The instant MS updated to Windows Media Player 7, I decided to ignore it and continue to use Windows Media Player 6 (before XP at least, it was still the lightweight "built-in" one, descendant from a useless little player in Windows 3.1). Later, I used Media Player Classic instead (scrollwheel support yay!). Later still VLC got a better UI and everyone was using it.
I didn't have to give much of a thought about WMP7, and it was the same about MSN Messenger 7. My favorite replacement software was aMSN, it worked and looked exactly the same in Solaris, Win 9x, XP, and Linux as if it were based on Java or Flash, but not needing those either! It ran on Tcl/Tk which afaik allows a decent GUI on top of a lousy scripting language. Ran well enough though not the least buggy software on Earth. Loved it. Posthumous thanks to the project.
Now the choice is between Skype, which doesn't run without Skype, or Facebook with a real name policy and that prides itself on being a spying platform. So, fuck it! IM is dead.
Thanksfully the costs of cell phone voice and SMS plumetted (easily by a factor of 10x or 20x) since the good old IM days. Also in the rats's nest of malware and computer attacks the Internet has been, MSN chat would likely not have been sustainable. It would be a constant mess of accounts stealing, eavesdropping, impersonating etc. Too bad. IM is dead as far as I'm concerned, except when using some ad hoc P2P IM software or a private encrypted IRC server etc. among a small circle of people.
It makes it worthwhile to install a pirate Enterprise version over a legit Home or Pro one. Heck, in the bad old days it was a good idea to do that to get rid of Norton etc. crapware and claim back gigabytes lost in a recovery partition.
I will welcome systemd with wide open arms if that's how things go. Using whatever free software tools (inclduing rsyslog) to view binary logs instead of cat etc. is a minor inconvenience next to buying a $1000 computer just for that.
I agree that all of that isn't much of a big deal. It's not like we're stuck with USB 1 and a useless built-in modem, sure. If one doesn't like the idea of ethernet on USB 3 for "psychological" reasons (or real heavy duty) there has already been the Apple Thunderbolt NIC dongle. That's as much "real" hardware as onboard or PCIe hardware and we possibly might see affordable thin laptops with thunderbolt in the future.
Cost is an issue, that is many people don't have financial security to spend $30 on a dongle, on a whim. That is okay, the market does allow to have a $500 laptop with RJ45, VGA and HDMI. Conversely we might have $500 thin laptops with SSD or flash, USB type C, USB A and other "mini ports" or lack of them.
That's a weird strawman, nobody said anything about encryption or interception.
There is a problem with Firefox's new private browsing window. It says protection against tracking is enabled. That's true as it does something like Privacy Badger does (although there's little indication of what is done) but you still leave your IP and browser fingerprint (afaik) everywhere and if you go on facebook or logged in google etc. you're of course tracked about everything you do since that is exactly what they are for.
People are at large non technical or not technical enough and are easily deluded into believing private mode browsing is safer. Like some tell me that your position isn't tracked when you use a dumb phone, which is entirely false.
There's a trend of low end boards having only three PCIe slots. A board with two PCIe and two PCI slots (sandwiched between the PCIe) is better. If you install a PCIe graphics card that cover the second slot, the first one will leave you with only one PCIe 1x available. The second motherboard leaves you with one PCI and one PCIe 1x available.
"For some reason, manufacturers refuse to use a DVI-I port" Separate rather than combined ports allow to use both instead of just one. That also avoids the issue of having both a DVI-I and a DVI-D port : one does VGA and the other not. People routinely find out about it when they have to use dual VGA and they can't. Confusing, frustrating and infuriating. In my opinion, DVI can go and VGA can stay. You can get a passive cable with DVI on one end and HDMI on the other (or Displayport). There's an exception to that, yet : you can't easily get dual link DVI that way.
Someone needs to make an ultrabook with enough thickness for VGA and RJ45 ; everything else can remain small and lightweight.
Well, traditional laptops have become something like that:) they all often seem to use a 15W Intel CPU (ending in "U") which allows cheaper cooling, longer battery life/smaller battery. So there are "crap" traditional laptops that only weigh 2 kg or 2.1 kg.
