If you implemented "real" hardware on FPGA you would also need a scaler, after transforming that NTSC composite signal to something else. French NES had some hardware to convert composite (PAL?) to RGB so that it could play on TVs of the day that only supported RGB and RF. That's a NES with RGB output, but not really (real RGB was on SNES, Megadrive, Master System). It was some kind of high quality composite with some crawling artefacts when scrolling (that perhaps are the same on all NES, I don't know).
Well that would be very interesting for hardware engineers to do such things but IMO they just took a generic chip meant for a DVD player etc. and ran an emulator on it.
My kick in the nuts is that it doesn't come with TWO controllers like the NES did. Too bad for leaving out Teenage Mutant (Hero/Ninja) Turtles, it was a great game (well, we mocked it in 16bit days) and would have gone well with the few other hard ones on the list.
I'm imagining something like Raspberry Pi 1 in terms of CPU power, but with less RAM and cheaper. Heck, with 8MB RAM and 4MB flash maybe you've got enough (assuming you need one 1920x1080 24bit buffer plus something neglectable for the rest), 16MB if you need some double buffering or whatever, or 128 MB if that's the smallest and cheapest chip with enough bandwith for the frame buffer (more than 100MB RAM stays unused).
could be MIPS as well as Cortex-A5 single core etc.
For somebody who's whining about my "deflector shields", you're making similar assumptions, just in the opposite direction from my opinion. Just because you like Firefox's interface doesn't mean everybody else does. Again, look at the user figures for how many people are still on Firefox.
What would be the absolute number of desktop web browser users who use Firefox? I don't know what such numbers are (total number of desktop web users, year by year) but for the sake of the argument, 30% of 500 million desktops or 14% of one billion desktops is about the same fuck ton of users. Or take that figure of 7% market share and apply it to 1.2+ billion users.
Also when you spend $100 trillion on building some huge moving military base made with a billion tons of steel etc., you'd better defend it with 1000+ Tie fighters not 20 or so.
The standard for a real SSD in memory card form factor was in the news recently, it's UFS.
About a non-writable SSD : what's that?:) Your concern about lifespan due to writes is overblown and you can always use flash, but not write to it. Like Nintendo DS games, or your many firmware blobs in your PC that are stored on flash and upgraded never, once or a few times (BIOS/UEFI, hard disk drive firmware, VGA BIOS, etc.)
I agree something read-only and cheap would be great. But games need updates these days (sadly) so you could do it with additional writable "read-mostly" flash on the side, used for patches. Not very great. Also, mask ROMs exist. Perhaps we could make a really huge one? 128Gbit, 256Gbit? Sounds great but if the mask costs say one million dollars and you need to make a new one if you made a mistake or change your mind.. this almost makes selling games on an SSD a sensible thing.
Windows Vista and 7 Ultimate version users, I believe. That's a superset of the Enterprise edition. I was "burned" by Windows 7 not including the old Unix subsystem except on Enterprise and Ultimate (just kidding, I wanted it to play with it and run simple software but I'm still pissed over it)
The lack of upgradable RAM is what I dislike most about this. Although if we end up with 4GB on really cheap hardware (not $500, morel ike $129) and 8GB or even 16GB on a more expensive one, that'll be decent.
The issue of storage can be covered by UFS cards, they can replace real hard drives basically.
What kind of keyboard was that?, like keys built into the tablet's body or a more regular external one?
High end tablets never really went away as far as I know. Most are iPad or Windows x86. Quite recently there's been the Google Pixel C as a decidedly high end Android tablet with a keyboard. There are negative reviews that have to do with the OS mainly, people complain of running phone software scaled to 10" (which I imagine is worsened by the "flat design" trend) but I guess you'd do ok, as long as you know what you want to run.
A these prices, people can get a "real" computer, with thin options i.e. tablet or laptop with no RJ45. Simple task, get data to/from a USB drive, most people won't know what to do. Although we know that a USB-to-go dongle may be used, or something like installing an ssh server on the tablet and using filezilla or sshfs on the desktop.
"Special computers" have always been a failure, such as Network Computers, Philips CD-I, Internet (browsing) appliances, linux netbooks (those with a token distro thrown on a 2GB internal flash drive), next to those Android tablets are a huge success.
The best is when you're in a prison cell guarded by deadly visible lasers, and your girlfriend smuggles in a storage diamond. You route deadly laser into the diamond and you get a 3D hologram showing you the escape route displayed in the air, right from the diamond. It must have been a very special kind of diamond too, as it didn't catch fire.
Dial-up is fast. I think I read it's done at 300 bauds, and it isn't a joke : slow negociation and handshake are avoided, and perhaps whatever is done to encabulate your data is reduced.
