True that! but you were better off with an Intel non MMX, since it had faster x87 and that was useful. Low clocked original 6x86 was good at integer code ; S3 Virge was cheap and had very high 2D performance. So, for everything 320x200 under MS-DOS it was a monster that chewed through everything. Ran your old 3D games at a solid 70 fps (after all those years, I learned that 320x200 mode was at 70Hz), stuff like Dark Forces, all that used integer / fixed point. Tomb Raider ran well and was a 320x200 DOS game. Quake was a bit slow as I found out years later (even Intel P133 was much faster) although we tried for one of the many weird resolutions rather than stay in ugly 320x200. Screamer 2's demo was 320x200 in 65536 colors!
Too bad PCs lacked an easy, standard way to plug Playstation-like two controllers. The low res looked pixellated even back then, but actually late DOS games like that looked much like what the PC did, only the PC used a fast CPU and fast dumb graphics buffer. You could run with no driver whatsoever loaded if keyboard-only was good to go for the game.
In the 640x480 and 3D accelerated Windows 95 era, Cyrix was instantly obsolete.
You prompted me to RTFA. Unsurprisingly, it gobbles data from features not actually part of email, but available in gmail, specifically calendar events and contacts. RTFA also opens saying that by using the Outlook mobile app as a generic email client (not only for hotmail/windows live/outlook.com), Microsoft downloads all your email from all the email accounts you're using from within the application. So any vanilla 1980s email goes, I suspect you could run your own email server and get the email you receive on your own server forwarded to/downloaded by the microsoft "cloud" email client.
Of course, gmail started doing that in the first place years ago.
The weakness is if you never turn it off (make it sleep once in a while at best) and never need to reboot for crashes either. A mild example of this is running an out of date version of Firefox because recent 64 bit versions don't crash anymore or crash all your web pages but not the browser.
Solutions like "delete cookies when browser closes", "wipe VM or OS to known clean state on shutdown/boot up" don't always work, if the hardware is too reliable and the software doesn't even crash or recovers instead of quitting.
So I fully except the Microsoft Somethingbook to have forced reboots. Cheap BOFH way to take care of the problem. Maybe long term we'll need live kernel upgrades without reboot, perhaps even a way to load a new browser version (e.g.), handing other the program state and live network connections to the new version, if that's possible. All for your grandma's solitaire and email box.
What about hanging clothes in some fridge sized unit, with fans, exhaust somewhere, ultrasound and no rotating drum at all? I wonder if getting rid of the drum entirely would hurt the clothes even less, while I wonder if that'd be effective still.
Let's say we're using a drum dryer with ultrasounds, though. Will it be cheaper to build than an old fashioned heat dryer? No idea what the transducers cost but they're not exactly doing hifi or a womb scan. Might be expensive but if you make a hundred million of them a year with a cheap patent license (dryer apparently has a few dozens of them) then hopefully that's the kind of thing that can come crashing down.
I think so, yes. Data scrubbing. I even saw a screenshot where in the GUI for checking a drive, you get a popup that tells you you can't run the drive check nor need it (in drive properties, whatever)
Maybe you have Storages Spaces for "RAID 1" or spanning drives with some parity, I don't know the details of that. Don't look for NTFS specific features etc. though.
But why would you want thermal energy specifically? We're looking for "drying energy". Sometimes, waiting for water to fall out of a shirt and the rest of the moist to evaporate while at room temperature works.
We could also throw our clothes in a large electric pizza oven at around 300C (I know, this is not a good enough oven for making "real" pizza). I'm sure the pizza oven is better at trapping heat in. But hope your clothes are rugged enough.
You sound like you wish you were joking, but yes Microsoft did. They've had what they call an "LTSB".
You can't have it, though.
(I believe, a contract with them covering a minimum of 100 desktop licenses is needed, for the feature I had in Windows 98 of "don't install crap I don't want to")
This might be a common theme in Windows, e.g. a printer or network driver implements rather high level features instead of a system wide layer doing it for everyone. This might be backwards, have roots to 1993 or earlier, I don't know but a decade of driver compatibility isn't unheard of and the typical effect was : you use the driver CD included with your hardware, and you get your recto verso printer working, your scanner scanning, your tuner can tune channels or stations, your network card can do ethernet bonding (well, some high end Intel I guess), your graphics card comes with a GUI panel for triple buffering, vsync, brightness, gamma, texture filtering etc.
