Special hardware might still be a technical possibility, with PowerVR demonstrating ray tracing acceleration. But all high performance consumer hardware that's left is x86 and big name GPU vendors. Boring but it's where it's at..
I miss games that had what would be a low budget today but felt like they had high production value. You could have low res 2D games but with high attention to graphics design, voices, live actors.. Indie may be interesting, now please do the same with a finished game, a publisher and run at 60 fps on a 1 ghz CPU if the game is simple:)
I feel like there's too much stuff in your list! The only stuff missing is e.g. the local bus company's app, that of the bank. Even government/welfare apps etc. Trading broker's app. Grocery delivery. All that stuff is made for the duopoly. Although there's no big reason why a mobile site with a shortcut on the home screen wouldn't do the job for most of these, hence why I'm pissed at the death of Firefox OS. Native apps (including Java/C# here) were vitally needed when they needed to support a single core and 256MB RAM and also the javascript engines were more crappy back then. Perhaps with Web Assembly that will make the news again. Although yes maybe web apps are technically despicable but well I'm typing on the Slashdot "web app" right now.
Weird, on this continent what they call daylight is 6500K. It's the brightest sunlight in e..g. a bright clear August day - but funnily it's considered warm for a monitor.
There is a fair improvement on DirectX 12 games, alas tied to that Windows 10 crap but the story might be similar with Vulkan. Also perhaps works with some recent DX11 games and/or drivers. AMD GCN since the now old 7970 / 280X has had some good support for async computing which used to be just wasted silicon. Now they're partly catching up the nvidia GPUs, although still fairly more power hungry. Right now you could get a Radeon Nano (not too power hungry) with a 1080p 144Hz screen and that'd be about the best PC gaming you can get (with an Intel CPU, i3 6100 being fairly great...) but that's fairly expensive for a toy.
IBM did not bother creating a mobile chipset for the G5, which by the way was a cut down POWER4 variant and thus already some "big iron" hardware for the desktops. It could have gone on including in laptops, but such stuff costs billions and Unix workstations were dead, OS/2 and NT on PPC were dead. Meanwhile x86 are lowish power / high peformance and used on most laptops, desktops, servers not just mac pro and imac. Also IBM went to making 5GHz speed demons:) They'd have had to throw out that line of work, or to make a separate line of low power / high performance designs, only for Apple and perhaps consoles. So I guess IBM might gave done it, but for a zillion dollars. A beefed up, overclocked small CPU, they also did that for the consoles (PS3, X360). It was a bad CPU, later thr Wii U CPU did about the same job at less than half clock speed. I'm sure you can make a nicely usable small Macbook with such level of performance but this wouldn't compete with Core 2 Duo and later.
I like to think that if some country like Iran got rid of the death penalty it would be great news. See, why not give death penalty to child rapists? After that where to put the line in the sand? Even death penalty for adultery makes sense because think-of-the-children. I would like to reserve the death penalty to those who cut the spaghetti in half : that pisses me off and you can't uncut the spaghetti. Well regardless full abolition is easiest since there are no edge cases. Some countries may retain death penalty for high treason only but is that such a good idea?, I would almost agree but the exceptional circumstances it might be used in might be a good occasion for misusing it (such as a putsch situation).
You concept of not being a human being does not make any sense to me. What does that even mean? The closest notion is that of the Untermensch, which was a bunch of bollocks invented by power thirsty men. And yes Hitler was a human being. In fact no non-human animal is able to do what a Hitler or Breivik did which makes the notion of a non-human human even more meaningless. As for the relatives? It's not for them to judge. Hard feelings don't make murder legal. Only self-defense murder is allowed.
I remember briefly reading about jazz bands suffering a lot. Live bands face huge competition from dead people. Of course that is the case whether said dead people are in public domain or not.
Somehow I think that newer hardware will handle many newer versions just fine. If you have early hardware with say 1GHz CPU, 256MB RAM and slow flash then sure version n+2 will suck. If years later your hardware has a 2GHz CPU that's 3x faster than the old one, 2GB RAM and much faster flash, software version m+3 is more likely to run smooth.