Uh, I am at a loss figuring out how US ATMs work if all you have is a swipe card. Do you sign, and if so, where? A piece of paper comes out, which you sign and throw away on the curb?
I see, it says data rate. So it may well be your version. Notably, Serial ATA advertise signaling rate (1.5 Gbps, 3 Gbps and 6 Gbps) which you divide by 10 for accurate MB/s numbers. With a bit of protocol stuff and inefficiency that gives you SSDs topping out around 550MB/s or a bit more.
Not sure if it's a matter of area of work, or if it's up to a given consortium to choose one or the other figure, no matter what it's about. PCIe gives numbers in "GT/s" so you know that you have to multiply by the encoding and the number of "X". GDDR5 memory etc. seems to be given out in data rate Gbps. Here I might have got a bit too cynical.
Dual GPU means more latency and twice the bullshit.
4K is also a crap ton of pixels you might as well avoid unless you're a developer with 20 xterm opened or a spreadsheet professional who uses spreadsheet software with a UI that scales arbitrarily. If 1080p is okay for work, I believe a 1080p 144Hz would maximize the gaming value, if good antialiasing can be used too.
Hell, even Doom 1 and 2, Quake 1, 2 and 3 are not sold on Steam Linux although these games pioneered Linux gaming.
It also sucks how gaming requires hundreds of dollars in upgrades that are of no use for most everything else (browsing, documents, watching video etc.). Why spend big bucks for a gaming linux desktop?, you could either get a Windows desktop instead (same hardware with Windows installed) or a console. The Windows desktop not only has more games, it makes it trivially easy to run Quake 1, 2, 3, Doom 1, 2 and 4 etc.
From the other side of the ocean (that country that owns St-Pierre et Miquelon) you have the two suspects but also some carrier-branded Huawei, LG too, stuff like that (even Windows phones). Going to an equivalent of newegg there are tons of brand though, Taiwanese like Acer, Asus, and mainland China like Xiaomi, ZTE and I-don't-remember-what etc.
If Samsung has made decent profit while the rest of industry does very low to no profits, if that happened that'd be noteworthy. Now, like GP I be wary of a company that makes excessive profit on your back, like Apple or old time IBM but when it devolves to cut-throat 1% margin you can end up with garbage display screens, unusable laptop keyboards because they saved $1, or the current breed of unupgradable laptops. Sometimes, if you pay $1 more shared between $0.50 so you can have an SD slot and $0.50 more profit, I think that's the better deal. Ironically all lowest end phones have SD slot (but half the fashionable internal storage)
AVG Free or Free AVG depending on what they call it, it was really freeware some years back (like, in 2009 or 2011). It didn't even nag you once a year. For this and the light impact on system resources, I've had or I had a good opinion of AVG. Later, they switched to acting as almost-scareware like other major free antivirus software such as Avast, pretending it's expired about once a year. I switched to Avast since (on other people's Windows installations) but lately its "scareware mode" asks you to register with an e-mail address. I found out the only way to make it go away short to caving to at least one of their demands, is to enter a garbage e-mail address. Random letters in the form of xxxx@yyy.com.
Interestingly, my AVG Free installation from 2011 is "grandfathered" in : even when updated and upgraded, it never goes into "expired" and "warning" mode (which most AV software uses as a trick to upgrade you to a paid version etc.) So they went into nagware, but leaving the older arrangement as is instead of overriding it was a nice thing. Too bad that Windows installation is a bit borked (did you know Windows 7 can get stuck at SP0? if that's common there might be millions of computers at risks. I wonder what's the market share of Windows 7 without SP1)
Also : free antiviruses say in their license that for a professional/corporate use, you must pay. So you've always had to pay for AVG if it's to be used in a cubicle office etc. Like that's a honor system, but I suspect nagware mode also discourages IT from just installing the free/home version on all workstations and forgetting about it. One big gripe I have then : they all refuse to install on Windows Server 2003, 2008 etc. Windows Server in a home or personal use, I'm sure it's very rare but why not lol. Server 2003 was awesome, I once used it as a better lite XP than pirate cdrom images of lite XP. This virtually means that if you run Windows Server on a home desktop, you'll have to pay a subscription to an antivirus vendor.
Agreed, but you're taking 2.9 Gbps and getting 362MB/s. With 8b/10b encoding, it's rather 290MB/s, which is the speed UFS start at indeed. That's decimal MB too but we're used to that regarding bus speeds.
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why by 320?
at least, the screen is 256 pixel wide.
If you implemented "real" hardware on FPGA you would also need a scaler, after transforming that NTSC composite signal to something else.
French NES had some hardware to convert composite (PAL?) to RGB so that it could play on TVs of the day that only supported RGB and RF. That's a NES with RGB output, but not really (real RGB was on SNES, Megadrive, Master System). It was some kind of high quality composite with some crawling artefacts when scrolling (that perhaps are the same on all NES, I don't know).
