Worst case, if WebGL ads ever become popular we might see browser freezes, computer crashes, overheating (already possible with a laptop that has dead thermal paste)
It seems to me that newspaper decline is disastrous, as we're losing fact checking and long articles. We see more copy-pasting journalism (e.g. Reuters or AFP wire news) or not even that, as "retweeting" crap spares the effort. So, blatantly false news and outright fabrications get broadcast instantly all over the world, such as "Kim Jong Un killed his ex-girlfriend" ; then you get to choose from 1000 media sources to hear the same bad news, and the weakened newspapers can hardly check and balance as they used to.
You can find many alternative sources, but the general masses will not have been exposed to them and some of them will provide weak or fabricated news too. e.g. RT News may post things you can agree with but a lot of the content is likely made up. Then you can bury yourself in a filtering bubble, whether an algorithmic one or just frequenting the same circles and sites over again. You may find the news more "democratic" and they may be somewhat but I feel like democracy is week at the moment. Biggest corporations and richest people have been continuously getting more powerful and dissent is locked away in social media posts or drowned into a see of crap. Real journalists are still needed, news without journalists is like war without soldiers (blow stuff up from the air for a decade and watch everything go to shit)
There was a precedent with CP/M. CP/M was a boring OS running on very boring and generic hardware (you have a 8080 or clone, text mode and floppy drives) made by many companies or possibly hand built by an individual. MS-DOS was more of the same on IBM and compatibles, but easier - a standardized BIOS, floppy formats, keyboard interface, graphics standards etc. Around 1993, Commodore and Amiga were killed off and around 2000 the Unix workstations (that weren't even marketed to the general public) died off too. Eventually smartphones followed that model : everything uses Android. That's when smartphone adoption skyrocketed. (there was Windows Mobile before it, funnily)
If you weren't around using computers in the 80s or the very early 90s, you are likely to only ever have used MS-DOS, Windows and maybe Linux. Some people had a computer that didn't run an OS (Commodore 64 etc.). I had gaming consoles that didn't have an OS (that was the norm in the 80s and 90s)
Funny that you bring up 4GB vs 16GB ram issue. Get a new mac with 4GB : then you're fucked. It's soldered down. You can only upgrade by changing the whole motherboard.
To run Wayland I guess you have to be an enthusiast or a developer (writing a toolkit, a graphics driver or a desktop environment) or some fringe Fedora + Gnome 3 user.
Let's say 0.1% users use Enlightenment, and 0.1% users use Wayland. So people running Enlightenment on Wayland could be as low as a millionth desktop linux users, thus perhaps 15 to 20 people, likely less. Wayland is dying!
Run X11 over Wayland if you want backwards compatibility or start the desktop with the X11 backend. There's no reason your esoteric needs should impact on the experience everyone else suffers from. And thankfully that reality will soon be realized.
I agree but applications and toolkits etc. will have to continue supporting X11. For now I'll keep running a 2D uncomposited X11 desktop mostly built around gtk2. Not too esoteric I believe. I want Wayland to leave vaporware status : I just don't want to use any 3D accelerated desktop on X11 (although they might be a bit too heavy on RAM and disk I/O anyway). But if I have to I'll stay on X11 till end of times.
Of course it's useful. Why should something like cups get started without a printer? Why should the user know to enable it once they get one? These days hardware changes at runtime, and things are expected to work when you plug in a printer or a bluetooth adapter, and not to complain or stop booting if some hardware turns out not to be there anymore.
Cups should be started without a printer, because then you can print in a file, put the file on a USB stick and go to a print shop or a place with a printer:). Or it may not know when an network or LPT printer becomes available.
Windows seemed fond of displaying things in KB (that are KiB), e.g. a 720,043 KB file. Was another source of failed CD-R burning, if you failed to account for the difference between a file size in MB (MiB) and thousands of KB (KiB).
Network speed and hard disk size are arbitrary, like wise e.g. a sound file. But I'm still partial to K = 1024 as even then buffer sizes and sectors size are in "binary" K.
Google Maps is really awful, since the "let's make it 10x slower" update. Maybe WebGL itself isn't ready for wide consumption except in contrieved set ups, but how much GPU power do you need for a 2D application? Google Earth runs fine on 10-year-old integrated graphics, and butter smooth on old low end graphics card.
The "right" solution would be for Google Maps to improve through Intel driver updates, browser updates and Google writing code that works better.
1920x1080 at 15" is arguably small, though. I find a 15.6" 1080p laptop to be painful. Same at 4K and scaling is likely easier to read but there's that trend of makes pushing the higher res number they can regardless of the end user experience. Or maybe some people only use emacs and xterms, know to configure a web browser for a default zoom level or use Metro apps.
3200x1800 would give an equivalent 1600x900 which in my opinion feels right (Apple uses equivalent 1440x900).
What does really prevent a single SoC to have two pieces of firmware?, i.e. two different flash memories on the die. Conceptually I don't see the difference between two separate chips, and the two chip's contents pasted and glued together on a single die. That is sort of the point of a SoC. Well I'm disregarding any IP or integration issue here.
