There's a laptop shell that uses USB (Displaylink chip), even more low common denominator than VGA since phones are only really guaranteed to have USB as a working external input/output. No VGA out either on Raspberry Pi or this story's computer, unless you use an active dongle. But you'll likely want at least USB 3.0 on the computer you connect the "shell" to. There's no real computer smarts inside to have it also do laptop operation, but that's a start. It seems not available yet, too.
Pretty decent if you can get it to work with the small computer boards, desktops and whatnot that you care about but if you need some brain behind it without them, you plug a recent-ish smartphone in for basic tasks.
Who gives a crap? It's a phone, and it doesn't require a special charger anymore (uses USB), making it a good upgrade over a previous phone. Perhaps bluetooth audio works (for real speaker(s), not a headset). It evens has a jack, instead of only accepting proprietary headphones like old phones from the 00s.
It is true that computer garbage is worthless crap, except when you re-use parts (or whole items). In some countries, people repair even dumb phones. Basel is a mouthpiece for the recycling industries, they're paid to make high profile stories once in a while. The industries want for all US garbage to be destroyed in the US. This would expand their business, that's all. They want to make it illegal that your dead laptop's LCD panel ends up in some African kid's laptop.
Many phones have a posted maximum limit of 128GB or 200GB or 256GB, because there weren't any bigger SD card to test with. They may be expected to support up to the theoretical max of 2TB. The other common "hard" limit is 32GB.
In fact, on socket 1366 motherboards (i7-920 and up) you have an official limit of 24GB RAM, but they can take up to 48GB RAM unofficially. Because 8GB sticks failed to not work, and Intel and motherboard manufacturers quietly decided to not update the docs.
Remember when Jews were considered like witches because they washed hands before eating and survived epidemic diseases? Between hygiene, high quality water supply, sanitation and strong immunity thanks to very high levels of nutrition it's been a while since the last huge black plague.
MATE and Xfce are moving to GTK3, however slowly. gnome-disks is commonly included, it allows to add/etc/fstab entries with UUID by clicking around. Which is very helpful, although explaining what's a fstab UUID entry to your mother-in-law or auntie is left as an exercise for the reader.
I agree it's a bit bad, but 3200x1800 is a very decent resolution. If you use 200% scaling (which I believe sums up what Cinnamon, Ubuntu, Gnome can do with HiDPI) then you get a shiny 1600x900 equivalent, which gives decent room for stuff. If you have to use software which really doesn't work with the scaling, use physical 1600x900 resolution instead.
To paraphrase someone's sig Slashdot logic : 1440x900 is better than 1600x900
Like those Unix-like environments where the prompt isn't set are so much more useful! And when you use up arrow / down arrow to get the command line history, it should display garbage characters instead of actually working, so that users are forced to learn how to set their terminal character map or whatever it is. And when you run graphical emacs (because the notepad clones are for dummies and none should be installed out of the box), it should be set so that home/end keys bring you to the beginning or end of the whole file, not the current line. That will teach how to set it up. Mouse scroll wheel support is a waste of bytes, real mice have three buttons and that's it. Users should be required to recompile their apps with --enable-scrollwheel on a case by case basis.
I had a good Logitech gamepad with four face buttons and two nice shoulder buttons and a D-PAD, although two buttons were turbo buttons. I want the game port back, lol. There's some additional cost about having to make it a USB device. Analog sticks drive the price up a great deal too. I mostly want a low cost gamepad, digital only but not skimping badly on the quality. Could sell a pack of two with a USB hub.
Yes, I overlooked USB filters. I even stumbled upon some on the web : around 30 or 40 euros/dollars for a USB filter and same for the DAC. I do hold the view that an internal sound card in a desktop can be well "audiophile" enough, e.g. Xonar DX, Sound Blaster Z and others. There's quite some filtering going on there, although some PC might be more noisy than others - perhaps graphics card with sudden and large power use transitions. Laptop audio outputs are generally potentially the worst ones, with phones and smartphones. But if the laptop is not hugely noisy and if the DAC chip is well surrounded, it might be good enough for the most part. I suspect a budget difference of $1 or similar would make or break it.
I disregard $5000 DACs as useless. Even if they hold their promises, being 99.9999% perfect instead of 99.999% doesn't serve any purpose.
