(I dismiss wifi and bluetooth outright, since users needs it deactivated for battery and security reasons)
Let's imagine the camera is a USB peripheral and thus runs its own CPU and software (firmware). For the sake of the argument there are enough milliwatts of processing to detect the kill pulse. Maybe it could even be rather simplistic. You're toast, then. It's as if someone tricked you with a keyboard whose CPU acts as a keylogger (even a PS/2 keyboard is not immune and has a small computer that runs the leds etc.). Besides obvious security shenanigans, it could figure out you're typing some word, such as "hitler" and then send alt+f4 followed by enter, or keyboard's sleep key, or hotkey to lock workstation etc. The workaround is to not use that keyboard.
Half way between pure software and such conspiracy theory, the camera plugs right into Apple's SoC which is a collection of CPUs. There's the image processor, and there is now the "motion processor" whose job is to collect sensor data crap when the main CPUs are sleeping. It's marketed as a way for a sleeping phone to listen on the mic. Not so impossible to have some relatively unknown piece of firmware doing things.
Bull crap. I have seen a low end laptop that uses the same CPU and GPU as in the Xbox 1 and PS4 : 11.6" screen, made by HP, touchpad rather good compared to older stuff, decent build
The CPU is quad core, but disabled down to a dual core and clocked at 1.0GHz. (vs 8 cores at 1.75GHz on Xbox) GPU is the same as in consoles (minus some datapaths), but has 128 processing units organized in two blocks. It's 768 on Xbox, 1152 on PS4 so 6x to 9x bigger, not counting a different power budget. The same laptop CPU on a desktop board is quad core and 1.6GHz, still the same small GPU.
RAM : 4GB DDR3 on 64bit on PC, 8GB of (much faster) DDR3 or GDDR5 on 256bit on consoles
The same 500GB drive on all. Latency a bit slow, but at roughly 100MB/s and with command queuing (a former SCSI feature) I find such a drive is FAST! It's not your grandpa's drive with 12x less data density and no queuing, it's also a ton faster than optical or SD card. It's stupid to whine about this. The latest 8TB 7200 rpm don't even quite max out SATA II yet or very barely (imagining you've got a slow controller), and only on the beginning of the drive.
I have not much more to say, have trouble believing that Microsoft couldn't secure the rights for 30-something videos or perhaps it's planned both on the short term and steady income. Also, by using torrent-like downloads on such 'EOL' content, being mild on users with low upload there would be a trade off users could accept (or don't suffer much if they don't know what upload is and have the hard disk space). But maybe they insist all the way on an "app" that streams so that there's no hard disk space consumed, instant access and work on so called "universal" devices.
The Microsoft solutions comes as playing nice to lawyers and accoutants first, the "technical purity" of their platform second perhaps and dead last your customers. It's very silly, please at least pretend you care. You've even turned off customers with a big, well lit and aerated living room and $90 or something to blow on what you call "universal" content. You might as well still candy and ice cream from children in an early summer afternoon in the park. Invite the local journals and radio stations to come over.
If Windows is due to legacy of the 80s and 90s then where's the linux freeware, payware and shareware? There's fuck all on that front. 99% is free and open source software. Typically on a system the only linux proprietary software you'll find is Oracle Virtualbox (some of the "extended" features), Google Earth and (few) Steam games. Some crap like Skype for those who want it.
It's great that way, but I miss the Windows days, with more software and less OS upgrades.
Ubuntu support is coming on Windows of all things. If you install Chrome and know about the Chrome app store (I know of it, but I'm not interested) then you'll get Windows applications, Ubuntu applications, Chrome stuff and Metro apps so that's four "subsystems" up from three. But no Android and you have to run Windows 10.
Netbooks quickly got upgraded to a 1024x600 screen, 1GB RAM (can be changed to 2GB) and a 160GB HDD. On these specs Windows XP is lightweight and as long as you got Intel graphics, you could run multiplayer 3D games on it. People bought it at their first laptop ever, since it was both an unprecedented price point and could run regular software, perhaps better than their old 256MB desktop.
A few years later, there were 15" Windows 7 laptops at netbook price points, so people got that instead. The web took over many things, e.g. pirated music is of a high enough quality on youtube (that wasn't true in 2008) and there are interactive websites (or e-mail) for most stuff instead of writing a letter in Word and printing it. So a computer thing that runs crippleware became good enough, if you're ok with it.
