Some of it may be useful, especially energy-related such as closing and opening window blinds, turning off/on heat automatically (even using a weather forecast?). But the rest seems to be crap like a touchscreen mirror that teaches you how to brush teeth, music that follows you around if you have a mansion and no family or friends, a fridge that thinks it's a mainframe or any contraption they can come up with. Will we really need, eventually, a conveyor belt that feeds bread slices to a toaster, then a cartoony white-glove-hand seizes the toasted bread that flies out of the toaster and hand it to a butter-knifing-and-spreading robot? Will we spend our time to reconfigure the robot to use peanut butter or jam, rather than do the task ourselves?
Now a bread dispenser that cuts a slice for me would be fun I guess. Sliced bread is the worst invention since sliced bread : if you slice real bread beforehand, it will just go stale and hard faster. Also it sucks when you want a thick slice but all the slices available are thin ones. So, here comes the smart bread slicing machine. It either has a touchscreen, or you pull your smartphone to ask for the desired thickness and number of slices, with options for thickness randomization or custom thickness distributions. Great! Now I can't hurt myself. Although I could hurt myself when doing the cleaning and maintenance of my Bread Slicer 2000, or when it jams. Also I think I should share my bread stats on Facebook. Hey friend, I crumbed you three times today! Why didn't you answer or comment on me?
In the "real" world there are such fine pieces of art as "smart switches" or power bars that turn everything off if you turn the TV off. (Some might even add an inconspicuous killer switch next to a light switch, for guests to press when they're trying to find their keys). So, your set-top box or ISP box gets its power cut while in the middle of writing to disk ; DVR recording is lost, downloads are interrupted, NAS shares are dead and when you turn the thing on you watch the poor thing show a spinner on its VFD screen forever while it fscks the file system.
I didn't know what was a Viewmaster, and I looked it up. It's a passive viewer for stereoscopic stills, this existed much earlier in the 19th century. "3D" has been trying to take over for about 170 years.
I like that this is getting almost 100 km (officially). Most electric bicycles have about half that which means : you can go 50 km away but can't go back? - you can, but you will be hauling a lot of dead weight on 50 km. Short range electric bike would suck ass, unless it fits your need e.g. short commute in moutain / hilly area.
In some cases.. It's either a "good" thing or a bad thing, but if you have to carry an electric bike upstairs (and better, with days worth of groceries) that's quite the work out. So that you can get it plugged into the mains.. and to not let a fecking $2000 bike hang around in the street.
I had to put an ad blocker on a Windows computer the other day, because YOUTUBE pushed an ad that said "One of your drivers is outdated", localized in our language. It was not emulating Windows dialogs, but to an untrained user looked like some sort of system prompt anyway which might have lead to crapware or adware be installed, but could as well be a tech support scam.
The ad scared me, so I thought the end user didn't deserve to be used like that. Another ad somewhere may have told him he had a virus (you used to laugh that crap off ten years ago, but well) I suppose the alternative could be that I design and write a three-month crash course about computers (starting with "the computer has a CPU, memory and I/O. The CPU runs a programme made of machine language instructions.."), Windows and the Internet. Then teach the course over monthes, and evaluate my friend. Or take one minute to install an ad blocker. (and very few other tasks, such as reversing the free antivirus's decision to lock itself, and unpinning the blue E from the task bar)
In French law there is "author's right". It seems to be about entirely the same as copyright (afterall there are old international conventions) but the creator may get to keep a moral right. It's likely a good thing but it's so that the creator gets honor and attribution from it not more money. You can sign away your other rights (afaik).
Pulse jets were a dead end technology anyway. I had seen the one with the bicycle. I thought it was powerful ENOUGH for such a vehicle, or even downright evil! I agree that most of the energy is hilariously wasted. The technology was only ever used to terrorize civilians, but it was not long till detecting and shooting down flying pulse jets was a routine task. Perhaps there would be value in using one to scare birds away!