So ipad 2 is fucked, but you can e.g. run Windows 10 on a 2006 PC, whereas you can't run Vista on a 1997 PC.
Quad core needs have already been a concern, with some games even not launching on dual cores. Fortunately the i3 is a 4-thread CPU, with huge gains next to the dual core dual thread version of the same. In most games it's about the best CPU.
The issue now is that a slow dual core is mostly good for everything, but games need a really fast CPU and preferably a recent version of Windows. A slow quad core will be barely usable. Those who say it's only about the GPU are wrong. That's a bummer if you otherwise don't need to upgrade your PC
I was concerned the e10s feature would lead to that Chrome dystopia of 4GB or 6GB use etc. , but it turns out only one process is added : Web Content, like plugin-container was added many versions ago (mainly used for Flash). Back then the latter one was a big improvement. You could go from hourly crashes to daily crashes. Now it seems more like I get a monthly crash.
It's funny how things actually get better from year to year.
E10s does not makes the browser much faster, it prevents some slowdowns instead. The memory management seems solid. I don't remember what's the plans for palemoon but they likely could build on that firefox + XUL + e10s for a newer version.
With 512 MB? I'd trim everything else down : lxde or fluxbox (with pcmanfm), wicd instead of network manager (or just nothing if you're wired), alsa instead of pulseaudio, and use Firefox.
Don't expect both full browser features and low RAM use. This ain't 2005. Use dillo if you want something fast but it's just a step above text browsers. Want something most robust?, you should be using a browser that runs on a 2GB+ computer through ssh -X or RDP.
A bicycle helmet will certainly help you if head meets the ground. So, don't hit the fucking ground? Easy enough most times, even when getting hit by a car in some circumstances. But if you're doing a daily commute and that day you didn't get your sleep or whatever.. Maybe you're at night or in low light. You could have an avoidable fall even with no cars around, just because you're concerned about something else, you're doing the trip without a need to pay conscious attention. Some freak bump on the road might get you, or riding at full speed into some construction area, whatever. By all means don't use a helmet to run errands. But I think it is worth it specifically to get to work.
SLI was Scan Line Interleave back in 1998. (and the Voodoo5 used small horizontal bands of pixels rather than straight scanlines). Then nvidia decided to revived it years later, but deciding the letters would stand for Scalable Link Interface, which doesn't really mean anything in particular. It never interleaved scanlines anymore.
Agreed. I will put these developers in a queue, behind those that are interested in the current story.
Bet those developers use xterm (or at best urxvt), because for some reason tabbed terminal emulators that use gtk2 | gtk3 | Qt for the right-click menu are evil.
Sometimes the laptop has a round plug that is the same as on other laptops, or on stuff like the Bose Sound Link mono speaker. Like most DC inputs on random electronics (but those exist in multiple diameters). Some audio amplifiers can be powered by a laptop power supply. Voltage is almost always 19V. Seems true of the "motherboard brands" and a few other Asian ones, it varies.
There are a few desktop motherboards with 19V DC input, easier to find is ASRock AM1H-ITX I'd try if possible to get a laptop with same connector.
If that idea holds, then the extracted revenues may be cause high CO2 output or need high CO2 output for them to be. E.g. consumer buys a hybrid car, saves 18% CO2 per mile, gets paid by the government for buying the car, drives it 10% more since it's so much "green" and better ; that still results in a 10% CO2 savings at use. But making the car and batteries released twice the CO2 than making the non-hybrid car. So, the hybrid car is more expensive and worse for the environment.
Other example, Germany runs a terrible energy policy. CO2 emissions increase. But has lots of solar panels and/or wind to show off (not that they're necessarily bad in themselves..)
In both cases the problem does NOT come from wanting to reduce CO2, rather it's because of PRETENDING to. That's fake environmentalism, "green" capitalism a.k.a. greenwashing which is a bit like asking the tobacco industry for health advice.
Your last bit about monoculture is interesting but I fear it is not improving.
Sure Windows has less of a stranglehold, but while on the desktop we're relatively free, it's mobile (phones) that has turned into a monoculture that gets stronger by the year.