People listen to stuff in the outside on an external battery-powered speaker, and the songs and mp3 "mix tapes" won't store themselves in the built-in 8GB found on most smartphones. Having no data plan or limited data plan is common too. Even homeless may people have smartphones now.
These games are "indie" but can realistically only reach their market, especially with linux, by being distributed on Steam. Perhaps developers can target the "Steam Runtime" while not using Steam. No idea how they should be sold or DRM'ed then, but if there's a middleman it's not as indie as it was in the 90s.
Open Arena has two uses : to check that your OpenGL works (because glxgears is too fast) and to fill precious available space on the / partition (your system gets at least semi-unusable if it's filled up)
It's also a warning about how gaming on an AZERTY keyboard can suck if the devs didn't plan or test for it. It's semi-useful if you have access to a small LAN of old desktops and want to play some Free deathmatch on it while wishing you had real Quake 3.
Under Windows, hopefully the user will have found out about IrFanView or XnView to deal with collections of pictures (if only to view them) and then will look for functions in the menus to find about batch resizing.
It's also low footprint in not littering your system with crap. It does not even have "the LXDE window manager" like there's the Xfce window manager, the Mate one, the Gnome 3 one, the KDE one etc. but instead uses a small, existing one.
Its Windows 95 task bar is not the greatest ever, nor is it really bad. That's where this Peppermint distro release looks interesting, using Xfce's task bar and start menu instead. It's likely very easy to replicate, lxsession has a couple extremely small config files in/etc and that's it.
It's a linux-only version, 11.2 with security patches that come in through the package manager. I doubt malware authors care very much about that one. It used to be easier to block, but ublock origin is a partial workaround.
The route you have driven a thousand times is more dangerous if anything. Rote memory and muscle memory allow the brain to switch out so it's like you can fall asleep and drive perfectly for kilometers, which is fairly scary.
That's incorrect, the Atom line for what I'll call IBM PC compatibles in short is still alive and well.
What's definitively canned is Atoms lower end than than, for Android smartphones and non-existing tablet products, with a smartphone GPU (PowerVR) and a lack of IBM PC legacy. I'm sure it could have run Windows 10 Phone (no win32) or Windows RT (dead) i.e. an x86 version of the ARM version of Windows, but that'd be confusing fast.
There still are Atoms coming, with a real desktop GPU, slow and toned down in size of course but that's the main draw. Even last year's $99 Atom tablets use one like that.
If you're in the business of making a pizza you will likely acquire the toppings, and cut them, e.g. cutting mushrooms to small pieces, or slicing that New York sausage-like thing named after bell peppers. I assume it's faster to then drop the toppings on the pizza rather than load them in an array of toppings dispensers and catter to that ugly, oversized machine.
The great US fraud that is contaminating some EU country is that so-called "liberals" use a few societal values and causes as an empty façade (e.g. gay mariage, abortion, and SJW issues) while adopting centrist/right-wing policies.
The opposing party then makes a huge fuss about those irresponsible "leftists", "socialists", new incarnation of Castro, Marx, Chavez, Guevara or any other colorful description. Such idiocy is neverending and is found in like a thousand statements from politicians and a million Web 2.0 comments all over the place. Meanwhile the "liberals" that go with the wind (the kind that'll find a job in finance or think tanks etc. not go back to a sociology tenure), their job is to show they don't have "leftist" policies and as far as they go having their left-wing politically murdered is what they want anyway.
With enough of these cycles, you end up with the US situation : on Trump's "left", you get to vote for George W. Bush with a cunt ("But, wimmen!")
It's all about detering the 80%-90% people just like what Microsoft did with Windows (95, 2000, XP etc.) Heck, while Windows was a matter of entering a known CD key or downloading a volume licensed version, the VPN solution for Netflix doubles your monthly bill so you need both technical ability and a willingness to pay.
Going after the biggest VPNs (e.g. let's say public ones with more than 100 Netflix users) is like Windows activation, sort of a show stopper although it was just one more step that was never intended to stop unlicensed Windows users, just prevent your uncle to install it (given that Internet access made finding a key trivial)
There's also some "plausable deniability" : pretend you don't know about all the VPNs, but show you do something about the ones you know. Thus the media licenseholders won't make a fuss and slashdot users can access the Netflix, which they pay for.