So buy a freezer? buy a slow cooker? (buy a $1000 set of clothes to get a job interview and then a job) I forgot.. buy a meat grinder? I didn't know that was cheap, and it takes room.
Just kidding! Bulking up, flavouring, greasing up, proteining.. mmmm, those are nice things indeed! Although the latter word isn't a real word.
Re. the freezer : if you're poor it's possible to have one, but you would likely depend on your Land Lord having chosen to include one. Small kitchen fridges (waist height) with a freezer do exist and the freezer is real sometimes, albeit small. Just enough room for an ice cream, a pizza and the shit ton of frost that's in there. I'm sure I could do what I saw my grandma do : she cooks vegetable soup then freezes it.
The self-powered slow cookers / crock pots I see on image search look like greatly useful piece of kit. On this continent they're likely uncommon (and if you're poor : are you going to put it on the stove? on the floor?)
I don't know the fuck why but beans are like 5x more expensive than canned beans here, so canned beans it is and there isn't much need for cooking.
One issue that's a bit sad is many people will be a single 20-something then 30-something, or a single mom with one or two kids etc. and thus doing a three-meal chicken (or just two meals) isn't much practical.
Define healthy foods? Some actually are nasty (fat-free foods) and some are great but if you only ever eat the same thing that's going to be bad no matter what.
Also, let's say you've been donated food already (by a charity or family), or dumpster dived a great lot of it today, then it wouldn't make sense to buy over again what you have e.g. vegetables when there is scavenged vegetables already for dinner. Better buy side things like mayonnaise, condiment, onions, oil etc. and yes beer. Next time you might have all the side things but badly need the main things so you won't buy what you bought last time.
Micro-managing seems rather stupid. Why not jail the poor? (like U.K. circa 19th century)
Also, the rich don't get their tax breaks on fake-money cards that don't buy beer or cigars.
That is true and is sometimes a showstopper, sometimes not. But you would need very little more than "User interface sugar" (to borrow programming slang that describes certain features as syntaxic sugar)
For example : create a browser user profile, which you'll call "youtube profile" for instance. Create a shortcut to Firefox -p "youtube profile". Attribute it some youtube icon you may find on the web (or even in/usr/share !). Set up your browser profile some more (e.g. persona background to recognize it more easily, ad blocker etc.) Now you've turned youtube into a segregated "web app"! with two important benefits : the youtube history is segregated from your main browser's youtube history (or google history), and since you're now running two separate browsers the CPU bottlenecks are segregated. (if you use firefox with software video decoding you should know what I mean...)
One thing missing would be the ability to use a "favicon" as the icon that ends up being used in the task bar. Also, the browser won't create shortcuts for you. You can use Firefox alpha for the m?ain browser : it has a huge performance increase due to e10s, and it makes the task bar icons different (blue firefox logo)
In all : what if I had to use browser based IM? I'd be okay. Imagine you had to run your chat program in Microsoft QBASIC. That would kind of suck, but we would manage it.
It was a pain in the butt to install Windows 7 Pro and not have SUA available. Not that I really had used SFU before (on XP Pro), but I just wanted the shell and a few commands etc. Fuck! (the "pro" feature was to not come with minesweeper and hearts etc.)
Windows 7 was actually a pretty shitty release! Network settings are impossible to find unless you run "control ncpa.cpl" or make a shortcut to it. Takes three or four fucking hours to update. Every day use's kinda slow with TWO GIGABYTES of memory. Shitty UI you can't change back here and there (such as "show desktop" on the wrong side unless you get to good pseudo-hacking lengths to get another one). But of course it's Windows thus it never crashes, your video drivers are perfect, old games run at 100 fps on crappy hardware etc. Despite that I would say most of the love for Windows 7 is Stockholm's syndrome.
and d) : "But you choose the wrong version! Non-LTS Ubuntu is considered unusable, now. Wait for 16.04. But perhaps you really need to wait for 16.04.1. But wait, you should be on 14.04.5". "By the way, your desktop needs to be 5 to 10 year-old, but the graphics card is best if 2 to 4 year-old". "Why did you install SoftwareFoo version 2.9? It's a transitional package. Don't do that!" "SoftwareFoo version 3.0 has been released! We removed the popular support for tabs, the menu bar and added exciting new features. It now murders puppies and mutilates unmarried women."