If your external DAC is powered from the USB port, it may pick up noise from the computer. Power comes from the laptop's insides, just as with an internal DAC. So you need a separate power supply for the DAC. Two power bricks and two wall plugs for a laptop. Then, you need a Thunderbolt SSD to add storage instead of adding an SSD in the laptop. Ethernet dongle too. Get a powered USB hub if you're out of ports, since powered hubs are better. Third power brick. Why not make the keyboard external while we're at it, because that's trendy (Surface Pro like computers). By that point, why call it a laptop?
Though if you have many blurred pictures of a face or license plate, you might get on something. There might be quite a lot of information in a minute-long video that includes a blurred face.
Why kill a pedophile when we find jail to be enough for murderers, and people like Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer and Slobodan Milosevic? A few children getting raped isn't that big of a deal. Go kill a pedophile, then we'll jail you for the murder, hopefully with an exemplary long sentence.
I think nice is only about priority, so if I set Firefox at very low priority and it uses 80% CPU, it will still use 80% and thus waste power. I would have to investigate about putting Firefox in a cgroup.
Thinking about setting the CPU clock at 1.0 GHz in the BIOS and voltage at 0.9 V. Because, fuck you CPU. And fuck you Linux for feature regressions (panel applet that ought to display CPU frequencies doesn't work anymore on my hardware. Automatic underclocking may be broken, but I have no real way to check for now.)
It's stupid to go to such lengths, but ugprading to 8GB RAM and a 64bit OS works well. (4GB + 64bit or 32bit with Firefox e10s is not bad either) I don't know why, but I have a firefox instance running at 3.2GB real memory here, and 4.7GB virtual memory. It's fine i.e. today is a lucky day.
[It's still possible to find ddr2 memory to upgrade, in fact I guess most people that would be inclined to make such an upgrade don't care about ddr2 systems anymore and thus don't drive the prices up.] Although, if it's the CPU overhead that murders it, you may have as much RAM as you want and still be fucked. I think I noticed that Firefox gets worse than usual if it's hitting against the 2GB virtual memory limit (32bit process) and hovering there. 64 bit gives effectively infinite virtual memory, so it seems to help a lot. (e10s on 32bit makes it harder to reach the 2GB limit, but in no way impossible). Obviously, when firefox is running at 1.97 to 1.99 GB virtual memory there must be a lot of "urgent" and "last chance before nuclear meltdown" garbage collection going on.
To enable 90% of what's missing from the older UI 1. Right-click somewhere like the bookmark buttons, plus button, download arrow or sandwich made of one slice of bread between two slices of bread 2. Click on "Menu Bar"
Add-ons used to fail routinely in the "golden old times" of 0.x, 1.0 and perhaps for another couple years. Now, everything works unless it's been completely unmaintained for too long. There's an automatic check and extensions update when needed. Although, I only need half the extensions I used to, because many actual browser features were added over time (simple example : open a plain text link)
Well yes, but it is a failure of either the browser or the OS to not provide some control over it to the user. I should be able to limit Firefox to e.g. 20% CPU use (with the 100% == one core convention), and perhaps pause the browser.
As it is, when the browser idles from 10% to 20% CPU use, you're being lucky. If it idles at 80% or 110% CPU, then there's nothing you can do except restart it (a pain, since the crap needs reloaded and that's hundreds of network requests, and over a hundred billion CPU cycles) or kill all your hungry tabs, which defeats the purpose of having these pages opened in tabs.
The mad CPU idling is a problem, as hardware ages but is still fast, and overheats. It's getting hard to watch a video and keep the CPU under 80 C (degree Celsius). Disassemble and reassemble cooling is the solution, but if you download a youtube video on such a computer, open in it VLC and kill the firefoxes, the CPU use drops by an order of magnitude. (graphics card does full H264 decode but I don't trust the open source driver and graphics stacks to work. So my position for VDPAU etc. still is : forget about it.)
USB DAC are a widespread consumer item, and can already be used on phones (at least in theory). Move the phone and DAC to USB-C (can be USB 2.0 or 3.0, don't care) then you don't need a confusing "USB-To-Go" dongle and the external DAC can power the phone - this can also be done so that the phone powers the DAC and the direction changes automatically depending on whether the DAC is plugged to a power source or not.