While under linux, you seemingly need an internet connection to install a word processor. Did you know, before broadband and on this side of the Atlantic, spending days downloading things from the internet would have quickly enough run a phone bill over $1000, what with there being 1440 minutes in a day.
Does Drvfs have a loop device? (or, if the question is wrong, does WSL have a loop device, working with no trouble on files on Drvfs volumes) Does WSL have FUSE? If so there are a number of things that should be doable, some rather basic stuff like sshfs and curlftpfs for a start. There's a ceph-fuse package for example, so while you might not want to run a ceph node, unless you don't care about speed / CPU or warts I don't know about, I assume it might be usable to access data on a ceph data store.
Will Drvfs access "RAW" partitions that Windows doesn't know about or give a damn about? Then there's ext2 on FUSE, ZFS on FUSE, will those work?
But all the stuff in the linux kernel, I guess that won't work, nor will MS implement everything. That's some amount of work, with data corruption or a lot of loss if buggy. There are likely other workarounds : use hardware raid, Windows software raid, use a linux VM on Hyper-V, if that works with Vt-d / IOMMU access to a SATA/SAS controller.
Speaking of old, why not hook up a mainframe to the "cloud"? It's all built around I/O, partitioning and billing the user anyway. Let's have a single computer datacenter. We can achieve the classic vision of one computer per continent.
I believe curious people might try to use it. I know there are emulators and a freeware IBM OS version from before I was born, so it is certain that millions of people never had the chance to try doing something, anything at all with a mainframe.
I have a pitch for it : "The state of the art in NoSQL and consolidation."
So, that's what happens for people with a 2.5GHz Sandy Bridge or better and Intel graphics or nvidia with proprietary driver. Great, fine, but not all far of "works on my machine". How about dual core 1.0GHz AMD laptops? (Bobcat and Jaguar CPU, the latter using the same technology as Playstation 4) The 3D desktops are slow. And we're asked to like it and believe they're more efficient since the GPU "off-loads" compositing tasks. Ha hahahaha.
To me, desktops like Gnome 3 and Cinnamon use too much CPU and thus are undesirable. I thought, Wayland ought to make the CPU load drop and allow to run those 3D desktops on modest hardware well, like Windows does. But I'm not so sure and it is the open source world's Duke Nukem Forever anyway. E.g., it's been long enough my graphics card has been deprecated already. Even if Wayland is released, then we'll have to rely on hobby developers to make the drivers compatible and then stable and/or efficient. There is a lot of fast, efficient hardware with deprecated graphics out there like AMD E-350 laptops, desktop APU, 45nm Core 2 Duo but well they're fast enough to run browsers or applications, not spend half their resources on the windowing system.
You convinced me, I will immediately seek to upgrade to Windows 10 Home or Insider Preview, go out of my way to enable everything and write a script to submit my web searches to Bing on Edge and Google on Google Chrome simultaneously, or the other way around. Thanks for making me see the light and providing an opportunity for me to amend my errors.
You are the same guy as above and it feels like posts by apk that attempt to pass off as something written by someone other than apk. Perhaps you are the "Republicans hate us and want us to die" guy, but applied your writing skills to piss on some "FF community" you've made up and that happens to include people you disagree with. There are enough millions FF users anyway that it doesn't represent a community any more that drivers of 90s Ford cars or owners of a certain brand of TV or people that walk up and downstairs form a "community".
I wish there were checkboxes to disable pictures and javascript like in the old days, if it makes web pages break down it would be the intended effect anyway.
I do admit I downplayed the problem, insomuch as it was an attempt at taking things lightly which is why I talked about mundane, unremarkable or slightly pleasant items so as to emphasize that it isn't an especially monstrous, alien or inflexible GUI unless you're thinking of the default appearance in Windows where the title bar is missing maybe but this aside I do believe it's a decently normal looking application as far as browsers go and we might think it's not right that you can't move buttons for back, forward, stop, reload anymore nor move the sandwich or sewer grill menu which does put an artificial limit on customization abilities but otherwise make customization a bit easier since you won't mess it up badly by accident and you know the general public will mess thing up with accidental drag and drop like they often did with the Windows 95 or XP task bar and moreover the link or menu item that brings the customization interface in is more prominently featured making it more discoverable for would-be users while the toolbar's consistency makes it a good place for custom and additional icons brought in by the installation of add-ons at the request of the end user.
