'd be a large spectrum of options, from booting a slow Micro SD with debian and LXDE ; using two hard drives from dead laptops ; get a 500GB or less SSD and two 3TB hard drives, the latter for mirrored ZFS or BTRFS.
Now that'd be crazy high end desktop class storage. No need for a home NAS, let this computer powered on permanently. (the network doesn't keep up with 200MB/s hard drives yet anyway).
Thus the issue is that the website expects acceleration to work properly. The website can be blamed for being slow, and for doing this to promote Chrome. It's a lot easier to get enough basic OpenGL in non-browser apps running : Google Earth invariably runs a lot faster than Google Maps, and can be used on old hardware, even in Linux and even with an open source driver.
I tried KDE "Marble" but I wasn't impressed (blocky, slow, hard to navigate at all, looks like it was made in the mid 90s) I've tried gnome-maps right now : it works but there are no UI preferences (what do you expect). The zoom is too fast and coarse, with a transition effect that hurts the eyes. You hit "mousewheelup" and it looks like you're going to crash into the ground at 300 mph. You hit mousewheeldown and it flashes a blank tile that fades in to the maps. Perhaps someone can fork it and turn it into a normal app?
I don't want browser acceleration. How can I be guaranteed it won't make the browser crash, or actually slow down perhaps to a stand still because of overhead?, if not crash the whole X session. There's Google Earth as a 10x faster version of Google Maps, or openstreetmaps website, or others. Amazon will also slow down your browser, that's because the web site is defective. So don't go to Amazon (there's ebay for the odd things anyway) or keep only one tab or don't forget you can use a secondary Firefox instance on a secondary profile, where you can either use slow things there or use things you don't want be slowed down.
What's true is flash for NPAPI on linux is version 11.2, but it is with security fixes. Been that way for years and scheduled from the beginning to end in April 2017 (or was it just sometimes in 2017)
Evidently, NPAPI Flash will die, what I didn't expect is there would be a replacement in the form of PPAPI, such as we may thus see a big version jump on Firefox on Linux.
What about the global warming pause? That was a manufactured conclusion that required to wait a few years to disprove, and now we know there was no pause. You rely on manufactured conclusions to accuse others of manufactured conclusions, and that's bunk.
(correction : it was Halo 1, delayed Windows version. Looked bland without pixel shaders, and the textures were low res. Perhaps it would have been more fun on the original Xbox)
Street Fighter IV was well regarded in not needing a high end PC or GPU, I think.
On the other hand, PC version of Street Fighter II was unspeakable, but it was the tail end of rip off arcade conversions made by contractors for atari/amstrad/commodore/amiga etc., quite some time ago. So.. you get a 16 bit computer version with the beautiful backgrounds and characters, but they're turned into drunk paper dolls that jump higher that the depth of the screen and the controls are designed for a single button joystick (!), not that the game would have been playable anyway. THAT is a PC port that sucks! I remember trying Halo 2 and thinking it looked like crap and ran like a dog (because on PC if you wanted those graphics you could play Quake 2 and run at 60 fps on a 400MHz CPU), but the game otherwise worked like intended. Rip off games of the 80s and 90s were as if you wanted to play a game of chess, but the pawns are on the top most and bottom most ranks, you're in check when the game starts, and there are illegal moves such as nonsensical castling all over the place.
What if you were a medical doctor and were asked to disproof, every day, hundreds of pages of bullshit written by crooks about how vaccines cause autism, women can get pregnant when sharing a man's bath water, AIDS is not caused by HIV, and so on ad vitam eternam? How would you find time to do your actual, time consuming enough job?
The bad thing with that is even if you try to do the "right thing" by reading an internet newspaper, you end up in a filtering bubble by only looking up a couple categories you're interested in.
This makes an actual newspaper vastly superior. Even if you skim over or ignore swathes of it, all of the content is there and instantly available. Once in a while you might read something in the "useless" culural sections or among some content you usually don't give a damn about.
A newspaper is a collection of a few dozen reflective, zero power 4K displays that you can bend and fold at will, and where you don't even have to scroll. Scrolling is so 500 B.C.!