There's also assembling your own hardware, in which case there is no Windows to wipe out. Newegg kind of on-line store that will assemble a PC if you ask it to, or a local and physical shop. Quite a few million PCs are like that (with most of them ending up with Windows still)
That's my main reason for having a few words against uTorrent. The software itself, even perhaps the original installation, I could live with that. But it is the software that introduced me to "software update wants to bundle crap", and that scared me away somewhat.
I also wonder if "bundled" software is considered normal because perhaps it does stuff like most Android software or Javascript does rather than being full-on malware. I remember that in the late 90s/early 00s all forms of spyware were to be considered bad or virus-like, and also the crap that installed without your consent tended to open Internet Explorer pop-ups on its own (porn or otherwise), tried to dial a very expensive number to steal your money, replaced your web search (wait, this still exists right?).
I also have a friend who basically only uses youtube, file management, Windows Media Player (because that's what comes up), and email like once a month. He basically will never want to install anything, but there's a Firefox installed. He asked me about messages like something says a driver needs to be updated. I checked that one and it was a youtube advertisement! Now that's very banal, but I was surprised still to see a link (in localized language) to probable malware/crapware/badware hanging casually on one of the top 5 web sites.
So, for a user of the "don't install me anything!" kind who doesn't go to porn sites either there's still danger lurking around. So I had to install the ad blocker to protect against potential malware served on YOUTUBE, despite not giving a fuck about the ads on that computer (huge CPU/RAM resources available, etc.)
hum, 256kbps audio is 32 KB per second. 128 GB is 4 million times that, so 4 million seconds, which divided by 86400 gives 46.3 days of audio. Sounds like a scary big number but it gets about possible to listen to all of it in a year. It's also 1111 hours of audio, which would amount to well over a thousand CDs. Now let's imagine all music is spread perfectly evenly between 20 genres. That's 55.5 hours of music per genre. So let's say you have 55 hours of rock music, they might be spread along only 20+ artists or bands.
Maybe that Skylake story is just to scare people into compliance. Also, no matter what Microsoft does you have to rely on Intel for those driver updates.
Xming is a local X11 server, as evidenced by windows showing on your desktop? Perhaps there isn't anything worth using with it other than remote ssh sessions, I don't know of X11 Windows software.
A large collection of music in multiple genres at bitrate from 192 to 256 kbps takes a fair share of that. Storing and playing music on computers was a fairly mundane thing 12 years ago. The individual data is small enough to be workable even if the storage is horribly slow, or through DSL upload, or through USB1. (or even Bluetooth) There used to be a handheld media player with a friggin'g hard drive in it, made by a big firm. What was it already?:)
I think it's Vuze that I tried, from Azureus fame and what I got is an interface as overloaded as a Christmas tree, kind of want to be your Itunes, or Real Player or whatever. I remember when CD burning software attempted to be your "one true stop" for all your digital media, no thanks I just want to find the regular wizardless interface and burn the files.
Too many choices for that "one true way". Should I do everything from the torrent client, or a Windows CD burning program?, from Itunes? from an open source music player and library manager that also plays video? from a file server's web interface? from Metro apps on windows? from a smart TV? from a web browser?
Slashdot Mirror
Some of it may be useful, especially energy-related such as closing and opening window blinds, turning off/on heat automatically (even using a weather forecast?). But the rest seems to be crap like a touchscreen mirror that teaches you how to brush teeth, music that follows you around if you have a mansion and no family or friends, a fridge that thinks it's a mainframe or any contraption they can come up with. Will we really need, eventually, a conveyor belt that feeds bread slices to a toaster, then a cartoony white-glove-hand seizes the toasted bread that flies out of the toaster and hand it to a butter-knifing-and-spreading robot?