Specifically, I believe that's the Displayport hub functionality you're needing, called something like MST. So I would believe a monitor that includes a Displayport hub and lets you plug another in would work, while not needing to be a Thunderbolt monitor. Or your Thunderbolt hub is missing an internal Displayport hub. The DP hub is rare hardware, or only recently available, or perhaps not yet as readily available as you'd wish so as to find it on cheap hardware.
(On top of that there could be bullshit like your GPU being a bit older or using your hub's hdmi out breaks dual display ability, just saying this in case.). If you're lucky DP hubs might crash in prices like late this year or early next year, and putting a standalone hub between your current hub and your monitors would work.
Artificial gravity or "antigrav" would be a great application but I'm not sure they will be ever doable at all, what if it can be theoretically made but your device would need to be 1000 km or 1 0000 000 km wide?
USB sticks are a true replacement, except when it comes to giving one away. You could just give a floppy, expecting it back but it didn't have to be the exact same and no big deal if the other party kept it. With USB sticks the capacities and speeds aren't the same, they're all different and the cheapest one costs like a 10 box of floppies. It may also contain some of your music, movies, porn, politically offensive material etc. so you'd have to "sanitize" it.
SD cards might work too except for SD vs micro-SD and the lack of readers on desktop and older laptops. Same basic cost problem too. If there were full sized SD cards for $0.50, no matter the capacity you would be able to use it to give away a couple pictures, a sound recording, a TPS report etc.
The USB-C audio proposal allows analog sound over the USB connector. That's rather clever since the same connector thus also supports digital headphones, external DAC, or just straight into your 1972 amp with e.g. a USB type C to dual RCA cable presumably.
The bad : plug analog USB headset on a digital-only USB port, then nothing happens. The ugly : sound output and charging at the same time, obviously. Although in a favorable use case you've got both covered with a single cable.
Slashdot Mirror
(I dismiss wifi and bluetooth outright, since users needs it deactivated for battery and security reasons)
Let's imagine the camera is a USB peripheral and thus runs its own CPU and software (firmware).
For the sake of the argument there are enough milliwatts of processing to detect the kill pulse. Maybe it could even be rather simplistic.
You're toast, then.
It's as if someone tricked you with a keyboard whose CPU acts as a keylogger (even a PS/2 keyboard is not immune and has a small computer that runs the leds etc.). Besides obvious security shenanigans, it could figure out you're typing some word, such as "hitler" and then send alt+f4 followed by enter, or keyboard's sleep key, or hotkey to lock workstation etc.
The workaround is to not use that keyboard.
Half way between pure software and such conspiracy theory, the camera plugs right into Apple's SoC which is a collection of CPUs. There's the image processor, and there is now the "motion processor" whose job is to collect sensor data crap when the main CPUs are sleeping. It's marketed as a way for a sleeping phone to listen on the mic.
Not so impossible to have some relatively unknown piece of firmware doing things.
Bull crap. I have seen a low end laptop that uses the same CPU and GPU as in the Xbox 1 and PS4 :
11.6" screen, made by HP, touchpad rather good compared to older stuff, decent build
The CPU is quad core, but disabled down to a dual core and clocked at 1.0GHz. (vs 8 cores at 1.75GHz on Xbox)
GPU is the same as in consoles (minus some datapaths), but has 128 processing units organized in two blocks. It's 768 on Xbox, 1152 on PS4 so 6x to 9x bigger, not counting a different power budget.
The same laptop CPU on a desktop board is quad core and 1.6GHz, still the same small GPU.
RAM : 4GB DDR3 on 64bit on PC, 8GB of (much faster) DDR3 or GDDR5 on 256bit on consoles
The same 500GB drive on all. Latency a bit slow, but at roughly 100MB/s and with command queuing (a former SCSI feature) I find such a drive is FAST! It's not your grandpa's drive with 12x less data density and no queuing, it's also a ton faster than optical or SD card. It's stupid to whine about this. The latest 8TB 7200 rpm don't even quite max out SATA II yet or very barely (imagining you've got a slow controller), and only on the beginning of the drive.
I have not much more to say, have trouble believing that Microsoft couldn't secure the rights for 30-something videos or perhaps it's planned both on the short term and steady income.