The shame is newspapers have shrunk and lowered in quality and merely echo propaganda like TV, radio and internet news sites do. Corporate power and advertisement make them trivially susceptible to pressure. I'm not sure that in my country there is any good daily newspaper left. E.g. war stories are the cartoon-like version where our authorities call for us to be outraged about the bombings of civilians by Russia and Syria, but starving people hit by artillery don't officially exist if they're not in the right areas. It's only a war crime when Syrians defend themselves, not when the West or Israel or Al Qaida does it. Also, everyone is unemployed, underemployed or underpaid, and tobacco increased 2x in price, food increases despite the zero inflation. So they arbitrate between a newspaper and bread or a newspaper and smokes, and decline to buy the newspaper. Internet news sites are the shit end of the stick, like video games replaced going outside and free or pirated movies replaced the theater.
It mostly lack a selection of task bar themes, and sometimes you end up with black speaker icon on black tool bar. Sucks! But if you have low RAM (or "low" RAM such as 1GB and need every single last MB available for a web browser) it's great. The only other thing I dislike is Openbox doesn't have ALT-F9 and ALT-F10 hotkeys out of the box as in Windows 2.0, Motif, Mate and Xfce.
People were waiting for the 5" phones with 1GB RAM and Firefox OS 2.x (e.g. ZTE Open L)
A big mistake was to go too much low end then fail to release upgrades fast enough. People were stuck on version 1.3, which doesn't actually offer privacy - no adblocking and no filtering. For those that were interested on technical and security grounds, it was a giant Osborne effect (that would still be going on : Web Assembly and Servo are not there yet). It did have e10s early on. The best part is the phone didn't require an online acccount, nor even asked for one.
With today's phone CPUs it would be a kind of Chrome OS for the mobile phone. The one low end friendly aspect was the OS and built-in apps used very few storage. Security patches were small and quick. (But actual upgrades required to download a community image and to mess with the phone, using a Windows program to flash it. Hence the normal end user experience was to run Firefox OS 1.3 forever, based on Firefox 28)
PHP is relegated to web servers? So the platform it would be tied to is "the web". In constrast, some languages can be used for web back-end, general scripting and full applications.
Other way to look at it.. PC hardware long has been advertising officially specified throttling, too. Most CPU except some but not all lower end ones have a "base clock" and a "turbo clock", so they're only promising you the base clock under sustained heavy load. Intel ran an ad to boast how their CPUs are smart and throttle "up" when they can.
Not necessarily. An "i7" rated for 15 watts will be a dual core CPU with lowish but decent clocks, slightly higher than those on a 15 watt i5 chip. It's a better bin i.e. for the same clock it can run at a very slightly lower voltage. So it's better, but throttling can definitely happen and has to do with how the cooling is made.
Laptops that come with FreeDOS are a thing too, likely more common than pre-installed linux. There are no logos, but there's the most basic of support for the display, keyboard and storage without Windows at least.
LOL. There's also nvidia legacy drivers for old graphics cards. Great job at supporting the latest distros while keeping high performance, but it was missing newer RandR support. This fest ended when the hardware died and I replaced it. I am also sure something can be done about the text mode consoles, but I stopped trying to do anything about it. They run fine, but they're in 2048x1536.
If the SSD is soldered and the BIOS is locked down anyway - doesn't allow to talk to the SSD through a standard protocol like IDE, AHCI or NVMe, good luck with that. What you'd possibly do is boot linux from an SD card. Have only SD card, USB and the network for storage, till linux has enough preliminary support to be able to use the SSD but not boot from it. Later, linux might support it well enough to boot on it and install on it, you will need a recent enough installer or live USB. Although the whole timetable for all of this can't be known.
The GUI is great if you choose the one that works for you. Even Network Manager is rather great to take an example of something often derided or reviled. What sucks is if you to try to run a recent (current) USB wifi dongle and it doesn't work at all, or your graphics driver is not great at all and the only solution is to change your graphics hardware. Even Quake 3 in Wine doesn't work properly, and to install or just try out software version n+1 or n+2 is a sysadmin task. Well, everyone knows that but I think the GUI is nice, it's behind-the-scene stuff that makes stuff not work.