I know a guy who uses the VGA port daily on his laptop : it is connected to a decent 1680x1050 LCD monitor. That's all there is to it. No added value would be gained doing otherwise, in fact for most people needing to buy a $20 or $30 adapter that you can only find by ordering it on the net is a pain in the ass.
Graphics cards already have to act as audio devices for that same feature over HDMI, so audio over Displayport doesn't take much in terms of hardware features. We should expect virtually every device with a Displayport output to support sound output.
It's a lot easier to give up VGA because monitors, by and large, are not expensive, and even when they are there will still be methods to get analog video to them either through add-in cards or through conversion devices.
This is precisely what is happening on Intel Skylake motherboards. The chipset or processor doesn't support VGA, but there are like three lines for display outputs internally. It is common already that a converter is built onto the motherboard so that one of the output ends up as VGA instead of digital, and that is cheap enough.
Cursory look at current motherboards ("bottom of the barrel" on price) tells me the COM port is quite common still, and even LPT is still available on the back sometimes.
See : Gigabyte GA-H110M-S2PV DDR3 ASUS H110M-D D3 Gigabyte GA-H110M-DS2 DDR3
What about Nokia Communicator 9000? It had a damn 386 in it. It was so far ago (1996) that its CPU/RAM specs would have made for a somewhat useful desktop PC (with the addition of a hard drive etc. of course)
You made good points in your latter post. The Apple phone was such a baseline and step up, it's like comparing Amiga 1000 / Amiga 500 to a hodgepodge of CP/M, TRS-80, Apple II and Spectrum machines etc., or comparing the netbooks to the pockets computer that ran BASIC or did agenda/contacts/notes only.
The war is going to last at least ten years, if some people sitting in some regional and western capitals don't try to change their course of action. What about you go spend ten years living in concentration camps, do you think that will do wonders for your "medical care" and your traditions? What about you give birth to your children and raise them in the camps?
There are already *millions* of syrian refugees, most of them in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey or Jordan.
That's an absurdly high number, it makes a sizable fraction of the entire world's population and is the same amount of people as the population of Finland. Lebanon is a tiny country with the same population as Finland and they have to make do with over one million refugee. So keeping them close to their point of origin is impossible, there's no immediate solution barring resorting to extermination camps. Bitching against a 225 million expense is rather quaint.
Imagine if most European countries decided to leave NATO? Better to deal with the root of the problem.
Interesting bit about circadian rythms but I believe (or was indoctrinated) that social eating during the course of a long meal is very important. You have to start at the same time but you have plenty leniency and time regarding the speed at which you eat (and the quantity). You also derive much more pleasure and eating pleasure likely correlates well with eating well. Maybe a one-hour lunch is useful even so that you can tie to your circadian rhyme (if you've begun eating your salad too early it's no big deal, but you can time your heavy mashed potatoes or fried chicken action the way you like)
If you fill the whole die with CPU cores and cache (plus northbridge, ring bus etc.) you end up with a CPU that needs to be in the 130W to 160W range. Now unlike 10-12 years ago the power management is competent, but it reeks of egg-frying monstrosities of old.
Alternatively let's say Intel makes it a low power chip, so that it fits with Intel's power-limited consumer motherboards. You get a choice of a 10-core processor at 2GHz, instead of a 4-core processor at 4GHz with built-in GPU. That is pretty worthless. Give me fewer cores and 4GHz.
Also you won't find a graphics card low end enough for you tastes, lest you go with an antique one on PCI slot or the simplified 2D-only VGA-only controller found on sever motherboards.
Easy. You invest one million trillion dollars in facilities ad their operation for producing Pu238 in large enough quantities, then everyone can have a relatively safe RTG at home.
I would say otherwise : Windows has Alt + keypad numbers (not Alt Gr), Linux has not. So you can't just learn the code for the character in question and use it that way.