Also, by using torrent-like downloads on such 'EOL' content, being mild on users with low upload there would be a trade off users could accept (or don't suffer much if they don't know what upload is and have the hard disk space). But maybe they insist all the way on an "app" that streams so that there's no hard disk space consumed, instant access and work on so called "universal" devices.
The Microsoft solutions comes as playing nice to lawyers and accoutants first, the "technical purity" of their platform second perhaps and dead last your customers.
It's very silly, please at least pretend you care. You've even turned off customers with a big, well lit and aerated living room and $90 or something to blow on what you call "universal" content. You might as well still candy and ice cream from children in an early summer afternoon in the park. Invite the local journals and radio stations to come over.
If Windows is due to legacy of the 80s and 90s then where's the linux freeware, payware and shareware?
There's fuck all on that front. 99% is free and open source software. Typically on a system the only linux proprietary software you'll find is Oracle Virtualbox (some of the "extended" features), Google Earth and (few) Steam games. Some crap like Skype for those who want it.
It's great that way, but I miss the Windows days, with more software and less OS upgrades.
Ubuntu support is coming on Windows of all things. If you install Chrome and know about the Chrome app store (I know of it, but I'm not interested) then you'll get Windows applications, Ubuntu applications, Chrome stuff and Metro apps so that's four "subsystems" up from three. But no Android and you have to run Windows 10.
Netbooks quickly got upgraded to a 1024x600 screen, 1GB RAM (can be changed to 2GB) and a 160GB HDD.
On these specs Windows XP is lightweight and as long as you got Intel graphics, you could run multiplayer 3D games on it.
People bought it at their first laptop ever, since it was both an unprecedented price point and could run regular software, perhaps better than their old 256MB desktop.
A few years later, there were 15" Windows 7 laptops at netbook price points, so people got that instead.
The web took over many things, e.g. pirated music is of a high enough quality on youtube (that wasn't true in 2008) and there are interactive websites (or e-mail) for most stuff instead of writing a letter in Word and printing it. So a computer thing that runs crippleware became good enough, if you're ok with it.
One word : music.
People listen to stuff in the outside on an external battery-powered speaker, and the songs and mp3 "mix tapes" won't store themselves in the built-in 8GB found on most smartphones.
Having no data plan or limited data plan is common too. Even homeless may people have smartphones now.
These games are "indie" but can realistically only reach their market, especially with linux, by being distributed on Steam.
Perhaps developers can target the "Steam Runtime" while not using Steam. No idea how they should be sold or DRM'ed then, but if there's a middleman it's not as indie as it was in the 90s.
Open Arena has two uses : to check that your OpenGL works (because glxgears is too fast) and to fill precious available space on the / partition (your system gets at least semi-unusable if it's filled up)
It's also a warning about how gaming on an AZERTY keyboard can suck if the devs didn't plan or test for it.
It's semi-useful if you have access to a small LAN of old desktops and want to play some Free deathmatch on it while wishing you had real Quake 3.
Does anyone run SteamOS?
I'd personnally put it under 1% of linux desktop users.
Under Windows, hopefully the user will have found out about IrFanView or XnView to deal with collections of pictures (if only to view them) and then will look for functions in the menus to find about batch resizing.
It's also low footprint in not littering your system with crap.
It does not even have "the LXDE window manager" like there's the Xfce window manager, the Mate one, the Gnome 3 one, the KDE one etc. but instead uses a small, existing one.
Its Windows 95 task bar is not the greatest ever, nor is it really bad. That's where this Peppermint distro release looks interesting, using Xfce's task bar and start menu instead. It's likely very easy to replicate, lxsession has a couple extremely small config files in /etc and that's it.
It's a linux-only version, 11.2 with security patches that come in through the package manager.
I doubt malware authors care very much about that one.
It used to be easier to block, but ublock origin is a partial workaround.
The route you have driven a thousand times is more dangerous if anything. Rote memory and muscle memory allow the brain to switch out so it's like you can fall asleep and drive perfectly for kilometers, which is fairly scary.
Currencies should be deflationists, so that roman mir can steal from other people by hoarding cash.
That's incorrect, the Atom line for what I'll call IBM PC compatibles in short is still alive and well.