It's a bit trumped up (well, as in old card games we still play), as they run the same 16+4 set up as far as I know. But there is way more I/O built into the CPU itself. Some of it is four SATA or two SATA plus two PCIe lanes for an SSD. Some of it is USB, but additional USB or SATA or PCIe SSD on the chipset will "steal" bandwith still.
Seriously, now when I go back to Win Xp, 7, 8. 8.1, 2008 (R2), 2012 (R2) etc, I feel like I keep on beating my head against a wall as I have to recall where specifically on this version various settings are so I can tweak various things like my network connections, disk configurations and so forth. Consistency is definitely not MS's goal with new releases.
Yes, one fairly ridiculous thing is the network wizards or network "center" which just prevents access to basic network settings like turning wifi network cards on and off. Even in Windows 7 it sucks ball. I had to teach non-technical friends to type Win+R, then "control ncpa.cpl", or I created a desktop shortcut that does that. Then I get the same basic and useful window as in Windows XP!
Likewise, learn to type "diskmgmt.msc" or "compmgmt.msc" or Win+Pause or "devmgmt.msc", launch those from cmd.exe or win+r (I couldn't find a button to launch the run box on the Windows 7 start menu, wtf?). These mostly are GUIs from Windows 2000, NT4 or 95 albeit I would have to check if all of them still are there on 8.x and 10.
Transmitting power a few hundreds kilometers or a thousand kilometers away has a high enough efficiency I believe. It's the infrastructure that costs a ton. You can electrify all train lines too, but that will cost some billions likewise. Billions that need to be spent for power delivery network upgrades elsewhere.
What I like about the idea is it's a "range extender" for trains and could be one of very few real uses for H2 as a fuel, made from useless wind power.
Slashdot Mirror
It's SMR, and that is some weird kind of drive. You probably don't want to do clever things, the more clever things you do the more you'll cause write amplification, wholesale moving of large quantities of data. Even writing timestamps in an already written area seems a bad idea? You probably want it as dumb as possible, unless the clever file systems/volume managers etc. have been updated to support SMR drives and allow configurations that pander to them.
8TB SMR drives might be useful as cheap, glorified back up tapes for these huge and clever ZFS pools and zvols that store a small Library of Congress worth of checksummed and scrubbed data, but seemingly are impossible to back up.
Should get a 360W PSU or less : running your PSU at less than 20% load is inefficient.
Liking some storage options, so I would very much like a longer one that can take two 2.5" rotational hard drives, as well as the M.2 slot on motherboard.
There'd be a large spectrum of options, from booting a slow Micro SD with debian and LXDE ; using two hard drives from dead laptops ; get a 500GB or less SSD and two 3TB hard drives, the latter for mirrored ZFS or BTRFS.
Now that'd be crazy high end desktop class storage. No need for a home NAS, let this computer powered on permanently. (the network doesn't keep up with 200MB/s hard drives yet anyway).
Thus the issue is that the website expects acceleration to work properly. The website can be blamed for being slow, and for doing this to promote Chrome.
It's a lot easier to get enough basic OpenGL in non-browser apps running : Google Earth invariably runs a lot faster than Google Maps, and can be used on old hardware, even in Linux and even with an open source driver.
I tried KDE "Marble" but I wasn't impressed (blocky, slow, hard to navigate at all, looks like it was made in the mid 90s)
I've tried gnome-maps right now : it works but there are no UI preferences (what do you expect). The zoom is too fast and coarse, with a transition effect that hurts the eyes. You hit "mousewheelup" and it looks like you're going to crash into the ground at 300 mph. You hit mousewheeldown and it flashes a blank tile that fades in to the maps. Perhaps someone can fork it and turn it into a normal app?
I don't want browser acceleration. How can I be guaranteed it won't make the browser crash, or actually slow down perhaps to a stand still because of overhead?, if not crash the whole X session.
There's Google Earth as a 10x faster version of Google Maps, or openstreetmaps website, or others.
Amazon will also slow down your browser, that's because the web site is defective. So don't go to Amazon (there's ebay for the odd things anyway) or keep only one tab or don't forget you can use a secondary Firefox instance on a secondary profile, where you can either use slow things there or use things you don't want be slowed down.