Because it's the version with the longest shelf life and it will even survive Firefox 57, on the ESR channel. Not for very long but if you really want a long term browser that'll have to be lynx or Internet Explorer 11 lol.
- right click on anywhere except the URL and tab bars, enable the menu - click on the sewer grill, on "Customize" and rearrange a short few things - when you need to close the browser cleanly, you can also go to the sewer grill, click and hit the bottom right "quit" button. easy targets to hit - you can also use the sewer grill to access the Preferences icon, that's a workaround for them not putting preferences/options under the "Tools" menu in the linux version.
That's all I have to say about the "GUI nightmare" that is Australis. You can also navigate to "about:about" for a list of option and feature web-like pages. Fairly hidden but it's a portal to the semi-hidden things.
Windows RT was nonsensical : it was like they were ashamed of the tablet software it ran, so they grafted a IE + Office only desktop to make it more useful. So, it sucked both as a tablet and a desktop, and was undesirable if bought without the keyboard. They didn't make a cheaper, tablet-only tablet i.e. an oversized Windows Phone, so Android was free to capture the entirety of the non iOS market. People did buy iOS and Android tablet-only tablets, until moving to 5" and 6" phones mostly. Not sure if anything would have been different if Microsoft had actually attempted to make tablets that people wanted to buy, but they sure failed hard and had a better opportunity in 2012 than now, since people now are locked into Android/iOS-only internet "apps" and weren't so much back then.
Well, I'm talking about mobile-only networked "apps" and otherwise the "CloudBook" might succeed has a laptop-lite but won't replace the need people have for an Android thing on the side.
In theory, Microsoft might sell a license upgrade to Windows 10 Pro (perhaps with a requirement of 64GB or more minimum main storage. Hopefully some laptops come with an M.2 slot for either main or additional storage). You would then run Suse-on-linux-on-Windows or Ubuntu-on-linux-on-Windows if not cygwin, or even try to install some NFS or sshfs client on Windows proper if that is an option.
That's not what you were talking about, but it would be a somewhat honorable way to allow to make the hardware more useful. Alternatively, the trusted bootloader protection (TPM module) could be disabled ; it's very common that it can be turned off on PC hardware anyway, but perhaps that's wishful thinking here. Alternatively again, you would have to use a signed linux or Windows or BSD installer. Well, lots of what if's.
Since you asked, analog video standard contain "useless" lines that won't be displayed, since some time is needed for the deflector thing on the Y axis to go back from the bottom to the top of its range. Thus, NTSC (or PAL 60, used for consoles, computers but not broadcast) have an effective 480i resolution not 525i. Then, classic console have some hackish way to "cancel" the display of each other line (while getting rid of the 1-line offset between two fields) and so achieve a real 240p. A broadcast station might not have approved a messed up signal like that, but for the cable between a console and TV, it did the job and that's we had anyway.
On e.g. a SNES or Megadrive connected through RGB SCART ("PAL", but not really, just PAL res and refresh, and straight RGB signal) you would see how convincing the display is, not unlike 320x200 VGA on monitors of that age. It might be 288p at 50Hz though, with small black bars on top and bottom. Maybe the console's or computer's vertical resolution was 192, 200, 224, 240 sometimes so I guess there's letterboxing or overscan or something. Later consoles moved to straight 480i60 and 576i50 it seems (and less common 480p options, or 1080i on original Xbox)
This quite reminds me of the local news section on other website, celebrating the highs of daily life. Following is a recent article (continued on web site, so I avoid pasting it entirely)
"Man Tries Using Pink 6-Pound Bowling Ball To Great Amusement"
WEST ORANGE, NJ—Seemingly knowing full well that the relatively small and light ball was not designed for someone of his size, sources confirmed Tuesday that 25-year-old Darren Foerstner tried using a pink 6-pound bowling ball for one frame, all to the incredible amusement of friends and onlookers at Eagle Rock Lanes bowling alley. “When Darren walked up to the lane holding that little pink ball, we were all thinking, ‘Wait a minute, that ball is meant for children,’ but then we realized what he was doing, and everyone just started cracking up,” said friend Kelly Lingard, adding that, as part of his lighthearted and exceptionally entertaining display, Foerstner demonstrated that his thumb and fingers were unable to fit into the smaller holes of the pink ball, forcing him to palm it with his entire hand. (...)