On Linux, depends on the keyboard layout you chose (french, french legacy, french alternative, french legacy alternative.. wtf are they?) Easier to ignore capital accental letters, though the most annoying one is capital "ç".
It's a "Core 2 Solo" you have there. A fast single core PC is not bad at all, except perhaps with Windows + antivirus + crapware running. Even multitasking is not a problem, unless you run a CPU hog. What made me move away from single core was how installing an OS in a VM, with the CPU at 100% for every I/O made the PC run like crap (after installing though, Virtualbox guest additions remedy that by a fair amount).
btw it's Celeron 430 not Celeron M 430. Celeron M has 533MHz FSB, 512K L2 and is 32bit, Celeron 430 has 800MHz FSB, 1MB L2 and 64bit.
MS did port Windows 2000 to Alpha 64bit, but it was only for internal use. No idea what it looked like : full GUI with Minesweeper and Solitaire?, or just a kernel and stuff and text output to a serial port.
But in late nineties when your typical dekstop had 16MB to 64MB memory I'm not sure that 64bit was all that needed. Also, by early 2000 you could get a dual Pentium III with lots of MHz and a Geforce 256 graphics card ("workstation" graphics card such as 3D Labs were still around too, for the PC). So I'm not sure if RISC Windows 2000 computers would have been successful : twice the price and doesn't run your programs? For bad or good all workstations went the way of the dodo like PDP/11 etc. minicomputers before.
I interpret the idea as the small computer thingy having two NICs on its own, and USB is used for power (mainly, could be used to send some log data to the PC). A kind of dongle that piggybacks on the PC and its network interface. As that would sit somewhere behind the tower, or perhaps in some other unsaviory place I am not sure why you would put a display on it.
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Nope. Inbetween the stars there are more stars, so all they had to do was to color the sky white.
The instant MS updated to Windows Media Player 7, I decided to ignore it and continue to use Windows Media Player 6 (before XP at least, it was still the lightweight "built-in" one, descendant from a useless little player in Windows 3.1). Later, I used Media Player Classic instead (scrollwheel support yay!). Later still VLC got a better UI and everyone was using it.
I didn't have to give much of a thought about WMP7, and it was the same about MSN Messenger 7.
My favorite replacement software was aMSN, it worked and looked exactly the same in Solaris, Win 9x, XP, and Linux as if it were based on Java or Flash, but not needing those either!
It ran on Tcl/Tk which afaik allows a decent GUI on top of a lousy scripting language. Ran well enough though not the least buggy software on Earth. Loved it. Posthumous thanks to the project.
Now the choice is between Skype, which doesn't run without Skype, or Facebook with a real name policy and that prides itself on being a spying platform. So, fuck it!
IM is dead.
Thanksfully the costs of cell phone voice and SMS plumetted (easily by a factor of 10x or 20x) since the good old IM days. Also in the rats's nest of malware and computer attacks the Internet has been, MSN chat would likely not have been sustainable. It would be a constant mess of accounts stealing, eavesdropping, impersonating etc.
Too bad. IM is dead as far as I'm concerned, except when using some ad hoc P2P IM software or a private encrypted IRC server etc. among a small circle of people.
It makes it worthwhile to install a pirate Enterprise version over a legit Home or Pro one.
Heck, in the bad old days it was a good idea to do that to get rid of Norton etc. crapware and claim back gigabytes lost in a recovery partition.
I need a Mac and an IDE to view logs? wow.
I will welcome systemd with wide open arms if that's how things go. Using whatever free software tools (inclduing rsyslog) to view binary logs instead of cat etc. is a minor inconvenience next to buying a $1000 computer just for that.
I agree that all of that isn't much of a big deal. It's not like we're stuck with USB 1 and a useless built-in modem, sure.
If one doesn't like the idea of ethernet on USB 3 for "psychological" reasons (or real heavy duty) there has already been the Apple Thunderbolt NIC dongle. That's as much "real" hardware as onboard or PCIe hardware and we possibly might see affordable thin laptops with thunderbolt in the future.