What's true is flash for NPAPI on linux is version 11.2, but it is with security fixes. Been that way for years and scheduled from the beginning to end in April 2017 (or was it just sometimes in 2017)
Evidently, NPAPI Flash will die, what I didn't expect is there would be a replacement in the form of PPAPI, such as we may thus see a big version jump on Firefox on Linux.
What about the global warming pause? That was a manufactured conclusion that required to wait a few years to disprove, and now we know there was no pause.
You rely on manufactured conclusions to accuse others of manufactured conclusions, and that's bunk.
(correction : it was Halo 1, delayed Windows version. Looked bland without pixel shaders, and the textures were low res. Perhaps it would have been more fun on the original Xbox)
Street Fighter IV was well regarded in not needing a high end PC or GPU, I think.
On the other hand, PC version of Street Fighter II was unspeakable, but it was the tail end of rip off arcade conversions made by contractors for atari/amstrad/commodore/amiga etc., quite some time ago. So.. you get a 16 bit computer version with the beautiful backgrounds and characters, but they're turned into drunk paper dolls that jump higher that the depth of the screen and the controls are designed for a single button joystick (!), not that the game would have been playable anyway.
THAT is a PC port that sucks! I remember trying Halo 2 and thinking it looked like crap and ran like a dog (because on PC if you wanted those graphics you could play Quake 2 and run at 60 fps on a 400MHz CPU), but the game otherwise worked like intended.
Rip off games of the 80s and 90s were as if you wanted to play a game of chess, but the pawns are on the top most and bottom most ranks, you're in check when the game starts, and there are illegal moves such as nonsensical castling all over the place.
What if you were a medical doctor and were asked to disproof, every day, hundreds of pages of bullshit written by crooks about how vaccines cause autism, women can get pregnant when sharing a man's bath water, AIDS is not caused by HIV, and so on ad vitam eternam? How would you find time to do your actual, time consuming enough job?
The bad thing with that is even if you try to do the "right thing" by reading an internet newspaper, you end up in a filtering bubble by only looking up a couple categories you're interested in.
This makes an actual newspaper vastly superior. Even if you skim over or ignore swathes of it, all of the content is there and instantly available. Once in a while you might read something in the "useless" culural sections or among some content you usually don't give a damn about.
A newspaper is a collection of a few dozen reflective, zero power 4K displays that you can bend and fold at will, and where you don't even have to scroll. Scrolling is so 500 B.C.!
The shame is newspapers have shrunk and lowered in quality and merely echo propaganda like TV, radio and internet news sites do. Corporate power and advertisement make them trivially susceptible to pressure. I'm not sure that in my country there is any good daily newspaper left. E.g. war stories are the cartoon-like version where our authorities call for us to be outraged about the bombings of civilians by Russia and Syria, but starving people hit by artillery don't officially exist if they're not in the right areas. It's only a war crime when Syrians defend themselves, not when the West or Israel or Al Qaida does it.
Also, everyone is unemployed, underemployed or underpaid, and tobacco increased 2x in price, food increases despite the zero inflation. So they arbitrate between a newspaper and bread or a newspaper and smokes, and decline to buy the newspaper.
Internet news sites are the shit end of the stick, like video games replaced going outside and free or pirated movies replaced the theater.
It mostly lack a selection of task bar themes, and sometimes you end up with black speaker icon on black tool bar. Sucks! But if you have low RAM (or "low" RAM such as 1GB and need every single last MB available for a web browser) it's great.
The only other thing I dislike is Openbox doesn't have ALT-F9 and ALT-F10 hotkeys out of the box as in Windows 2.0, Motif, Mate and Xfce.
People were waiting for the 5" phones with 1GB RAM and Firefox OS 2.x (e.g. ZTE Open L)
A big mistake was to go too much low end then fail to release upgrades fast enough. People were stuck on version 1.3, which doesn't actually offer privacy - no adblocking and no filtering. For those that were interested on technical and security grounds, it was a giant Osborne effect (that would still be going on : Web Assembly and Servo are not there yet). It did have e10s early on.
The best part is the phone didn't require an online acccount, nor even asked for one.
With today's phone CPUs it would be a kind of Chrome OS for the mobile phone.
