Serial ports still are damn all over the place, they're just hidden behind a serial to USB controller, or sometimes quietly exposed as a "service port" behind random hardware, with any kind of connector (DB9 or not).
Come to think of, there even exist 3.5mm jack serial ports. Or 3.5mm jack power supplies.
Beware of automating the backup, if it goes wrong it will be precisely at the time you need it - your data gets lost or corrupted, automatic backup kicks in and overwrites the copy you'd rely on with garbage.
Optical is dead for me but for stupid reasons : tax on blank media, lack of enough SATA or IDE ports on some machines. On the other hand, gimme dual PS/2. I even made sure to have dual DVI-I for now (not DVI-D)
Fluxbox is decent for a dummied media player. You have to edit the start menu by hand to include the like three programs you want to run, add an entry to turn off the PC and put setuid on/sbin/halt. Stupid?, but I did that.
Best I ever used still is XP/2003 turned Windows 2K/98 with a virtual desktops freeware, Autohotkey and a crazy.exe and.dll editing utility that allows to change the start menu layout, delete a few useless graphics like the top right useless icon in explorer, etc.
They concentrated on interconnects that are of use inside a node and are baked in the motherboard pretty much. So that's something like Intel QPI, but not a supercomputer interconnect. For the near future you'll have to ask IBM what they use on POWER9 systems.
Graphics have diminishing returns. An example is real time shadows ; most games used to have no shadows at all, or to put a simple round blob under the characters, or to have rather exquisite lighting but static and only on the walls : lighting/shadowing was generated in the map editor when you hit "compile" and was painted on the walls (Quake 1, Half-Life 1).
A decade later real shadows were common, you can even have a character's nose project a shadow on the character's face and it's done real time. That cost a lot of gigaflops and megabytes. All's great, except the shadows will often lack precision so you'll often be looking at poor edges or square blocky patches of "shadow". So let's increase the shadow's resolution by 2x, 4x or 8x in each axis (if you're using shadow maps) or do some whatever filtering at 2x2, 4x4 or 8x8.. then it uses 4x, 16x or 64x more resources just so that it breaks down less often. They'll look slightly better or fairly better, but in the grand scheme of things you're still looking at about the same graphics.
As it is, distroes default to ext4 and users can use a small boot drive (low end SSD, eMMC, very old hard drive..) or do the basic separation between / and/home on a single drive. I advocate for joes and grandmas and everything in between. You might as well talk of ghetto SANs or hypervisor desktop rigs. I could network boot an iSCSI volume from a ZFS file server afterall, after spending a few hundreds on a tiny PC and a couple 2.5" drives.
This reminds me of the Soviet Union, the first part of your post. Going from (Soviet Union) to (Not Soviet Union) was a huge disaster for people involved. It's like a tremendous economical and political collapse kill people.
US and Canada had it easy, perhaps the historical parallel would be eastern part of Roman Empire turned Eastern Roman Empire turned Byzantian Empire.
Africa land is poor, because it didn't have glaciers crushing and moving the land etc. fertilizing it dozens of times. Lush forests are amazing but sustain on thin humus on top of worthless soil. Huge stretches are water poor. It's huge, like twice it looks like due to Mercator projection bias on maps.
I'm sure it might turn out a lot better, still. I don't know about drawing borders on ethnical boundaries. No idea what the many cultures there think. Ethnical or tribal boundaries often are a US talking point : the US has wages multiple wars in the Middle East to dismantle and balkanize countries and it has been a huge disaster. A side victim was Libya, one of the better African countries to live in, which doesn't exist anymore. I'm more familiar with the French version of what a state is so I see half or more African country-states as French speaking and English speaking ones. Language that help with mutual intelligibility but also could help develop industries such as solar panel manufacturing, nanotechnology, batteries and reverse fuel cells or whatever is useful, manufacturing and operating satellites and drones, whatever. What if France was stuck on ethnical/regional boundaries : it would be like 15 or 20 countries each with their own languages, ditto Italy or Germany. Of course I'm applying what I know to a foreign whole continent so that has its limits.