Well that would be very interesting for hardware engineers to do such things but IMO they just took a generic chip meant for a DVD player etc. and ran an emulator on it.
My kick in the nuts is that it doesn't come with TWO controllers like the NES did.
Too bad for leaving out Teenage Mutant (Hero/Ninja) Turtles, it was a great game (well, we mocked it in 16bit days) and would have gone well with the few other hard ones on the list.
I'm imagining something like Raspberry Pi 1 in terms of CPU power, but with less RAM and cheaper.
Heck, with 8MB RAM and 4MB flash maybe you've got enough (assuming you need one 1920x1080 24bit buffer plus something neglectable for the rest), 16MB if you need some double buffering or whatever, or 128 MB if that's the smallest and cheapest chip with enough bandwith for the frame buffer (more than 100MB RAM stays unused).
could be MIPS as well as Cortex-A5 single core etc.
um why not build a Genesis emulation console with an actual Z80 included, then :)
If you had such special needs and hated the version churn why not use the medium-term support version? (ESR 31.x, 38.x, 45.x)
For somebody who's whining about my "deflector shields", you're making similar assumptions, just in the opposite direction from my opinion. Just because you like Firefox's interface doesn't mean everybody else does. Again, look at the user figures for how many people are still on Firefox.
What would be the absolute number of desktop web browser users who use Firefox?
I don't know what such numbers are (total number of desktop web users, year by year) but for the sake of the argument, 30% of 500 million desktops or 14% of one billion desktops is about the same fuck ton of users.
Or take that figure of 7% market share and apply it to 1.2+ billion users.
Also when you spend $100 trillion on building some huge moving military base made with a billion tons of steel etc., you'd better defend it with 1000+ Tie fighters not 20 or so.
The standard for a real SSD in memory card form factor was in the news recently, it's UFS.
About a non-writable SSD : what's that? :)
Your concern about lifespan due to writes is overblown and you can always use flash, but not write to it. Like Nintendo DS games, or your many firmware blobs in your PC that are stored on flash and upgraded never, once or a few times (BIOS/UEFI, hard disk drive firmware, VGA BIOS, etc.)
I agree something read-only and cheap would be great. But games need updates these days (sadly) so you could do it with additional writable "read-mostly" flash on the side, used for patches. Not very great.
Also, mask ROMs exist. Perhaps we could make a really huge one? 128Gbit, 256Gbit?
Sounds great but if the mask costs say one million dollars and you need to make a new one if you made a mistake or change your mind.. this almost makes selling games on an SSD a sensible thing.
Windows Vista and 7 Ultimate version users, I believe. That's a superset of the Enterprise edition.
I was "burned" by Windows 7 not including the old Unix subsystem except on Enterprise and Ultimate (just kidding, I wanted it to play with it and run simple software but I'm still pissed over it)
Good.
I find that hilarious, like people have been meeting there for 150 years.
The lack of upgradable RAM is what I dislike most about this. Although if we end up with 4GB on really cheap hardware (not $500, morel ike $129) and 8GB or even 16GB on a more expensive one, that'll be decent.
The issue of storage can be covered by UFS cards, they can replace real hard drives basically.
What kind of keyboard was that?, like keys built into the tablet's body or a more regular external one?
High end tablets never really went away as far as I know. Most are iPad or Windows x86.
Quite recently there's been the Google Pixel C as a decidedly high end Android tablet with a keyboard.
There are negative reviews that have to do with the OS mainly, people complain of running phone software scaled to 10" (which I imagine is worsened by the "flat design" trend) but I guess you'd do ok, as long as you know what you want to run.
A these prices, people can get a "real" computer, with thin options i.e. tablet or laptop with no RJ45.
Simple task, get data to/from a USB drive, most people won't know what to do. Although we know that a USB-to-go dongle may be used, or something like installing an ssh server on the tablet and using filezilla or sshfs on the desktop.
"Special computers" have always been a failure, such as Network Computers, Philips CD-I, Internet (browsing) appliances, linux netbooks (those with a token distro thrown on a 2GB internal flash drive), next to those Android tablets are a huge success.
The best is when you're in a prison cell guarded by deadly visible lasers, and your girlfriend smuggles in a storage diamond. You route deadly laser into the diamond and you get a 3D hologram showing you the escape route displayed in the air, right from the diamond.
It must have been a very special kind of diamond too, as it didn't catch fire.
Dial-up is fast. I think I read it's done at 300 bauds, and it isn't a joke : slow negociation and handshake are avoided, and perhaps whatever is done to encabulate your data is reduced.
Uh, I am at a loss figuring out how US ATMs work if all you have is a swipe card. Do you sign, and if so, where? A piece of paper comes out, which you sign and throw away on the curb?