One thing good, the "hardware enablement stack" : this gives newer linux and Xorg every six monthes (till 18.04 is out), and 16.04.2 is the first version that uses the first iteration of it. This brings supposedly better support for Intel Skylake/Kaby Lake graphics, AMD graphics (except if you got GCN 1.0 hardware like Radeon 7970 and R7 240, then you're fucked) and I guess basic 2D without crashes and black screen if you've a recent nvidia. (Advice for nvidia has always been to install the nvidia driver, unless your card is a few years old and you're satisfied with the graphics)
Freezing Unity and not developing new versions reduces the amount of work to keep it secure so that is neutral to security updates, hopefully. Staying on 16.04 forever means same GTK, Cairo, Qt etc. libraries or at worst x.y.2 is replaced with x.y.3. This may sound like wishful thinking, if not that Ubuntu does have some resources and skimping on security updates for an LTS would be the worst press ever (as if Windows blocked all security updates if you didn't satisfy their political standards. Wait..)
You said gpu graphics acceleration and I counter with the sorry states of driver when you don't have the right graphics card, and the stack built around X11 (and I think X11 is great, just that Wayland might be a better idea if you want to make the desktop GPU accelerated and catch up with Windows Vista and Android 2.x)
In fact, if you want to display some rectangular area of crap and this tasks consists in "copy window's content into a buffer", involving a crappy OpenGL driver and shitty interfacing libraries or even a copy into another buffer will only make it slower. Get Cinnamon, disable animations and cry at the CPU waste shown in "top". It's also RAM hungry and does more disk I/O than a 2D desktop.
It may be that not everything has to be new all the time. Many uninspired people likely are making chessboards and go-bans as we speak. It's sobering to think that Mafia from 2002 was already a (semi) open world, mission based game with good graphics and recognizably human characters. So, a bit like Watch Dogs but with slower cars and a better game. Battlefield 1942 came out the same year. Now, 2002 is not that early as far as games go but watch the current date. Scary?
There was even some hype for a Star Wars Battlefront game, which is from 2015, DLC up to 2016. They made it look like it's an all new game. But Star Wars : Battlefront came out in 2004 for fuck's sake! It had a colon in the title though. The premise is the same as far as I know, team deathmatch between evil empire and rebels on the internet.
Phones may have a few good games or well advertised games, but otherwise there's a million crapware, phones that are too slow, phones that are so fast they don't make some games better, throttling issues, battery issues, control issues. It's like PC gaming in that few people relatively to the population will ever play some high end game (but like PC gaming, 1% of the user base playing a game is 10+ million players/customers)
For one thing, Nintendo Switch has a "low res" display according to some but well, not : many people have a phone around 800x480 res, or a 1366x768 laptop, and even an iPhone 5S has less pixels in both directions (but more ppi) than the Switch.
It's true than phones may overtake it but with caveats I enumerated and also Moore's law is slowing down. They're not actually getting 2x better all the time. But you're probably right that gaming will get better, bigger, higher quality on phones:). The Switch's not all lost though : Nintendo can do the same thing that MS and Sony did, put out a new console that's compatible with the current one, so much as they'd be able to call it a Switch. Nintendo did it themselves before, with the Game Boy Color and New 3DS for instance. Nvidia will always be making Tegra, although the successors to Switch's Tegra are bigger, higher end, or with image processing crap for cars etc. so they'll have to make a custom one for Nintendo this time, like AMD did the first and second time for MS and Sony.
Slashdot Mirror
True that! but you were better off with an Intel non MMX, since it had faster x87 and that was useful.