They may leapfrog into a facebook (sigh) society. What will happen then? I don't know and I hate to think about that. Shitscared that it would lead to surveillance societies where the powerful target people to "disappear" and torture at will.
Isn't that stuff for sysadmins? What it's for, server software? Even if you're right, I'd rather try snappy snaps (once upgraded to an OS that uses them) since it advertises itself as a package manager for end user software, not some framework to set up virtual virtual images. If I want to fuck around on the command line doing system things I could try the more classical solution of making my own deb as was suggested. I would at last learn to make a deb, if only to package stupid things like a wallpaper or a winamp skin.
Let's me start by saying that when you want to run a game, you're more pragmatic and the political/philosophical/meta-technical issues take a second or third seat. I.e. even if snap packages are "evil" game users want to play the game, and Steam is a bit evil for someone who played in the DOS / Windows 95 days (or 8/16bit before that) when you didn't have to log in to some tracking platform each and every time. It's still praised a lot still.
Games are distributed as.deb etc. packages, binaries or Steam. There is GoG but I'd wager it's not very well known. There is also source if you want to fail at compiling it, or fail at compiling dependencies. If you're bored and want some games you might look into your package manager for distro provided games, it should be safer in a sense and they're there. Of course the games suck, but they are not in great numbers and they are outdated. Especially as users may be running Ubuntu LTS (and its spin off's) or Debian stable. For multiplayer games, an older version usually is a detriment. Emulators lack in quantity and quality. End result even a pure open source game is easier to run on Windows, since you download and run setup.exe and that's all, latest and most usable version. (and no driver issue)
Hence if there were snap package of games and some place to browse them it probably would be a lot better/easier. A second technical reason that prevents even me from running games included in the distro or distributed as.deb : I can't install a 600MB game or smaller at all, that's more than there's free space on the / partition. And running automatically out of / space is already what happens if you don't do apt-get clean in a while (or with useless older kernel versions). Thus.deb games are useless or only work in some cases. IF snap games can be installed on the 40x to 100x bigger data storage partition, problem solved!
So what if the binary tar ball does the same thing as the snappy snap? Just ignore new features in the snap, right? What if you unpack shit all over the place in/usr and are unable to clean it up. Yea after years of experience you'll maybe not do that but making software hard to install and untrackable just to please you is silly.
Getting some place to list the installed software (both CLI and GUI), with a version number, an uninstall button and a shortcut created in the start menu is better than nothing at all. I hope directories and processes are supported, that's the isolation most people need.
Under Hillary's supervision the US propagated rumors that niggers were Ghadaffi's mercenaries, which led to violent anti-black lynchings carried openly in the streets. How worse can you get than that? Also, it is US policy to promote Sunni war against Shia by pretending the Syrian regime (what we used to call a country or a state) is a Shia minority persecuting the Sunni majority, as if we hadn't enough of that crap back in 16th century Europe.
It's pointless having 16GB of RAM anyway, because tablet apps don't need it. Anything that needs 16GB RAM would be better run on a laptop with a keyboard and mouse. You can get laptops that are under 800g with a good 12" screen and good battery life.
1TB of storage is more useful if you are really random and can't plan far enough ahead to whittle your HD movie collection down to a 256GB SD card.
Remember netbooks? There were lots of slashdot arguments that netbooks have to be used for content consumption only or lightweight browsing and such ; even after they came with a hard drive and Windows, so people ran Photoshop (cracked) and video games on the thing if that's what they wanted to do. There's less highly pressing need but some could rely on the tablet like those weird peopke that had a laptop and no desktop all those years ago. With a 16GB/1TB tablet you could even ssh or RDP in from a crappy old desktop when you've got some "real work" to do and your desktop's CPU/RAM etc. isn't enough.