Cost is an issue, that is many people don't have financial security to spend $30 on a dongle, on a whim. That is okay, the market does allow to have a $500 laptop with RJ45, VGA and HDMI. Conversely we might have $500 thin laptops with SSD or flash, USB type C, USB A and other "mini ports" or lack of them.
That's a weird strawman, nobody said anything about encryption or interception.
There is a problem with Firefox's new private browsing window. It says protection against tracking is enabled. That's true as it does something like Privacy Badger does (although there's little indication of what is done) but you still leave your IP and browser fingerprint (afaik) everywhere and if you go on facebook or logged in google etc. you're of course tracked about everything you do since that is exactly what they are for.
People are at large non technical or not technical enough and are easily deluded into believing private mode browsing is safer. Like some tell me that your position isn't tracked when you use a dumb phone, which is entirely false.
Two words : my buddy's LG phone is stuck on Android 4.1 and there appears to be *nothing* else available for it.
If you're not in a hurry / don't really need to care you may wait for Ubuntu 16.04 (Ubuntu Mate) or Mint 18 Mate.
There's a trend of low end boards having only three PCIe slots. A board with two PCIe and two PCI slots (sandwiched between the PCIe) is better. If you install a PCIe graphics card that cover the second slot, the first one will leave you with only one PCIe 1x available. The second motherboard leaves you with one PCI and one PCIe 1x available.
"For some reason, manufacturers refuse to use a DVI-I port"
Separate rather than combined ports allow to use both instead of just one. That also avoids the issue of having both a DVI-I and a DVI-D port : one does VGA and the other not. People routinely find out about it when they have to use dual VGA and they can't. Confusing, frustrating and infuriating.
In my opinion, DVI can go and VGA can stay. You can get a passive cable with DVI on one end and HDMI on the other (or Displayport). There's an exception to that, yet : you can't easily get dual link DVI that way.
Someone needs to make an ultrabook with enough thickness for VGA and RJ45 ; everything else can remain small and lightweight.
Well, traditional laptops have become something like that :) they all often seem to use a 15W Intel CPU (ending in "U") which allows cheaper cooling, longer battery life/smaller battery.
So there are "crap" traditional laptops that only weigh 2 kg or 2.1 kg.
I know a guy who uses the VGA port daily on his laptop : it is connected to a decent 1680x1050 LCD monitor.
That's all there is to it. No added value would be gained doing otherwise, in fact for most people needing to buy a $20 or $30 adapter that you can only find by ordering it on the net is a pain in the ass.
60GHz wifi is a credible tech to use in that situation I believe, though it's virtually absent from the market yet.
You don't want to use it for everything, but it does same room, point-to-point networking that should be enough for your 720p or 1080p at 60Hz.
Graphics cards already have to act as audio devices for that same feature over HDMI, so audio over Displayport doesn't take much in terms of hardware features. We should expect virtually every device with a Displayport output to support sound output.
It's a lot easier to give up VGA because monitors, by and large, are not expensive, and even when they are there will still be methods to get analog video to them either through add-in cards or through conversion devices.
This is precisely what is happening on Intel Skylake motherboards. The chipset or processor doesn't support VGA, but there are like three lines for display outputs internally. It is common already that a converter is built onto the motherboard so that one of the output ends up as VGA instead of digital, and that is cheap enough.
Cursory look at current motherboards ("bottom of the barrel" on price) tells me the COM port is quite common still, and even LPT is still available on the back sometimes.
See :
Gigabyte GA-H110M-S2PV DDR3
ASUS H110M-D D3
Gigabyte GA-H110M-DS2 DDR3
What about Nokia Communicator 9000? It had a damn 386 in it. It was so far ago (1996) that its CPU/RAM specs would have made for a somewhat useful desktop PC (with the addition of a hard drive etc. of course)
You made good points in your latter post. The Apple phone was such a baseline and step up, it's like comparing Amiga 1000 / Amiga 500 to a hodgepodge of CP/M, TRS-80, Apple II and Spectrum machines etc., or comparing the netbooks to the pockets computer that ran BASIC or did agenda/contacts/notes only.