Low clocked original 6x86 was good at integer code ; S3 Virge was cheap and had very high 2D performance. So, for everything 320x200 under MS-DOS it was a monster that chewed through everything. Ran your old 3D games at a solid 70 fps (after all those years, I learned that 320x200 mode was at 70Hz), stuff like Dark Forces, all that used integer / fixed point. Tomb Raider ran well and was a 320x200 DOS game.
Quake was a bit slow as I found out years later (even Intel P133 was much faster) although we tried for one of the many weird resolutions rather than stay in ugly 320x200.
Screamer 2's demo was 320x200 in 65536 colors!
Too bad PCs lacked an easy, standard way to plug Playstation-like two controllers. The low res looked pixellated even back then, but actually late DOS games like that looked much like what the PC did, only the PC used a fast CPU and fast dumb graphics buffer. You could run with no driver whatsoever loaded if keyboard-only was good to go for the game.
In the 640x480 and 3D accelerated Windows 95 era, Cyrix was instantly obsolete.
You prompted me to RTFA. Unsurprisingly, it gobbles data from features not actually part of email, but available in gmail, specifically calendar events and contacts.
RTFA also opens saying that by using the Outlook mobile app as a generic email client (not only for hotmail/windows live/outlook.com), Microsoft downloads all your email from all the email accounts you're using from within the application. So any vanilla 1980s email goes, I suspect you could run your own email server and get the email you receive on your own server forwarded to/downloaded by the microsoft "cloud" email client.
Of course, gmail started doing that in the first place years ago.
The weakness is if you never turn it off (make it sleep once in a while at best) and never need to reboot for crashes either.
A mild example of this is running an out of date version of Firefox because recent 64 bit versions don't crash anymore or crash all your web pages but not the browser.
Solutions like "delete cookies when browser closes", "wipe VM or OS to known clean state on shutdown/boot up" don't always work, if the hardware is too reliable and the software doesn't even crash or recovers instead of quitting.
So I fully except the Microsoft Somethingbook to have forced reboots. Cheap BOFH way to take care of the problem.
Maybe long term we'll need live kernel upgrades without reboot, perhaps even a way to load a new browser version (e.g.), handing other the program state and live network connections to the new version, if that's possible. All for your grandma's solitaire and email box.
What about hanging clothes in some fridge sized unit, with fans, exhaust somewhere, ultrasound and no rotating drum at all?
I wonder if getting rid of the drum entirely would hurt the clothes even less, while I wonder if that'd be effective still.
Let's say we're using a drum dryer with ultrasounds, though. Will it be cheaper to build than an old fashioned heat dryer?
No idea what the transducers cost but they're not exactly doing hifi or a womb scan. Might be expensive but if you make a hundred million of them a year with a cheap patent license (dryer apparently has a few dozens of them) then hopefully that's the kind of thing that can come crashing down.
I think so, yes. Data scrubbing. I even saw a screenshot where in the GUI for checking a drive, you get a popup that tells you you can't run the drive check nor need it (in drive properties, whatever)
Maybe you have Storages Spaces for "RAID 1" or spanning drives with some parity, I don't know the details of that.
Don't look for NTFS specific features etc. though.
But why would you want thermal energy specifically? We're looking for "drying energy". Sometimes, waiting for water to fall out of a shirt and the rest of the moist to evaporate while at room temperature works.
We could also throw our clothes in a large electric pizza oven at around 300C (I know, this is not a good enough oven for making "real" pizza). I'm sure the pizza oven is better at trapping heat in. But hope your clothes are rugged enough.
You sound like you wish you were joking, but yes Microsoft did. They've had what they call an "LTSB".
You can't have it, though.
(I believe, a contract with them covering a minimum of 100 desktop licenses is needed, for the feature I had in Windows 98 of "don't install crap I don't want to")
They're introducing ReFS in Windows 10, or un-hiding it.
It lacks quotas, compression, lacks quite a few things but checksums is what it is for.
This might be a common theme in Windows, e.g. a printer or network driver implements rather high level features instead of a system wide layer doing it for everyone.