What's definitively canned is Atoms lower end than than, for Android smartphones and non-existing tablet products, with a smartphone GPU (PowerVR) and a lack of IBM PC legacy. I'm sure it could have run Windows 10 Phone (no win32) or Windows RT (dead) i.e. an x86 version of the ARM version of Windows, but that'd be confusing fast.
There still are Atoms coming, with a real desktop GPU, slow and toned down in size of course but that's the main draw. Even last year's $99 Atom tablets use one like that.
If you're in the business of making a pizza you will likely acquire the toppings, and cut them, e.g. cutting mushrooms to small pieces, or slicing that New York sausage-like thing named after bell peppers. I assume it's faster to then drop the toppings on the pizza rather than load them in an array of toppings dispensers and catter to that ugly, oversized machine.
The great US fraud that is contaminating some EU country is that so-called "liberals" use a few societal values and causes as an empty façade (e.g. gay mariage, abortion, and SJW issues) while adopting centrist/right-wing policies.
The opposing party then makes a huge fuss about those irresponsible "leftists", "socialists", new incarnation of Castro, Marx, Chavez, Guevara or any other colorful description. Such idiocy is neverending and is found in like a thousand statements from politicians and a million Web 2.0 comments all over the place. Meanwhile the "liberals" that go with the wind (the kind that'll find a job in finance or think tanks etc. not go back to a sociology tenure), their job is to show they don't have "leftist" policies and as far as they go having their left-wing politically murdered is what they want anyway.
With enough of these cycles, you end up with the US situation : on Trump's "left", you get to vote for George W. Bush with a cunt ("But, wimmen!")
It's all about detering the 80%-90% people just like what Microsoft did with Windows (95, 2000, XP etc.)
Heck, while Windows was a matter of entering a known CD key or downloading a volume licensed version, the VPN solution for Netflix doubles your monthly bill so you need both technical ability and a willingness to pay.
Going after the biggest VPNs (e.g. let's say public ones with more than 100 Netflix users) is like Windows activation, sort of a show stopper although it was just one more step that was never intended to stop unlicensed Windows users, just prevent your uncle to install it (given that Internet access made finding a key trivial)
There's also some "plausable deniability" : pretend you don't know about all the VPNs, but show you do something about the ones you know. Thus the media licenseholders won't make a fuss and slashdot users can access the Netflix, which they pay for.
Right, you have to agree to everything the US and its assorted "international community" do or say, else you're a Putin stooge!
Nevermind who launched all the wars on countries bordering the Black Sea and Mediterranean.
Specifically, I believe that's the Displayport hub functionality you're needing, called something like MST. So I would believe a monitor that includes a Displayport hub and lets you plug another in would work, while not needing to be a Thunderbolt monitor. Or your Thunderbolt hub is missing an internal Displayport hub. The DP hub is rare hardware, or only recently available, or perhaps not yet as readily available as you'd wish so as to find it on cheap hardware.
(On top of that there could be bullshit like your GPU being a bit older or using your hub's hdmi out breaks dual display ability, just saying this in case.). If you're lucky DP hubs might crash in prices like late this year or early next year, and putting a standalone hub between your current hub and your monitors would work.
You were born 50 years ago and took 40 years to get laid, thus you're 90-year-old?
Artificial gravity or "antigrav" would be a great application but I'm not sure they will be ever doable at all, what if it can be theoretically made but your device would need to be 1000 km or 1 0000 000 km wide?
USB sticks are a true replacement, except when it comes to giving one away. You could just give a floppy, expecting it back but it didn't have to be the exact same and no big deal if the other party kept it. With USB sticks the capacities and speeds aren't the same, they're all different and the cheapest one costs like a 10 box of floppies. It may also contain some of your music, movies, porn, politically offensive material etc. so you'd have to "sanitize" it.
SD cards might work too except for SD vs micro-SD and the lack of readers on desktop and older laptops. Same basic cost problem too. If there were full sized SD cards for $0.50, no matter the capacity you would be able to use it to give away a couple pictures, a sound recording, a TPS report etc.
The USB-C audio proposal allows analog sound over the USB connector. That's rather clever since the same connector thus also supports digital headphones, external DAC, or just straight into your 1972 amp with e.g. a USB type C to dual RCA cable presumably.
The bad : plug analog USB headset on a digital-only USB port, then nothing happens.
The ugly : sound output and charging at the same time, obviously. Although in a favorable use case you've got both covered with a single cable.