That's becoming a technical possibility. If the tablet outputs Displayport then dual monitors is a thing, if you use daisy chained monitors or a hub. That's special hardware though. In other cases you might need to carry the HDMI dongle or the DVI dongle etc. Even VGA CRT and PS/2 keyb and mouse might be possible with the right dongles, cables and hubs. I think the issue is the general public will not order dongles and crap from the internet(*) or want to put research into which hardware supports what. Even, or especially if a $15 expense makes your $1000 stuff a lot more useful.
(*) Repeat when needed. Likelyhood of dongles-on-dongles in some cases, or dongle on hub on dongle.
Another technical possibility is the single chip PCIe SSD. Fast, big (512GB) and reliable storage, it's completely fixed though (like mac book pro) USB 3.1 may be deemed good enough for spinning platter storage, SSD etc. Now can you get USB 3.1 and dual external display at the same time? That's the kind of question most don't want to deal with.
One of the original Chromebooks had a 320GB hard drive, and also a fast CPU, sandy bridge at 1.something GHz, and one DRAM slot for adding RAM (up to 10GB).
Funnily, years later hardware is worse:). Did you know a low end hard drive is much faster than small low end flash?, on writes. Of course it's fine if your flash/SSD/whatever is of a high grade enough. Which is easier said if you're buying a $749 phone or a desktop/laptop with the flash drive stuff on removable PCIe, SATA or mSATA.
Modern Atom CPU have eMMC support and that might be used rather often even on laptops. I'm thinking of small Windows 10 laptops in particular, they're like tablet hardware in a netbook case. So some laptops models or a tiny desktop may have a 32GB mSATA in there but you absolutely have to check for it.
I'm very curious what the caps cost given the need for metering, billing and support costs. And are they set eternally at a couple hundred GB or something?
Could it be that they cost more than they save? Couldn't be, right.
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Serial ports still are damn all over the place, they're just hidden behind a serial to USB controller, or sometimes quietly exposed as a "service port" behind random hardware, with any kind of connector (DB9 or not).
Come to think of, there even exist 3.5mm jack serial ports. Or 3.5mm jack power supplies.
Beware of automating the backup, if it goes wrong it will be precisely at the time you need it - your data gets lost or corrupted, automatic backup kicks in and overwrites the copy you'd rely on with garbage.
Optical is dead for me but for stupid reasons : tax on blank media, lack of enough SATA or IDE ports on some machines.
On the other hand, gimme dual PS/2. I even made sure to have dual DVI-I for now (not DVI-D)
But it doesn't do things like uploading at a petabyte/s to unknown alien civilization's computers.
Fluxbox is decent for a dummied media player. /sbin/halt. Stupid?, but I did that.
You have to edit the start menu by hand to include the like three programs you want to run, add an entry to turn off the PC and put setuid on
Best I ever used still is XP/2003 turned Windows 2K/98 with a virtual desktops freeware, Autohotkey and a crazy .exe and .dll editing utility that allows to change the start menu layout, delete a few useless graphics like the top right useless icon in explorer, etc.
They concentrated on interconnects that are of use inside a node and are baked in the motherboard pretty much. So that's something like Intel QPI, but not a supercomputer interconnect. For the near future you'll have to ask IBM what they use on POWER9 systems.
I can't help it.. So, it comes with free beer? That's the feature most of us will be interested in! Even better if it repeals tax increases on beer!
Graphics have diminishing returns. An example is real time shadows ; most games used to have no shadows at all, or to put a simple round blob under the characters, or to have rather exquisite lighting but static and only on the walls : lighting/shadowing was generated in the map editor when you hit "compile" and was painted on the walls (Quake 1, Half-Life 1).
A decade later real shadows were common, you can even have a character's nose project a shadow on the character's face and it's done real time. That cost a lot of gigaflops and megabytes.
All's great, except the shadows will often lack precision so you'll often be looking at poor edges or square blocky patches of "shadow". So let's increase the shadow's resolution by 2x, 4x or 8x in each axis (if you're using shadow maps) or do some whatever filtering at 2x2, 4x4 or 8x8.. then it uses 4x, 16x or 64x more resources just so that it breaks down less often.