Will we spend our time to reconfigure the robot to use peanut butter or jam, rather than do the task ourselves?
Now a bread dispenser that cuts a slice for me would be fun I guess. Sliced bread is the worst invention since sliced bread : if you slice real bread beforehand, it will just go stale and hard faster. Also it sucks when you want a thick slice but all the slices available are thin ones.
So, here comes the smart bread slicing machine. It either has a touchscreen, or you pull your smartphone to ask for the desired thickness and number of slices, with options for thickness randomization or custom thickness distributions. Great! Now I can't hurt myself. Although I could hurt myself when doing the cleaning and maintenance of my Bread Slicer 2000, or when it jams. Also I think I should share my bread stats on Facebook. Hey friend, I crumbed you three times today! Why didn't you answer or comment on me?
In the "real" world there are such fine pieces of art as "smart switches" or power bars that turn everything off if you turn the TV off. (Some might even add an inconspicuous killer switch next to a light switch, for guests to press when they're trying to find their keys). So, your set-top box or ISP box gets its power cut while in the middle of writing to disk ; DVR recording is lost, downloads are interrupted, NAS shares are dead and when you turn the thing on you watch the poor thing show a spinner on its VFD screen forever while it fscks the file system.
I didn't know what was a Viewmaster, and I looked it up. It's a passive viewer for stereoscopic stills, this existed much earlier in the 19th century. "3D" has been trying to take over for about 170 years.
I like that this is getting almost 100 km (officially). Most electric bicycles have about half that which means : you can go 50 km away but can't go back? - you can, but you will be hauling a lot of dead weight on 50 km.
Short range electric bike would suck ass, unless it fits your need e.g. short commute in moutain / hilly area.
In some cases.. It's either a "good" thing or a bad thing, but if you have to carry an electric bike upstairs (and better, with days worth of groceries) that's quite the work out. So that you can get it plugged into the mains.. and to not let a fecking $2000 bike hang around in the street.
At that price financing gets needed.
The US risks ending with a Clinton vs Trump finale. One is an egotistical, violent maniac warmonger and right-winger. The other one is Donald Trump.
In much of the world there is a condition to be uncapped, which is : get a DSL, cable or fiber connection.
I had to put an ad blocker on a Windows computer the other day, because YOUTUBE pushed an ad that said "One of your drivers is outdated", localized in our language. It was not emulating Windows dialogs, but to an untrained user looked like some sort of system prompt anyway which might have lead to crapware or adware be installed, but could as well be a tech support scam.
The ad scared me, so I thought the end user didn't deserve to be used like that. Another ad somewhere may have told him he had a virus (you used to laugh that crap off ten years ago, but well)
I suppose the alternative could be that I design and write a three-month crash course about computers (starting with "the computer has a CPU, memory and I/O. The CPU runs a programme made of machine language instructions.."), Windows and the Internet. Then teach the course over monthes, and evaluate my friend.
Or take one minute to install an ad blocker. (and very few other tasks, such as reversing the free antivirus's decision to lock itself, and unpinning the blue E from the task bar)
In French law there is "author's right". It seems to be about entirely the same as copyright (afterall there are old international conventions) but the creator may get to keep a moral right. It's likely a good thing but it's so that the creator gets honor and attribution from it not more money. You can sign away your other rights (afaik).
Pulse jets were a dead end technology anyway.
I had seen the one with the bicycle. I thought it was powerful ENOUGH for such a vehicle, or even downright evil!
I agree that most of the energy is hilariously wasted.
The technology was only ever used to terrorize civilians, but it was not long till detecting and shooting down flying pulse jets was a routine task. Perhaps there would be value in using one to scare birds away!
So buy a freezer? buy a slow cooker? (buy a $1000 set of clothes to get a job interview and then a job)
I forgot.. buy a meat grinder? I didn't know that was cheap, and it takes room.