I see, it says data rate.
So it may well be your version.
Notably, Serial ATA advertise signaling rate (1.5 Gbps, 3 Gbps and 6 Gbps) which you divide by 10 for accurate MB/s numbers. With a bit of protocol stuff and inefficiency that gives you SSDs topping out around 550MB/s or a bit more.
Not sure if it's a matter of area of work, or if it's up to a given consortium to choose one or the other figure, no matter what it's about.
PCIe gives numbers in "GT/s" so you know that you have to multiply by the encoding and the number of "X". GDDR5 memory etc. seems to be given out in data rate Gbps. Here I might have got a bit too cynical.
Dual GPU means more latency and twice the bullshit.
4K is also a crap ton of pixels you might as well avoid unless you're a developer with 20 xterm opened or a spreadsheet professional who uses spreadsheet software with a UI that scales arbitrarily.
If 1080p is okay for work, I believe a 1080p 144Hz would maximize the gaming value, if good antialiasing can be used too.
Hell, even Doom 1 and 2, Quake 1, 2 and 3 are not sold on Steam Linux although these games pioneered Linux gaming.
It also sucks how gaming requires hundreds of dollars in upgrades that are of no use for most everything else (browsing, documents, watching video etc.). Why spend big bucks for a gaming linux desktop?, you could either get a Windows desktop instead (same hardware with Windows installed) or a console. The Windows desktop not only has more games, it makes it trivially easy to run Quake 1, 2, 3, Doom 1, 2 and 4 etc.
Low end motherboards are often more reliable than high end ones. Much higher volumes and no funny hardware.
From the other side of the ocean (that country that owns St-Pierre et Miquelon) you have the two suspects but also some carrier-branded Huawei, LG too, stuff like that (even Windows phones).
Going to an equivalent of newegg there are tons of brand though, Taiwanese like Acer, Asus, and mainland China like Xiaomi, ZTE and I-don't-remember-what etc.
If Samsung has made decent profit while the rest of industry does very low to no profits, if that happened that'd be noteworthy.
Now, like GP I be wary of a company that makes excessive profit on your back, like Apple or old time IBM but when it devolves to cut-throat 1% margin you can end up with garbage display screens, unusable laptop keyboards because they saved $1, or the current breed of unupgradable laptops.
Sometimes, if you pay $1 more shared between $0.50 so you can have an SD slot and $0.50 more profit, I think that's the better deal.
Ironically all lowest end phones have SD slot (but half the fashionable internal storage)
AVG Free or Free AVG depending on what they call it, it was really freeware some years back (like, in 2009 or 2011). It didn't even nag you once a year. For this and the light impact on system resources, I've had or I had a good opinion of AVG. Later, they switched to acting as almost-scareware like other major free antivirus software such as Avast, pretending it's expired about once a year. I switched to Avast since (on other people's Windows installations) but lately its "scareware mode" asks you to register with an e-mail address. I found out the only way to make it go away short to caving to at least one of their demands, is to enter a garbage e-mail address. Random letters in the form of xxxx@yyy.com.
Interestingly, my AVG Free installation from 2011 is "grandfathered" in : even when updated and upgraded, it never goes into "expired" and "warning" mode (which most AV software uses as a trick to upgrade you to a paid version etc.)
So they went into nagware, but leaving the older arrangement as is instead of overriding it was a nice thing. Too bad that Windows installation is a bit borked (did you know Windows 7 can get stuck at SP0? if that's common there might be millions of computers at risks. I wonder what's the market share of Windows 7 without SP1)
Also : free antiviruses say in their license that for a professional/corporate use, you must pay. So you've always had to pay for AVG if it's to be used in a cubicle office etc. Like that's a honor system, but I suspect nagware mode also discourages IT from just installing the free/home version on all workstations and forgetting about it.
One big gripe I have then : they all refuse to install on Windows Server 2003, 2008 etc.
Windows Server in a home or personal use, I'm sure it's very rare but why not lol. Server 2003 was awesome, I once used it as a better lite XP than pirate cdrom images of lite XP. This virtually means that if you run Windows Server on a home desktop, you'll have to pay a subscription to an antivirus vendor.
Agreed, but you're taking 2.9 Gbps and getting 362MB/s. With 8b/10b encoding, it's rather 290MB/s, which is the speed UFS start at indeed. That's decimal MB too but we're used to that regarding bus speeds.
I actually don't want to ever hear about OSX again, just because the new word is ugly.
QTWeb has ended it seems (last release in 2013), maybe what you're looking for is Qupzilla which is maintained and the same idea.
K-meleon is still developed, which I didn't expect. So they made the switch from old school Gecko to tracking Firefox ESR (24, 31, 38)