But.. You have damn speakers in the phone, so the phone will always have at least one internal DAC. If you want to make a silent phone so that DAC externality purity is preserved, go for it. Also, from a quick look at all desktop and laptop computers, and all micro-USB phones : they can take an external USB DAC, and sometimes have many ports that can be used for external DAC (optical and electrical S/PDIF, HDMI, Displayport, multiples of them..). But there's a jack.
At worst, use USB-C for analog audio output (that's a thing, too). Keep a 3.5mm jack, not for audio but for 5V or 9V DC power input. Win-Win:D.
It's about you working as a delivery worker, but you receive orders from a remote computer, through a smartphone. They're of the kind "you have 20 seconds to comply and accept to go to A to collect the package", "distance to B : 3.24 miles, estimated time of arrival : 12:40. 12:39 remaining.. 12:38 remaining...". BUT you can refuse that delivery in the first place ; it goes to a pool of checked-in delivery boys in the right area and time, not to you in particular. But they ask you to register as an independent business, so that they don't concern themselves with such stuff as sick leave, paying for unemployment, health care, retirement ; parental leave, or even possibly the consequences of getting run over by a car?
So.. Very tempting if you have absolutely nothing to do and would like to deliver burgers or something dumb like that at 2 AM and earn a pittance, but it will be a new Uber-like scandal. The business model is : illegal employment, over the internet!
One use case is you're at some place, and playing music out the jack that serves as LINE OUT (not headphone). i.e. use the phone for DJing, if you can call it that. Which ironically you really have to do on the phone in this case, since the phone won't act as USB storage afaik so a typical desktop PC won't see the music files anyway. If after an hour or such the phone dies, this sucks big time. Especially, the music got interrupted. Note that audio hardware (amplifier or thing that has an amplifier) aged 10 to 30-year-old is very common, since it is considered normal for the stuff to last to 20-30 years roughly. So using bluetooth is an add-on you have to (or someone has to) pay for.
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There's a laptop shell that uses USB (Displaylink chip), even more low common denominator than VGA since phones are only really guaranteed to have USB as a working external input/output. No VGA out either on Raspberry Pi or this story's computer, unless you use an active dongle. But you'll likely want at least USB 3.0 on the computer you connect the "shell" to.
There's no real computer smarts inside to have it also do laptop operation, but that's a start.
It seems not available yet, too.
Pretty decent if you can get it to work with the small computer boards, desktops and whatnot that you care about but if you need some brain behind it without them, you plug a recent-ish smartphone in for basic tasks.
Who gives a crap? It's a phone, and it doesn't require a special charger anymore (uses USB), making it a good upgrade over a previous phone.
Perhaps bluetooth audio works (for real speaker(s), not a headset).
It evens has a jack, instead of only accepting proprietary headphones like old phones from the 00s.
It is true that computer garbage is worthless crap, except when you re-use parts (or whole items). In some countries, people repair even dumb phones.
Basel is a mouthpiece for the recycling industries, they're paid to make high profile stories once in a while. The industries want for all US garbage to be destroyed in the US. This would expand their business, that's all. They want to make it illegal that your dead laptop's LCD panel ends up in some African kid's laptop.
Many phones have a posted maximum limit of 128GB or 200GB or 256GB, because there weren't any bigger SD card to test with.
They may be expected to support up to the theoretical max of 2TB. The other common "hard" limit is 32GB.
In fact, on socket 1366 motherboards (i7-920 and up) you have an official limit of 24GB RAM, but they can take up to 48GB RAM unofficially. Because 8GB sticks failed to not work, and Intel and motherboard manufacturers quietly decided to not update the docs.
Remember when Jews were considered like witches because they washed hands before eating and survived epidemic diseases?
Between hygiene, high quality water supply, sanitation and strong immunity thanks to very high levels of nutrition it's been a while since the last huge black plague.
Perhaps your cat wants to teach you hunting.
MATE and Xfce are moving to GTK3, however slowly. /etc/fstab entries with UUID by clicking around. Which is very helpful, although explaining what's a fstab UUID entry to your mother-in-law or auntie is left as an exercise for the reader.
gnome-disks is commonly included, it allows to add
I agree it's a bit bad, but 3200x1800 is a very decent resolution. If you use 200% scaling (which I believe sums up what Cinnamon, Ubuntu, Gnome can do with HiDPI) then you get a shiny 1600x900 equivalent, which gives decent room for stuff. If you have to use software which really doesn't work with the scaling, use physical 1600x900 resolution instead.