Just kidding!
Bulking up, flavouring, greasing up, proteining.. mmmm, those are nice things indeed! Although the latter word isn't a real word.
Re. the freezer : if you're poor it's possible to have one, but you would likely depend on your Land Lord having chosen to include one. Small kitchen fridges (waist height) with a freezer do exist and the freezer is real sometimes, albeit small. Just enough room for an ice cream, a pizza and the shit ton of frost that's in there. I'm sure I could do what I saw my grandma do : she cooks vegetable soup then freezes it.
The self-powered slow cookers / crock pots I see on image search look like greatly useful piece of kit. On this continent they're likely uncommon (and if you're poor : are you going to put it on the stove? on the floor?)
I don't know the fuck why but beans are like 5x more expensive than canned beans here, so canned beans it is and there isn't much need for cooking.
One issue that's a bit sad is many people will be a single 20-something then 30-something, or a single mom with one or two kids etc. and thus doing a three-meal chicken (or just two meals) isn't much practical.
Define healthy foods?
Some actually are nasty (fat-free foods) and some are great but if you only ever eat the same thing that's going to be bad no matter what.
Also, let's say you've been donated food already (by a charity or family), or dumpster dived a great lot of it today, then it wouldn't make sense to buy over again what you have e.g. vegetables when there is scavenged vegetables already for dinner. Better buy side things like mayonnaise, condiment, onions, oil etc. and yes beer.
Next time you might have all the side things but badly need the main things so you won't buy what you bought last time.
Micro-managing seems rather stupid. Why not jail the poor? (like U.K. circa 19th century)
Also, the rich don't get their tax breaks on fake-money cards that don't buy beer or cigars.
That is true and is sometimes a showstopper, sometimes not.
But you would need very little more than "User interface sugar" (to borrow programming slang that describes certain features as syntaxic sugar)
For example : create a browser user profile, which you'll call "youtube profile" for instance. Create a shortcut to Firefox -p "youtube profile". Attribute it some youtube icon you may find on the web (or even in /usr/share !). Set up your browser profile some more (e.g. persona background to recognize it more easily, ad blocker etc.)
Now you've turned youtube into a segregated "web app"! with two important benefits : the youtube history is segregated from your main browser's youtube history (or google history), and since you're now running two separate browsers the CPU bottlenecks are segregated. (if you use firefox with software video decoding you should know what I mean...)
One thing missing would be the ability to use a "favicon" as the icon that ends up being used in the task bar.
Also, the browser won't create shortcuts for you.
You can use Firefox alpha for the m?ain browser : it has a huge performance increase due to e10s, and it makes the task bar icons different (blue firefox logo)
In all : what if I had to use browser based IM? I'd be okay.
Imagine you had to run your chat program in Microsoft QBASIC. That would kind of suck, but we would manage it.
It was a pain in the butt to install Windows 7 Pro and not have SUA available. Not that I really had used SFU before (on XP Pro), but I just wanted the shell and a few commands etc.
Fuck!
(the "pro" feature was to not come with minesweeper and hearts etc.)
Windows 7 was actually a pretty shitty release!
Network settings are impossible to find unless you run "control ncpa.cpl" or make a shortcut to it. Takes three or four fucking hours to update. Every day use's kinda slow with TWO GIGABYTES of memory. Shitty UI you can't change back here and there (such as "show desktop" on the wrong side unless you get to good pseudo-hacking lengths to get another one). But of course it's Windows thus it never crashes, your video drivers are perfect, old games run at 100 fps on crappy hardware etc. Despite that I would say most of the love for Windows 7 is Stockholm's syndrome.
and d) : "But you choose the wrong version! Non-LTS Ubuntu is considered unusable, now. Wait for 16.04. But perhaps you really need to wait for 16.04.1. But wait, you should be on 14.04.5". "By the way, your desktop needs to be 5 to 10 year-old, but the graphics card is best if 2 to 4 year-old". "Why did you install SoftwareFoo version 2.9? It's a transitional package. Don't do that!"