The one low end friendly aspect was the OS and built-in apps used very few storage. Security patches were small and quick. (But actual upgrades required to download a community image and to mess with the phone, using a Windows program to flash it. Hence the normal end user experience was to run Firefox OS 1.3 forever, based on Firefox 28)
The news is about a cube root, not a square root.
Data caps only are a problem for wireless phone networks or a few insular countries.
PHP is relegated to web servers? So the platform it would be tied to is "the web".
In constrast, some languages can be used for web back-end, general scripting and full applications.
Other way to look at it.. PC hardware long has been advertising officially specified throttling, too. Most CPU except some but not all lower end ones have a "base clock" and a "turbo clock", so they're only promising you the base clock under sustained heavy load. Intel ran an ad to boast how their CPUs are smart and throttle "up" when they can.
Not necessarily. An "i7" rated for 15 watts will be a dual core CPU with lowish but decent clocks, slightly higher than those on a 15 watt i5 chip. It's a better bin i.e. for the same clock it can run at a very slightly lower voltage. So it's better, but throttling can definitely happen and has to do with how the cooling is made.
Laptops that come with FreeDOS are a thing too, likely more common than pre-installed linux. There are no logos, but there's the most basic of support for the display, keyboard and storage without Windows at least.
LOL.
There's also nvidia legacy drivers for old graphics cards. Great job at supporting the latest distros while keeping high performance, but it was missing newer RandR support. This fest ended when the hardware died and I replaced it.
I am also sure something can be done about the text mode consoles, but I stopped trying to do anything about it. They run fine, but they're in 2048x1536.
If the SSD is soldered and the BIOS is locked down anyway - doesn't allow to talk to the SSD through a standard protocol like IDE, AHCI or NVMe, good luck with that.
What you'd possibly do is boot linux from an SD card. Have only SD card, USB and the network for storage, till linux has enough preliminary support to be able to use the SSD but not boot from it. Later, linux might support it well enough to boot on it and install on it, you will need a recent enough installer or live USB. Although the whole timetable for all of this can't be known.
The GUI is great if you choose the one that works for you. Even Network Manager is rather great to take an example of something often derided or reviled.
What sucks is if you to try to run a recent (current) USB wifi dongle and it doesn't work at all, or your graphics driver is not great at all and the only solution is to change your graphics hardware. Even Quake 3 in Wine doesn't work properly, and to install or just try out software version n+1 or n+2 is a sysadmin task. Well, everyone knows that but I think the GUI is nice, it's behind-the-scene stuff that makes stuff not work.
It's a bit trumped up (well, as in old card games we still play), as they run the same 16+4 set up as far as I know. But there is way more I/O built into the CPU itself. Some of it is four SATA or two SATA plus two PCIe lanes for an SSD. Some of it is USB, but additional USB or SATA or PCIe SSD on the chipset will "steal" bandwith still.
Seriously, now when I go back to Win Xp, 7, 8. 8.1, 2008 (R2), 2012 (R2) etc, I feel like I keep on beating my head against a wall as I have to recall where specifically on this version various settings are so I can tweak various things like my network connections, disk configurations and so forth. Consistency is definitely not MS's goal with new releases.
Yes, one fairly ridiculous thing is the network wizards or network "center" which just prevents access to basic network settings like turning wifi network cards on and off. Even in Windows 7 it sucks ball. I had to teach non-technical friends to type Win+R, then "control ncpa.cpl", or I created a desktop shortcut that does that. Then I get the same basic and useful window as in Windows XP!
Likewise, learn to type "diskmgmt.msc" or "compmgmt.msc" or Win+Pause or "devmgmt.msc", launch those from cmd.exe or win+r (I couldn't find a button to launch the run box on the Windows 7 start menu, wtf?). These mostly are GUIs from Windows 2000, NT4 or 95 albeit I would have to check if all of them still are there on 8.x and 10.
The two sets of shortcuts for paste/copy/cut aren't bad. There's one for left ctrl and one for right ctrl.
Transmitting power a few hundreds kilometers or a thousand kilometers away has a high enough efficiency I believe. It's the infrastructure that costs a ton.
You can electrify all train lines too, but that will cost some billions likewise. Billions that need to be spent for power delivery network upgrades elsewhere.
What I like about the idea is it's a "range extender" for trains and could be one of very few real uses for H2 as a fuel, made from useless wind power.