The war is going to last at least ten years, if some people sitting in some regional and western capitals don't try to change their course of action. What about you go spend ten years living in concentration camps, do you think that will do wonders for your "medical care" and your traditions? What about you give birth to your children and raise them in the camps?
There are already *millions* of syrian refugees, most of them in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey or Jordan.
That's an absurdly high number, it makes a sizable fraction of the entire world's population and is the same amount of people as the population of Finland.
Lebanon is a tiny country with the same population as Finland and they have to make do with over one million refugee. So keeping them close to their point of origin is impossible, there's no immediate solution barring resorting to extermination camps. Bitching against a 225 million expense is rather quaint.
Imagine if most European countries decided to leave NATO?
Better to deal with the root of the problem.
Interesting bit about circadian rythms but I believe (or was indoctrinated) that social eating during the course of a long meal is very important. You have to start at the same time but you have plenty leniency and time regarding the speed at which you eat (and the quantity). You also derive much more pleasure and eating pleasure likely correlates well with eating well.
Maybe a one-hour lunch is useful even so that you can tie to your circadian rhyme (if you've begun eating your salad too early it's no big deal, but you can time your heavy mashed potatoes or fried chicken action the way you like)
If you fill the whole die with CPU cores and cache (plus northbridge, ring bus etc.) you end up with a CPU that needs to be in the 130W to 160W range. Now unlike 10-12 years ago the power management is competent, but it reeks of egg-frying monstrosities of old.
Alternatively let's say Intel makes it a low power chip, so that it fits with Intel's power-limited consumer motherboards. You get a choice of a 10-core processor at 2GHz, instead of a 4-core processor at 4GHz with built-in GPU. That is pretty worthless. Give me fewer cores and 4GHz.
Also you won't find a graphics card low end enough for you tastes, lest you go with an antique one on PCI slot or the simplified 2D-only VGA-only controller found on sever motherboards.
Easy. You invest one million trillion dollars in facilities ad their operation for producing Pu238 in large enough quantities, then everyone can have a relatively safe RTG at home.
I would say otherwise : Windows has Alt + keypad numbers (not Alt Gr), Linux has not. So you can't just learn the code for the character in question and use it that way.
On Linux, depends on the keyboard layout you chose (french, french legacy, french alternative, french legacy alternative.. wtf are they?)
Easier to ignore capital accental letters, though the most annoying one is capital "ç".
The circumflex is a modifier key on AZERTY, that makes it reasonably easy to type.
It's a "Core 2 Solo" you have there. A fast single core PC is not bad at all, except perhaps with Windows + antivirus + crapware running.
Even multitasking is not a problem, unless you run a CPU hog. What made me move away from single core was how installing an OS in a VM, with the CPU at 100% for every I/O made the PC run like crap (after installing though, Virtualbox guest additions remedy that by a fair amount).
btw it's Celeron 430 not Celeron M 430. Celeron M has 533MHz FSB, 512K L2 and is 32bit, Celeron 430 has 800MHz FSB, 1MB L2 and 64bit.
MS did port Windows 2000 to Alpha 64bit, but it was only for internal use. No idea what it looked like : full GUI with Minesweeper and Solitaire?, or just a kernel and stuff and text output to a serial port.
But in late nineties when your typical dekstop had 16MB to 64MB memory I'm not sure that 64bit was all that needed. Also, by early 2000 you could get a dual Pentium III with lots of MHz and a Geforce 256 graphics card ("workstation" graphics card such as 3D Labs were still around too, for the PC). So I'm not sure if RISC Windows 2000 computers would have been successful : twice the price and doesn't run your programs?
For bad or good all workstations went the way of the dodo like PDP/11 etc. minicomputers before.
I interpret the idea as the small computer thingy having two NICs on its own, and USB is used for power (mainly, could be used to send some log data to the PC). A kind of dongle that piggybacks on the PC and its network interface. As that would sit somewhere behind the tower, or perhaps in some other unsaviory place I am not sure why you would put a display on it.