To paraphrase someone's sig
Slashdot logic : 1440x900 is better than 1600x900
A 1920x1920 desktop monitor exists, although highly priced. (from Eizo, monitor brand specialized in four-figure prices)
Like those Unix-like environments where the prompt isn't set are so much more useful!
And when you use up arrow / down arrow to get the command line history, it should display garbage characters instead of actually working, so that users are forced to learn how to set their terminal character map or whatever it is.
And when you run graphical emacs (because the notepad clones are for dummies and none should be installed out of the box), it should be set so that home/end keys bring you to the beginning or end of the whole file, not the current line. That will teach how to set it up.
Mouse scroll wheel support is a waste of bytes, real mice have three buttons and that's it. Users should be required to recompile their apps with --enable-scrollwheel on a case by case basis.
I had a good Logitech gamepad with four face buttons and two nice shoulder buttons and a D-PAD, although two buttons were turbo buttons. I want the game port back, lol. There's some additional cost about having to make it a USB device.
Analog sticks drive the price up a great deal too.
I mostly want a low cost gamepad, digital only but not skimping badly on the quality. Could sell a pack of two with a USB hub.
Yes, I overlooked USB filters. I even stumbled upon some on the web : around 30 or 40 euros/dollars for a USB filter and same for the DAC.
I do hold the view that an internal sound card in a desktop can be well "audiophile" enough, e.g. Xonar DX, Sound Blaster Z and others. There's quite some filtering going on there, although some PC might be more noisy than others - perhaps graphics card with sudden and large power use transitions.
Laptop audio outputs are generally potentially the worst ones, with phones and smartphones. But if the laptop is not hugely noisy and if the DAC chip is well surrounded, it might be good enough for the most part. I suspect a budget difference of $1 or similar would make or break it.
I disregard $5000 DACs as useless. Even if they hold their promises, being 99.9999% perfect instead of 99.999% doesn't serve any purpose.
If your external DAC is powered from the USB port, it may pick up noise from the computer. Power comes from the laptop's insides, just as with an internal DAC. So you need a separate power supply for the DAC. Two power bricks and two wall plugs for a laptop. Then, you need a Thunderbolt SSD to add storage instead of adding an SSD in the laptop. Ethernet dongle too. Get a powered USB hub if you're out of ports, since powered hubs are better. Third power brick. Why not make the keyboard external while we're at it, because that's trendy (Surface Pro like computers). By that point, why call it a laptop?
Though if you have many blurred pictures of a face or license plate, you might get on something. There might be quite a lot of information in a minute-long video that includes a blurred face.
Why kill a pedophile when we find jail to be enough for murderers, and people like Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer and Slobodan Milosevic?
A few children getting raped isn't that big of a deal.
Go kill a pedophile, then we'll jail you for the murder, hopefully with an exemplary long sentence.
I think nice is only about priority, so if I set Firefox at very low priority and it uses 80% CPU, it will still use 80% and thus waste power.
I would have to investigate about putting Firefox in a cgroup.
Thinking about setting the CPU clock at 1.0 GHz in the BIOS and voltage at 0.9 V. Because, fuck you CPU. And fuck you Linux for feature regressions (panel applet that ought to display CPU frequencies doesn't work anymore on my hardware. Automatic underclocking may be broken, but I have no real way to check for now.)
It's stupid to go to such lengths, but ugprading to 8GB RAM and a 64bit OS works well. (4GB + 64bit or 32bit with Firefox e10s is not bad either)
I don't know why, but I have a firefox instance running at 3.2GB real memory here, and 4.7GB virtual memory. It's fine i.e. today is a lucky day.
[It's still possible to find ddr2 memory to upgrade, in fact I guess most people that would be inclined to make such an upgrade don't care about ddr2 systems anymore and thus don't drive the prices up.]
Although, if it's the CPU overhead that murders it, you may have as much RAM as you want and still be fucked.
I think I noticed that Firefox gets worse than usual if it's hitting against the 2GB virtual memory limit (32bit process) and hovering there. 64 bit gives effectively infinite virtual memory, so it seems to help a lot. (e10s on 32bit makes it harder to reach the 2GB limit, but in no way impossible).