I'm pissed that Firefox OS has died, which makes me question the future of any other free mobile OS, such as Ubuntu Phone. It's awesome how Firefox OS was always that red headed bastard child the Slashdot user base would always shit and piss loudly on, but Android always gets a free pass.
It's as if they care about CPU hungry programs and video games to run on a cell phone (what you need Java and Native run-times for), whereas others are more worried about basic functionality and basic security or not being eavesdropped on, which Android does NOT guarantee. In fact running Windows is better than running Android : Windows is proprietary and has security updates, Android is proprietary and has no security updates.
I guess Android users can rationalize their using Android because they hardly have other choices (like desktop computing mid 90s), or they feel smug because they chose the right device, or they feel smart because they used a security exploit against their device to "root" it, or they crawled through shady forums to flashrootjailzapbreakburn the custom JZXHZYY "ROM" (I thought btw that ROM meant "read-only memory").
For instance KDE 4 is about to be replaced and will die, likely - or has been replaced already depending on your distro. KDE 5 might have good potential, it looks good on screenshots. Yet it would be nice to have some announcement that if I choose to convert to it, then it will be still around in ~12 years. Even if a Qt6 comes out then perhaps it's time to not care about it, the desktop and file manager / core apps can stay on Qt5?
Use the wrong USB cable or power brick, and the laptop is likely to lose battery charge while you're using it. So you will still need to carry your power brick with your laptop, but I agree it's an improvement. Especially over the hateful use of custom connectors by HP and Dell.
One problem is two memory slots are needed to get the full graphical performance (dual channel ram)
With a single channel DDR4 design, one good compromise would be 4GB integrated on the motherboard, and one empty slot. 4GB is well enough for grandma use, spreadsheet etc. and running Windows Update ; an additional 4GB, 8GB or 16GB can be installed by the user or the OEM. Better yet put a tiny jumper or a BIOS option to disable the on-board RAM. The PC needs to keep going even if the on-board RAM has bad cells.
Slashdot Mirror
Special hardware might still be a technical possibility, with PowerVR demonstrating ray tracing acceleration.
But all high performance consumer hardware that's left is x86 and big name GPU vendors.
Boring but it's where it's at..
I miss games that had what would be a low budget today but felt like they had high production value. You could have low res 2D games but with high attention to graphics design, voices, live actors.. :)
Indie may be interesting, now please do the same with a finished game, a publisher and run at 60 fps on a 1 ghz CPU if the game is simple
I feel like there's too much stuff in your list! The only stuff missing is e.g. the local bus company's app, that of the bank. Even government/welfare apps etc. Trading broker's app. Grocery delivery. All that stuff is made for the duopoly. Although there's no big reason why a mobile site with a shortcut on the home screen wouldn't do the job for most of these, hence why I'm pissed at the death of Firefox OS. Native apps (including Java/C# here) were vitally needed when they needed to support a single core and 256MB RAM and also the javascript engines were more crappy back then.
Perhaps with Web Assembly that will make the news again. Although yes maybe web apps are technically despicable but well I'm typing on the Slashdot "web app" right now.
Weird, on this continent what they call daylight is 6500K. It's the brightest sunlight in e..g. a bright clear August day - but funnily it's considered warm for a monitor.
There is a fair improvement on DirectX 12 games, alas tied to that Windows 10 crap but the story might be similar with Vulkan. Also perhaps works with some recent DX11 games and/or drivers.
AMD GCN since the now old 7970 / 280X has had some good support for async computing which used to be just wasted silicon. Now they're partly catching up the nvidia GPUs, although still fairly more power hungry. Right now you could get a Radeon Nano (not too power hungry) with a 1080p 144Hz screen and that'd be about the best PC gaming you can get (with an Intel CPU, i3 6100 being fairly great...) but that's fairly expensive for a toy.
IBM did not bother creating a mobile chipset for the G5, which by the way was a cut down POWER4 variant and thus already some "big iron" hardware for the desktops. It could have gone on including in laptops, but such stuff costs billions and Unix workstations were dead, OS/2 and NT on PPC were dead. Meanwhile x86 are lowish power / high peformance and used on most laptops, desktops, servers not just mac pro and imac. :)
Also IBM went to making 5GHz speed demons
They'd have had to throw out that line of work, or to make a separate line of low power / high performance designs, only for Apple and perhaps consoles. So I guess IBM might gave done it, but for a zillion dollars.