This might be backwards, have roots to 1993 or earlier, I don't know but a decade of driver compatibility isn't unheard of and the typical effect was : you use the driver CD included with your hardware, and you get your recto verso printer working, your scanner scanning, your tuner can tune channels or stations, your network card can do ethernet bonding (well, some high end Intel I guess), your graphics card comes with a GUI panel for triple buffering, vsync, brightness, gamma, texture filtering etc.
While under linux, you seemingly need an internet connection to install a word processor. Did you know, before broadband and on this side of the Atlantic, spending days downloading things from the internet would have quickly enough run a phone bill over $1000, what with there being 1440 minutes in a day.
Does Drvfs have a loop device? (or, if the question is wrong, does WSL have a loop device, working with no trouble on files on Drvfs volumes)
Does WSL have FUSE? If so there are a number of things that should be doable, some rather basic stuff like sshfs and curlftpfs for a start. There's a ceph-fuse package for example, so while you might not want to run a ceph node, unless you don't care about speed / CPU or warts I don't know about, I assume it might be usable to access data on a ceph data store.
Will Drvfs access "RAW" partitions that Windows doesn't know about or give a damn about? Then there's ext2 on FUSE, ZFS on FUSE, will those work?
But all the stuff in the linux kernel, I guess that won't work, nor will MS implement everything. That's some amount of work, with data corruption or a lot of loss if buggy. There are likely other workarounds : use hardware raid, Windows software raid, use a linux VM on Hyper-V, if that works with Vt-d / IOMMU access to a SATA/SAS controller.
Speaking of old, why not hook up a mainframe to the "cloud"? It's all built around I/O, partitioning and billing the user anyway.
Let's have a single computer datacenter. We can achieve the classic vision of one computer per continent.
I believe curious people might try to use it. I know there are emulators and a freeware IBM OS version from before I was born, so it is certain that millions of people never had the chance to try doing something, anything at all with a mainframe.
I have a pitch for it : "The state of the art in NoSQL and consolidation."
So, that's what happens for people with a 2.5GHz Sandy Bridge or better and Intel graphics or nvidia with proprietary driver.
Great, fine, but not all far of "works on my machine". How about dual core 1.0GHz AMD laptops? (Bobcat and Jaguar CPU, the latter using the same technology as Playstation 4)
The 3D desktops are slow. And we're asked to like it and believe they're more efficient since the GPU "off-loads" compositing tasks. Ha hahahaha.
To me, desktops like Gnome 3 and Cinnamon use too much CPU and thus are undesirable.
I thought, Wayland ought to make the CPU load drop and allow to run those 3D desktops on modest hardware well, like Windows does. But I'm not so sure and it is the open source world's Duke Nukem Forever anyway. E.g., it's been long enough my graphics card has been deprecated already. Even if Wayland is released, then we'll have to rely on hobby developers to make the drivers compatible and then stable and/or efficient.
There is a lot of fast, efficient hardware with deprecated graphics out there like AMD E-350 laptops, desktop APU, 45nm Core 2 Duo but well they're fast enough to run browsers or applications, not spend half their resources on the windowing system.
You convinced me, I will immediately seek to upgrade to Windows 10 Home or Insider Preview, go out of my way to enable everything and write a script to submit my web searches to Bing on Edge and Google on Google Chrome simultaneously, or the other way around. Thanks for making me see the light and providing an opportunity for me to amend my errors.
You are the same guy as above and it feels like posts by apk that attempt to pass off as something written by someone other than apk. Perhaps you are the "Republicans hate us and want us to die" guy, but applied your writing skills to piss on some "FF community" you've made up and that happens to include people you disagree with. There are enough millions FF users anyway that it doesn't represent a community any more that drivers of 90s Ford cars or owners of a certain brand of TV or people that walk up and downstairs form a "community".
I wish there were checkboxes to disable pictures and javascript like in the old days, if it makes web pages break down it would be the intended effect anyway.