They'll look slightly better or fairly better, but in the grand scheme of things you're still looking at about the same graphics.
As it is, distroes default to ext4 and users can use a small boot drive (low end SSD, eMMC, very old hard drive..) or do the basic separation between / and /home on a single drive. I advocate for joes and grandmas and everything in between. You might as well talk of ghetto SANs or hypervisor desktop rigs. I could network boot an iSCSI volume from a ZFS file server afterall, after spending a few hundreds on a tiny PC and a couple 2.5" drives.
This reminds me of the Soviet Union, the first part of your post. Going from (Soviet Union) to (Not Soviet Union) was a huge disaster for people involved. It's like a tremendous economical and political collapse kill people.
US and Canada had it easy, perhaps the historical parallel would be eastern part of Roman Empire turned Eastern Roman Empire turned Byzantian Empire.
I was going to make an opposing case.
Africa land is poor, because it didn't have glaciers crushing and moving the land etc. fertilizing it dozens of times. Lush forests are amazing but sustain on thin humus on top of worthless soil.
Huge stretches are water poor.
It's huge, like twice it looks like due to Mercator projection bias on maps.
I'm sure it might turn out a lot better, still.
I don't know about drawing borders on ethnical boundaries. No idea what the many cultures there think. Ethnical or tribal boundaries often are a US talking point : the US has wages multiple wars in the Middle East to dismantle and balkanize countries and it has been a huge disaster. A side victim was Libya, one of the better African countries to live in, which doesn't exist anymore.
I'm more familiar with the French version of what a state is so I see half or more African country-states as French speaking and English speaking ones. Language that help with mutual intelligibility but also could help develop industries such as solar panel manufacturing, nanotechnology, batteries and reverse fuel cells or whatever is useful, manufacturing and operating satellites and drones, whatever.
What if France was stuck on ethnical/regional boundaries : it would be like 15 or 20 countries each with their own languages, ditto Italy or Germany. Of course I'm applying what I know to a foreign whole continent so that has its limits.
They may leapfrog into a facebook (sigh) society. What will happen then? I don't know and I hate to think about that. Shitscared that it would lead to surveillance societies where the powerful target people to "disappear" and torture at will.
Isn't that stuff for sysadmins? What it's for, server software? Even if you're right, I'd rather try snappy snaps (once upgraded to an OS that uses them) since it advertises itself as a package manager for end user software, not some framework to set up virtual virtual images.
If I want to fuck around on the command line doing system things I could try the more classical solution of making my own deb as was suggested. I would at last learn to make a deb, if only to package stupid things like a wallpaper or a winamp skin.
Let's me start by saying that when you want to run a game, you're more pragmatic and the political/philosophical/meta-technical issues take a second or third seat. I.e. even if snap packages are "evil" game users want to play the game, and Steam is a bit evil for someone who played in the DOS / Windows 95 days (or 8/16bit before that) when you didn't have to log in to some tracking platform each and every time. It's still praised a lot still.
Games are distributed as .deb etc. packages, binaries or Steam. There is GoG but I'd wager it's not very well known. There is also source if you want to fail at compiling it, or fail at compiling dependencies.
If you're bored and want some games you might look into your package manager for distro provided games, it should be safer in a sense and they're there. Of course the games suck, but they are not in great numbers and they are outdated. Especially as users may be running Ubuntu LTS (and its spin off's) or Debian stable. For multiplayer games, an older version usually is a detriment. Emulators lack in quantity and quality.
End result even a pure open source game is easier to run on Windows, since you download and run setup.exe and that's all, latest and most usable version. (and no driver issue)
Hence if there were snap package of games and some place to browse them it probably would be a lot better/easier. .deb : I can't install a 600MB game or smaller at all, that's more than there's free space on the / partition. And running automatically out of / space is already what happens if you don't do apt-get clean in a while (or with useless older kernel versions). Thus .deb games are useless or only work in some cases.
A second technical reason that prevents even me from running games included in the distro or distributed as
IF snap games can be installed on the 40x to 100x bigger data storage partition, problem solved!