"SoftwareFoo version 3.0 has been released! We removed the popular support for tabs, the menu bar and added exciting new features. It now murders puppies and mutilates unmarried women."
There's also assembling your own hardware, in which case there is no Windows to wipe out.
Newegg kind of on-line store that will assemble a PC if you ask it to, or a local and physical shop.
Quite a few million PCs are like that (with most of them ending up with Windows still)
In other words, this is Microsoft giving you a license to run Metro applications you've developed on Xbox One.
That's my main reason for having a few words against uTorrent.
The software itself, even perhaps the original installation, I could live with that.
But it is the software that introduced me to "software update wants to bundle crap", and that scared me away somewhat.
I also wonder if "bundled" software is considered normal because perhaps it does stuff like most Android software or Javascript does rather than being full-on malware.
I remember that in the late 90s/early 00s all forms of spyware were to be considered bad or virus-like, and also the crap that installed without your consent tended to open Internet Explorer pop-ups on its own (porn or otherwise), tried to dial a very expensive number to steal your money, replaced your web search (wait, this still exists right?).
I also have a friend who basically only uses youtube, file management, Windows Media Player (because that's what comes up), and email like once a month. He basically will never want to install anything, but there's a Firefox installed.
He asked me about messages like something says a driver needs to be updated.
I checked that one and it was a youtube advertisement! Now that's very banal, but I was surprised still to see a link (in localized language) to probable malware/crapware/badware hanging casually on one of the top 5 web sites.
So, for a user of the "don't install me anything!" kind who doesn't go to porn sites either there's still danger lurking around. So I had to install the ad blocker to protect against potential malware served on YOUTUBE, despite not giving a fuck about the ads on that computer (huge CPU/RAM resources available, etc.)
hum, 256kbps audio is 32 KB per second. 128 GB is 4 million times that, so 4 million seconds, which divided by 86400 gives 46.3 days of audio.
Sounds like a scary big number but it gets about possible to listen to all of it in a year.
It's also 1111 hours of audio, which would amount to well over a thousand CDs. Now let's imagine all music is spread perfectly evenly between 20 genres. That's 55.5 hours of music per genre. So let's say you have 55 hours of rock music, they might be spread along only 20+ artists or bands.
Spoti-what?
Maybe that Skylake story is just to scare people into compliance.
Also, no matter what Microsoft does you have to rely on Intel for those driver updates.
Windows : a better Linux than Linux!
Xming is a local X11 server, as evidenced by windows showing on your desktop? Perhaps there isn't anything worth using with it other than remote ssh sessions, I don't know of X11 Windows software.
I will tell the valet to remember that the unlock code is y04WhDlHff6A49yarVdYjVxhwlu5X9WEOw5MZBu2Flj9srrbbB2
8ZDAr1IN4lm7fvoe4Y9n
And to get the jumper cables stored inside the car.
A large collection of music in multiple genres at bitrate from 192 to 256 kbps takes a fair share of that. Storing and playing music on computers was a fairly mundane thing 12 years ago. The individual data is small enough to be workable even if the storage is horribly slow, or through DSL upload, or through USB1. (or even Bluetooth) :)
There used to be a handheld media player with a friggin'g hard drive in it, made by a big firm. What was it already?
Yet they don't mind casually firing death rays at those systems.
I think it's Vuze that I tried, from Azureus fame and what I got is an interface as overloaded as a Christmas tree, kind of want to be your Itunes, or Real Player or whatever. I remember when CD burning software attempted to be your "one true stop" for all your digital media, no thanks I just want to find the regular wizardless interface and burn the files.
Too many choices for that "one true way". Should I do everything from the torrent client, or a Windows CD burning program?, from Itunes? from an open source music player and library manager that also plays video? from a file server's web interface? from Metro apps on windows? from a smart TV? from a web browser?