I do admit I downplayed the problem, insomuch as it was an attempt at taking things lightly which is why I talked about mundane, unremarkable or slightly pleasant items so as to emphasize that it isn't an especially monstrous, alien or inflexible GUI unless you're thinking of the default appearance in Windows where the title bar is missing maybe but this aside I do believe it's a decently normal looking application as far as browsers go and we might think it's not right that you can't move buttons for back, forward, stop, reload anymore nor move the sandwich or sewer grill menu which does put an artificial limit on customization abilities but otherwise make customization a bit easier since you won't mess it up badly by accident and you know the general public will mess thing up with accidental drag and drop like they often did with the Windows 95 or XP task bar and moreover the link or menu item that brings the customization interface in is more prominently featured making it more discoverable for would-be users while the toolbar's consistency makes it a good place for custom and additional icons brought in by the installation of add-ons at the request of the end user.
Because it's the version with the longest shelf life and it will even survive Firefox 57, on the ESR channel. Not for very long but if you really want a long term browser that'll have to be lynx or Internet Explorer 11 lol.
How to deal with Firefox Australis :
- right click on anywhere except the URL and tab bars, enable the menu
- click on the sewer grill, on "Customize" and rearrange a short few things
- when you need to close the browser cleanly, you can also go to the sewer grill, click and hit the bottom right "quit" button. easy targets to hit
- you can also use the sewer grill to access the Preferences icon, that's a workaround for them not putting preferences/options under the "Tools" menu in the linux version.
That's all I have to say about the "GUI nightmare" that is Australis.
You can also navigate to "about:about" for a list of option and feature web-like pages. Fairly hidden but it's a portal to the semi-hidden things.
Windows RT was nonsensical : it was like they were ashamed of the tablet software it ran, so they grafted a IE + Office only desktop to make it more useful. So, it sucked both as a tablet and a desktop, and was undesirable if bought without the keyboard. They didn't make a cheaper, tablet-only tablet i.e. an oversized Windows Phone, so Android was free to capture the entirety of the non iOS market. People did buy iOS and Android tablet-only tablets, until moving to 5" and 6" phones mostly. Not sure if anything would have been different if Microsoft had actually attempted to make tablets that people wanted to buy, but they sure failed hard and had a better opportunity in 2012 than now, since people now are locked into Android/iOS-only internet "apps" and weren't so much back then.
Well, I'm talking about mobile-only networked "apps" and otherwise the "CloudBook" might succeed has a laptop-lite but won't replace the need people have for an Android thing on the side.
In theory, Microsoft might sell a license upgrade to Windows 10 Pro (perhaps with a requirement of 64GB or more minimum main storage. Hopefully some laptops come with an M.2 slot for either main or additional storage).
You would then run Suse-on-linux-on-Windows or Ubuntu-on-linux-on-Windows if not cygwin, or even try to install some NFS or sshfs client on Windows proper if that is an option.
That's not what you were talking about, but it would be a somewhat honorable way to allow to make the hardware more useful.
Alternatively, the trusted bootloader protection (TPM module) could be disabled ; it's very common that it can be turned off on PC hardware anyway, but perhaps that's wishful thinking here. Alternatively again, you would have to use a signed linux or Windows or BSD installer.
Well, lots of what if's.
Since you asked, analog video standard contain "useless" lines that won't be displayed, since some time is needed for the deflector thing on the Y axis to go back from the bottom to the top of its range. Thus, NTSC (or PAL 60, used for consoles, computers but not broadcast) have an effective 480i resolution not 525i.
Then, classic console have some hackish way to "cancel" the display of each other line (while getting rid of the 1-line offset between two fields) and so achieve a real 240p. A broadcast station might not have approved a messed up signal like that, but for the cable between a console and TV, it did the job and that's we had anyway.
On e.g. a SNES or Megadrive connected through RGB SCART ("PAL", but not really, just PAL res and refresh, and straight RGB signal) you would see how convincing the display is, not unlike 320x200 VGA on monitors of that age. It might be 288p at 50Hz though, with small black bars on top and bottom.