A beefed up, overclocked small CPU, they also did that for the consoles (PS3, X360). It was a bad CPU, later thr Wii U CPU did about the same job at less than half clock speed. I'm sure you can make a nicely usable small Macbook with such level of performance but this wouldn't compete with Core 2 Duo and later.
I like to think that if some country like Iran got rid of the death penalty it would be great news.
See, why not give death penalty to child rapists? After that where to put the line in the sand? Even death penalty for adultery makes sense because think-of-the-children. I would like to reserve the death penalty to those who cut the spaghetti in half : that pisses me off and you can't uncut the spaghetti. Well regardless full abolition is easiest since there are no edge cases.
Some countries may retain death penalty for high treason only but is that such a good idea?, I would almost agree but the exceptional circumstances it might be used in might be a good occasion for misusing it (such as a putsch situation).
You concept of not being a human being does not make any sense to me. What does that even mean?
The closest notion is that of the Untermensch, which was a bunch of bollocks invented by power thirsty men. And yes Hitler was a human being. In fact no non-human animal is able to do what a Hitler or Breivik did which makes the notion of a non-human human even more meaningless. As for the relatives? It's not for them to judge. Hard feelings don't make murder legal. Only self-defense murder is allowed.
I remember briefly reading about jazz bands suffering a lot. Live bands face huge competition from dead people.
Of course that is the case whether said dead people are in public domain or not.
Somehow I think that newer hardware will handle many newer versions just fine. If you have early hardware with say 1GHz CPU, 256MB RAM and slow flash then sure version n+2 will suck. If years later your hardware has a 2GHz CPU that's 3x faster than the old one, 2GB RAM and much faster flash, software version m+3 is more likely to run smooth.
So ipad 2 is fucked, but you can e.g. run Windows 10 on a 2006 PC, whereas you can't run Vista on a 1997 PC.
But it's a beta. Version 1.1 of the final game plus latest graphics driver will likely run well
Quad core needs have already been a concern, with some games even not launching on dual cores. Fortunately the i3 is a 4-thread CPU, with huge gains next to the dual core dual thread version of the same. In most games it's about the best CPU.
The issue now is that a slow dual core is mostly good for everything, but games need a really fast CPU and preferably a recent version of Windows. A slow quad core will be barely usable.
Those who say it's only about the GPU are wrong. That's a bummer if you otherwise don't need to upgrade your PC
I found it fully intelligible with the wrong indent
I was concerned the e10s feature would lead to that Chrome dystopia of 4GB or 6GB use etc. , but it turns out only one process is added : Web Content, like plugin-container was added many versions ago (mainly used for Flash).
Back then the latter one was a big improvement. You could go from hourly crashes to daily crashes.
Now it seems more like I get a monthly crash.
It's funny how things actually get better from year to year.
E10s does not makes the browser much faster, it prevents some slowdowns instead. The memory management seems solid.
I don't remember what's the plans for palemoon but they likely could build on that firefox + XUL + e10s for a newer version.
With 512 MB?
I'd trim everything else down : lxde or fluxbox (with pcmanfm), wicd instead of network manager (or just nothing if you're wired), alsa instead of pulseaudio, and use Firefox.
Don't expect both full browser features and low RAM use. This ain't 2005.
Use dillo if you want something fast but it's just a step above text browsers.
Want something most robust?, you should be using a browser that runs on a 2GB+ computer through ssh -X or RDP.
A bicycle helmet will certainly help you if head meets the ground. So, don't hit the fucking ground? Easy enough most times, even when getting hit by a car in some circumstances. But if you're doing a daily commute and that day you didn't get your sleep or whatever.. Maybe you're at night or in low light. You could have an avoidable fall even with no cars around, just because you're concerned about something else, you're doing the trip without a need to pay conscious attention. Some freak bump on the road might get you, or riding at full speed into some construction area, whatever.
By all means don't use a helmet to run errands. But I think it is worth it specifically to get to work.