Obviously, when firefox is running at 1.97 to 1.99 GB virtual memory there must be a lot of "urgent" and "last chance before nuclear meltdown" garbage collection going on.
To enable 90% of what's missing from the older UI
1. Right-click somewhere like the bookmark buttons, plus button, download arrow or sandwich made of one slice of bread between two slices of bread
2. Click on "Menu Bar"
Add-ons used to fail routinely in the "golden old times" of 0.x, 1.0 and perhaps for another couple years.
Now, everything works unless it's been completely unmaintained for too long. There's an automatic check and extensions update when needed. Although, I only need half the extensions I used to, because many actual browser features were added over time (simple example : open a plain text link)
Well yes, but it is a failure of either the browser or the OS to not provide some control over it to the user. I should be able to limit Firefox to e.g. 20% CPU use (with the 100% == one core convention), and perhaps pause the browser.
As it is, when the browser idles from 10% to 20% CPU use, you're being lucky. If it idles at 80% or 110% CPU, then there's nothing you can do except restart it (a pain, since the crap needs reloaded and that's hundreds of network requests, and over a hundred billion CPU cycles) or kill all your hungry tabs, which defeats the purpose of having these pages opened in tabs.
The mad CPU idling is a problem, as hardware ages but is still fast, and overheats. It's getting hard to watch a video and keep the CPU under 80 C (degree Celsius). Disassemble and reassemble cooling is the solution, but if you download a youtube video on such a computer, open in it VLC and kill the firefoxes, the CPU use drops by an order of magnitude. (graphics card does full H264 decode but I don't trust the open source driver and graphics stacks to work. So my position for VDPAU etc. still is : forget about it.)
USB DAC are a widespread consumer item, and can already be used on phones (at least in theory).
Move the phone and DAC to USB-C (can be USB 2.0 or 3.0, don't care) then you don't need a confusing "USB-To-Go" dongle and the external DAC can power the phone - this can also be done so that the phone powers the DAC and the direction changes automatically depending on whether the DAC is plugged to a power source or not.
But.. You have damn speakers in the phone, so the phone will always have at least one internal DAC. If you want to make a silent phone so that DAC externality purity is preserved, go for it.
Also, from a quick look at all desktop and laptop computers, and all micro-USB phones : they can take an external USB DAC, and sometimes have many ports that can be used for external DAC (optical and electrical S/PDIF, HDMI, Displayport, multiples of them..). But there's a jack.
At worst, use USB-C for analog audio output (that's a thing, too). Keep a 3.5mm jack, not for audio but for 5V or 9V DC power input. Win-Win :D.
I do remember a kind of linux release, some years back.
http://5dwm.org/maxxi/roadmap....
It's about you working as a delivery worker, but you receive orders from a remote computer, through a smartphone. They're of the kind "you have 20 seconds to comply and accept to go to A to collect the package", "distance to B : 3.24 miles, estimated time of arrival : 12:40. 12:39 remaining.. 12:38 remaining...". BUT you can refuse that delivery in the first place ; it goes to a pool of checked-in delivery boys in the right area and time, not to you in particular.
But they ask you to register as an independent business, so that they don't concern themselves with such stuff as sick leave, paying for unemployment, health care, retirement ; parental leave, or even possibly the consequences of getting run over by a car?
So.. Very tempting if you have absolutely nothing to do and would like to deliver burgers or something dumb like that at 2 AM and earn a pittance, but it will be a new Uber-like scandal. The business model is : illegal employment, over the internet!
One use case is you're at some place, and playing music out the jack that serves as LINE OUT (not headphone). i.e. use the phone for DJing, if you can call it that. Which ironically you really have to do on the phone in this case, since the phone won't act as USB storage afaik so a typical desktop PC won't see the music files anyway. If after an hour or such the phone dies, this sucks big time. Especially, the music got interrupted.
Note that audio hardware (amplifier or thing that has an amplifier) aged 10 to 30-year-old is very common, since it is considered normal for the stuff to last to 20-30 years roughly. So using bluetooth is an add-on you have to (or someone has to) pay for.
Since you call the stuff "oxides" and "dioxide", I'm surprised you don't call the element "oxigen".