So what if the binary tar ball does the same thing as the snappy snap? Just ignore new features in the snap, right? /usr and are unable to clean it up. Yea after years of experience you'll maybe not do that but making software hard to install and untrackable just to please you is silly.
What if you unpack shit all over the place in
Getting some place to list the installed software (both CLI and GUI), with a version number, an uninstall button and a shortcut created in the start menu is better than nothing at all.
I hope directories and processes are supported, that's the isolation most people need.
Strangely Intel supports ECC on the Skylake Celeron now.
That still doesn't explain what is a synced photo and how it differs from an uploaded photo.
You should have used triple drive RAID 1 then. The probability of deleting everything is less than 50%.
Under Hillary's supervision the US propagated rumors that niggers were Ghadaffi's mercenaries, which led to violent anti-black lynchings carried openly in the streets. How worse can you get than that?
Also, it is US policy to promote Sunni war against Shia by pretending the Syrian regime (what we used to call a country or a state) is a Shia minority persecuting the Sunni majority, as if we hadn't enough of that crap back in 16th century Europe.
It's pointless having 16GB of RAM anyway, because tablet apps don't need it. Anything that needs 16GB RAM would be better run on a laptop with a keyboard and mouse. You can get laptops that are under 800g with a good 12" screen and good battery life.
1TB of storage is more useful if you are really random and can't plan far enough ahead to whittle your HD movie collection down to a 256GB SD card.
Remember netbooks? There were lots of slashdot arguments that netbooks have to be used for content consumption only or lightweight browsing and such ; even after they came with a hard drive and Windows, so people ran Photoshop (cracked) and video games on the thing if that's what they wanted to do.
There's less highly pressing need but some could rely on the tablet like those weird peopke that had a laptop and no desktop all those years ago.
With a 16GB/1TB tablet you could even ssh or RDP in from a crappy old desktop when you've got some "real work" to do and your desktop's CPU/RAM etc. isn't enough.
That's becoming a technical possibility. If the tablet outputs Displayport then dual monitors is a thing, if you use daisy chained monitors or a hub. That's special hardware though. In other cases you might need to carry the HDMI dongle or the DVI dongle etc.
Even VGA CRT and PS/2 keyb and mouse might be possible with the right dongles, cables and hubs.
I think the issue is the general public will not order dongles and crap from the internet(*) or want to put research into which hardware supports what. Even, or especially if a $15 expense makes your $1000 stuff a lot more useful.
(*) Repeat when needed. Likelyhood of dongles-on-dongles in some cases, or dongle on hub on dongle.
Another technical possibility is the single chip PCIe SSD. Fast, big (512GB) and reliable storage, it's completely fixed though (like mac book pro)
USB 3.1 may be deemed good enough for spinning platter storage, SSD etc.
Now can you get USB 3.1 and dual external display at the same time? That's the kind of question most don't want to deal with.
One of the original Chromebooks had a 320GB hard drive, and also a fast CPU, sandy bridge at 1.something GHz, and one DRAM slot for adding RAM (up to 10GB).
Funnily, years later hardware is worse :).
Did you know a low end hard drive is much faster than small low end flash?, on writes.
Of course it's fine if your flash/SSD/whatever is of a high grade enough. Which is easier said if you're buying a $749 phone or a desktop/laptop with the flash drive stuff on removable PCIe, SATA or mSATA.
Modern Atom CPU have eMMC support and that might be used rather often even on laptops. I'm thinking of small Windows 10 laptops in particular, they're like tablet hardware in a netbook case.
So some laptops models or a tiny desktop may have a 32GB mSATA in there but you absolutely have to check for it.
This isn't the 90s, people don't buy a new PC every couple years.
E10s turns that into e.g. a 700 MB process and a 1 GB process. That works around the 32bit limit.
I'm very curious what the caps cost given the need for metering, billing and support costs.
And are they set eternally at a couple hundred GB or something?
Could it be that they cost more than they save? Couldn't be, right.