The chip might have two separate interfaces for programming the two different firmwares. That does increase the cost. Some security feature like ARM Trustzone may be employed? I'm not qualified to elaborate on that. But fits in the initial design, transistors-are-cheap part of the bill.
Precisely, the person that is targeted by the surveillance apparatus does have physical access, being they're alone in the car at some distance of many kilometers. So it could be messed with. If only, install a switch to cut electrical power to it.
What would be interesting is if there are consequences for doing so. Parent and child (adult and major child, to drive a car!), that wouldn't need to involve the law or contracts etc. : a heated argument and keys confiscated (or not lent anymore) at most. If it's a company or employer-issued car : do you get fired? In the US or perhaps most of the US, sure yes. In an European country, probably but might depend on circumstances.
Now that is a great idea, a tailgating indicator. I would better have the info not leave the car, but warn the driver. Use radar or laser or echo etc. to measure the distance to the car in front, then if you're two meters from the car while driving at 90 kph you get warned.
I would not be surprised if that exists already but haven't heard of it. Hell, drive at 150 mph if you want but don't tailgate and don't be tailgated. (at 150 mph, I've computed the safety distance to be 134 meters)
ODB II isn't concerned with computer security, DRM etc. I believe? I expect it was done in the era or mindset of micro-controllers that don't run an operating system and free-for-all bit banging like you're running DOS, Win9x or an 8bit computer.
So, put a dongle on a dongle and cap the readings i.e. you might go at 4000 rpm but the stupid thing is told you never go above 3000 rpm. Only problem is with speeds calculated using GPS positions. Well perhaps jam it and stop jamming after you've been stopped for a little while.
I don't understand how anything exists at all. Let's say energy from the Big Bang is not a problem (because it came from vacuum energy from.. somewhere). Then everything should be energy/photons and equal parts of matter and antimatter that meet and convert to energy then equal parts matter and antimatter again and over again.
It likely can't : with fixed reactors you can accumulate a year of neutrino data, with submarines they're always on the move. We can imagine putting a mesh of dozens or hundreds neutrinos detectors on the ocean floors (or otherwise have a lot of neutrinos detectors in many places, ocean or sea floor is just one place they can work) at a staggering cost, not sure if that would work.
On the global antineutrino map 2015 you can't even see the low power reactors in Israel and North Korea (one for each) that are only used for producing bomb plutonium. But they're likely turned off or used infrequently.
On the other hand if you install the nvidia driver then you get 80x25 text. Nouveau likes to set a 2048x1536 graphical console (!) or on a lower end CRT monitor, 1600x1200. Used to have one of the drivers display a blank console : log in works etc. but the monitor was entirely black (which on a proper non-LCD looks as if it is turned off) By fucking with boot options or config files you can eventually get a 80x25 console. If anyone ever got a 80x50 console let me know.
Welcome to Windows 95 : fast graphics, and it is a file server where you can just right-click a directory and share it on the network. At the same time you can use the desktop and even play 3D games or DOS games. If you have enough RAM just run the version with bug fixes, called Windows 98SE.
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Worst case, if WebGL ads ever become popular we might see browser freezes, computer crashes, overheating (already possible with a laptop that has dead thermal paste)
It seems to me that newspaper decline is disastrous, as we're losing fact checking and long articles. We see more copy-pasting journalism (e.g. Reuters or AFP wire news) or not even that, as "retweeting" crap spares the effort. So, blatantly false news and outright fabrications get broadcast instantly all over the world, such as "Kim Jong Un killed his ex-girlfriend" ; then you get to choose from 1000 media sources to hear the same bad news, and the weakened newspapers can hardly check and balance as they used to.
You can find many alternative sources, but the general masses will not have been exposed to them and some of them will provide weak or fabricated news too. e.g. RT News may post things you can agree with but a lot of the content is likely made up. Then you can bury yourself in a filtering bubble, whether an algorithmic one or just frequenting the same circles and sites over again.
You may find the news more "democratic" and they may be somewhat but I feel like democracy is week at the moment. Biggest corporations and richest people have been continuously getting more powerful and dissent is locked away in social media posts or drowned into a see of crap.
Real journalists are still needed, news without journalists is like war without soldiers (blow stuff up from the air for a decade and watch everything go to shit)
ARM?
Wasn't was Alpha or something else?
There was a precedent with CP/M. CP/M was a boring OS running on very boring and generic hardware (you have a 8080 or clone, text mode and floppy drives) made by many companies or possibly hand built by an individual.
MS-DOS was more of the same on IBM and compatibles, but easier - a standardized BIOS, floppy formats, keyboard interface, graphics standards etc. Around 1993, Commodore and Amiga were killed off and around 2000 the Unix workstations (that weren't even marketed to the general public) died off too.
Eventually smartphones followed that model : everything uses Android. That's when smartphone adoption skyrocketed. (there was Windows Mobile before it, funnily)
If you weren't around using computers in the 80s or the very early 90s, you are likely to only ever have used MS-DOS, Windows and maybe Linux. Some people had a computer that didn't run an OS (Commodore 64 etc.). I had gaming consoles that didn't have an OS (that was the norm in the 80s and 90s)
Funny that you bring up 4GB vs 16GB ram issue. Get a new mac with 4GB : then you're fucked. It's soldered down. You can only upgrade by changing the whole motherboard.