Maybe the console's or computer's vertical resolution was 192, 200, 224, 240 sometimes so I guess there's letterboxing or overscan or something. Later consoles moved to straight 480i60 and 576i50 it seems (and less common 480p options, or 1080i on original Xbox)
This quite reminds me of the local news section on other website, celebrating the highs of daily life. Following is a recent article (continued on web site, so I avoid pasting it entirely)
"Man Tries Using Pink 6-Pound Bowling Ball To Great Amusement"
WEST ORANGE, NJ—Seemingly knowing full well that the relatively small and light ball was not designed for someone of his size, sources confirmed Tuesday that 25-year-old Darren Foerstner tried using a pink 6-pound bowling ball for one frame, all to the incredible amusement of friends and onlookers at Eagle Rock Lanes bowling alley. “When Darren walked up to the lane holding that little pink ball, we were all thinking, ‘Wait a minute, that ball is meant for children,’ but then we realized what he was doing, and everyone just started cracking up,” said friend Kelly Lingard, adding that, as part of his lighthearted and exceptionally entertaining display, Foerstner demonstrated that his thumb and fingers were unable to fit into the smaller holes of the pink ball, forcing him to palm it with his entire hand.
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http://www.theonion.com/articl...
One thing good, the "hardware enablement stack" : this gives newer linux and Xorg every six monthes (till 18.04 is out), and 16.04.2 is the first version that uses the first iteration of it. This brings supposedly better support for Intel Skylake/Kaby Lake graphics, AMD graphics (except if you got GCN 1.0 hardware like Radeon 7970 and R7 240, then you're fucked) and I guess basic 2D without crashes and black screen if you've a recent nvidia. (Advice for nvidia has always been to install the nvidia driver, unless your card is a few years old and you're satisfied with the graphics)
Freezing Unity and not developing new versions reduces the amount of work to keep it secure so that is neutral to security updates, hopefully. Staying on 16.04 forever means same GTK, Cairo, Qt etc. libraries or at worst x.y.2 is replaced with x.y.3.
This may sound like wishful thinking, if not that Ubuntu does have some resources and skimping on security updates for an LTS would be the worst press ever (as if Windows blocked all security updates if you didn't satisfy their political standards. Wait..)
You said gpu graphics acceleration and I counter with the sorry states of driver when you don't have the right graphics card, and the stack built around X11 (and I think X11 is great, just that Wayland might be a better idea if you want to make the desktop GPU accelerated and catch up with Windows Vista and Android 2.x)
In fact, if you want to display some rectangular area of crap and this tasks consists in "copy window's content into a buffer", involving a crappy OpenGL driver and shitty interfacing libraries or even a copy into another buffer will only make it slower.
Get Cinnamon, disable animations and cry at the CPU waste shown in "top".
It's also RAM hungry and does more disk I/O than a 2D desktop.
It may be that not everything has to be new all the time. Many uninspired people likely are making chessboards and go-bans as we speak.
It's sobering to think that Mafia from 2002 was already a (semi) open world, mission based game with good graphics and recognizably human characters. So, a bit like Watch Dogs but with slower cars and a better game. Battlefield 1942 came out the same year. Now, 2002 is not that early as far as games go but watch the current date. Scary?
There was even some hype for a Star Wars Battlefront game, which is from 2015, DLC up to 2016. They made it look like it's an all new game. But Star Wars : Battlefront came out in 2004 for fuck's sake! It had a colon in the title though. The premise is the same as far as I know, team deathmatch between evil empire and rebels on the internet.
Phones may have a few good games or well advertised games, but otherwise there's a million crapware, phones that are too slow, phones that are so fast they don't make some games better, throttling issues, battery issues, control issues. It's like PC gaming in that few people relatively to the population will ever play some high end game (but like PC gaming, 1% of the user base playing a game is 10+ million players/customers)
For one thing, Nintendo Switch has a "low res" display according to some but well, not : many people have a phone around 800x480 res, or a 1366x768 laptop, and even an iPhone 5S has less pixels in both directions (but more ppi) than the Switch.
It's true than phones may overtake it but with caveats I enumerated and also Moore's law is slowing down. They're not actually getting 2x better all the time. But you're probably right that gaming will get better, bigger, higher quality on phones :).
The Switch's not all lost though : Nintendo can do the same thing that MS and Sony did, put out a new console that's compatible with the current one, so much as they'd be able to call it a Switch. Nintendo did it themselves before, with the Game Boy Color and New 3DS for instance. Nvidia will always be making Tegra, although the successors to Switch's Tegra are bigger, higher end, or with image processing crap for cars etc. so they'll have to make a custom one for Nintendo this time, like AMD did the first and second time for MS and Sony.