SLI was Scan Line Interleave back in 1998. (and the Voodoo5 used small horizontal bands of pixels rather than straight scanlines). Then nvidia decided to revived it years later, but deciding the letters would stand for Scalable Link Interface, which doesn't really mean anything in particular. It never interleaved scanlines anymore.
They let you travel on the bus's roof back then?
Why can't we have good things.
Agreed. I will put these developers in a queue, behind those that are interested in the current story.
Bet those developers use xterm (or at best urxvt), because for some reason tabbed terminal emulators that use gtk2 | gtk3 | Qt for the right-click menu are evil.
Sometimes the laptop has a round plug that is the same as on other laptops, or on stuff like the Bose Sound Link mono speaker. Like most DC inputs on random electronics (but those exist in multiple diameters). Some audio amplifiers can be powered by a laptop power supply. Voltage is almost always 19V. Seems true of the "motherboard brands" and a few other Asian ones, it varies.
There are a few desktop motherboards with 19V DC input, easier to find is ASRock AM1H-ITX
I'd try if possible to get a laptop with same connector.
If that idea holds, then the extracted revenues may be cause high CO2 output or need high CO2 output for them to be.
E.g. consumer buys a hybrid car, saves 18% CO2 per mile, gets paid by the government for buying the car, drives it 10% more since it's so much "green" and better ; that still results in a 10% CO2 savings at use. But making the car and batteries released twice the CO2 than making the non-hybrid car.
So, the hybrid car is more expensive and worse for the environment.
Other example, Germany runs a terrible energy policy. CO2 emissions increase. But has lots of solar panels and/or wind to show off (not that they're necessarily bad in themselves..)
In both cases the problem does NOT come from wanting to reduce CO2, rather it's because of PRETENDING to. That's fake environmentalism, "green" capitalism a.k.a. greenwashing which is a bit like asking the tobacco industry for health advice.
Your last bit about monoculture is interesting but I fear it is not improving.
Sure Windows has less of a stranglehold, but while on the desktop we're relatively free, it's mobile (phones) that has turned into a monoculture that gets stronger by the year.
I'm pissed that Firefox OS has died, which makes me question the future of any other free mobile OS, such as Ubuntu Phone. It's awesome how Firefox OS was always that red headed bastard child the Slashdot user base would always shit and piss loudly on, but Android always gets a free pass.
It's as if they care about CPU hungry programs and video games to run on a cell phone (what you need Java and Native run-times for), whereas others are more worried about basic functionality and basic security or not being eavesdropped on, which Android does NOT guarantee.
In fact running Windows is better than running Android : Windows is proprietary and has security updates, Android is proprietary and has no security updates.
I guess Android users can rationalize their using Android because they hardly have other choices (like desktop computing mid 90s), or they feel smug because they chose the right device, or they feel smart because they used a security exploit against their device to "root" it, or they crawled through shady forums to flashrootjailzapbreakburn the custom JZXHZYY "ROM" (I thought btw that ROM meant "read-only memory").
So what?
Are you suggesting we ignore missing or wrong data and put a bunch of zeros or 0xFFFFFFFF in there instead?
For instance KDE 4 is about to be replaced and will die, likely - or has been replaced already depending on your distro.
KDE 5 might have good potential, it looks good on screenshots. Yet it would be nice to have some announcement that if I choose to convert to it, then it will be still around in ~12 years. Even if a Qt6 comes out then perhaps it's time to not care about it, the desktop and file manager / core apps can stay on Qt5?
Use the wrong USB cable or power brick, and the laptop is likely to lose battery charge while you're using it.
So you will still need to carry your power brick with your laptop, but I agree it's an improvement. Especially over the hateful use of custom connectors by HP and Dell.
One problem is two memory slots are needed to get the full graphical performance (dual channel ram)
With a single channel DDR4 design, one good compromise would be 4GB integrated on the motherboard, and one empty slot.
4GB is well enough for grandma use, spreadsheet etc. and running Windows Update ; an additional 4GB, 8GB or 16GB can be installed by the user or the OEM.
Better yet put a tiny jumper or a BIOS option to disable the on-board RAM. The PC needs to keep going even if the on-board RAM has bad cells.