There's shims and udev and crap. I don't know how that really works but it doesn't prevent the init system to be upstart or init.
To run Wayland I guess you have to be an enthusiast or a developer (writing a toolkit, a graphics driver or a desktop environment) or some fringe Fedora + Gnome 3 user.
Let's say 0.1% users use Enlightenment, and 0.1% users use Wayland. So people running Enlightenment on Wayland could be as low as a millionth desktop linux users, thus perhaps 15 to 20 people, likely less.
Wayland is dying!
Run X11 over Wayland if you want backwards compatibility or start the desktop with the X11 backend. There's no reason your esoteric needs should impact on the experience everyone else suffers from. And thankfully that reality will soon be realized.
I agree but applications and toolkits etc. will have to continue supporting X11.
For now I'll keep running a 2D uncomposited X11 desktop mostly built around gtk2. Not too esoteric I believe. I want Wayland to leave vaporware status : I just don't want to use any 3D accelerated desktop on X11 (although they might be a bit too heavy on RAM and disk I/O anyway). But if I have to I'll stay on X11 till end of times.
Of course it's useful. Why should something like cups get started without a printer? Why should the user know to enable it once they get one? These days hardware changes at runtime, and things are expected to work when you plug in a printer or a bluetooth adapter, and not to complain or stop booting if some hardware turns out not to be there anymore.
Cups should be started without a printer, because then you can print in a file, put the file on a USB stick and go to a print shop or a place with a printer :).
Or it may not know when an network or LPT printer becomes available.
That is a technicality, though.
Windows seemed fond of displaying things in KB (that are KiB), e.g. a 720,043 KB file. Was another source of failed CD-R burning, if you failed to account for the difference between a file size in MB (MiB) and thousands of KB (KiB).
Network speed and hard disk size are arbitrary, like wise e.g. a sound file. But I'm still partial to K = 1024 as even then buffer sizes and sectors size are in "binary" K.
Google Maps is really awful, since the "let's make it 10x slower" update. Maybe WebGL itself isn't ready for wide consumption except in contrieved set ups, but how much GPU power do you need for a 2D application? Google Earth runs fine on 10-year-old integrated graphics, and butter smooth on old low end graphics card.
The "right" solution would be for Google Maps to improve through Intel driver updates, browser updates and Google writing code that works better.
1920x1080 at 15" is arguably small, though. I find a 15.6" 1080p laptop to be painful. Same at 4K and scaling is likely easier to read but there's that trend of makes pushing the higher res number they can regardless of the end user experience. Or maybe some people only use emacs and xterms, know to configure a web browser for a default zoom level or use Metro apps.
3200x1800 would give an equivalent 1600x900 which in my opinion feels right (Apple uses equivalent 1440x900).
What does really prevent a single SoC to have two pieces of firmware?, i.e. two different flash memories on the die.
Conceptually I don't see the difference between two separate chips, and the two chip's contents pasted and glued together on a single die. That is sort of the point of a SoC. Well I'm disregarding any IP or integration issue here.
The chip might have two separate interfaces for programming the two different firmwares. That does increase the cost.
Some security feature like ARM Trustzone may be employed? I'm not qualified to elaborate on that. But fits in the initial design, transistors-are-cheap part of the bill.
What a crappy insulting and sad little post you've written there.
btw a Windows installation is something useful/needed even if once in a blue moon, if only to chkdsk an ntfs drive.
Precisely, the person that is targeted by the surveillance apparatus does have physical access, being they're alone in the car at some distance of many kilometers.
So it could be messed with. If only, install a switch to cut electrical power to it.
What would be interesting is if there are consequences for doing so. Parent and child (adult and major child, to drive a car!), that wouldn't need to involve the law or contracts etc. : a heated argument and keys confiscated (or not lent anymore) at most.
If it's a company or employer-issued car : do you get fired? In the US or perhaps most of the US, sure yes. In an European country, probably but might depend on circumstances.
Let's move to North Korea, then the issue is nullified in two ways : the tracking is expected and nobody has a car anyway.
Now that is a great idea, a tailgating indicator. I would better have the info not leave the car, but warn the driver. Use radar or laser or echo etc. to measure the distance to the car in front, then if you're two meters from the car while driving at 90 kph you get warned.
I would not be surprised if that exists already but haven't heard of it. Hell, drive at 150 mph if you want but don't tailgate and don't be tailgated. (at 150 mph, I've computed the safety distance to be 134 meters)
ODB II isn't concerned with computer security, DRM etc. I believe?
I expect it was done in the era or mindset of micro-controllers that don't run an operating system and free-for-all bit banging like you're running DOS, Win9x or an 8bit computer.
So, put a dongle on a dongle and cap the readings i.e. you might go at 4000 rpm but the stupid thing is told you never go above 3000 rpm.
Only problem is with speeds calculated using GPS positions. Well perhaps jam it and stop jamming after you've been stopped for a little while.
So, power will just go more expensive while industrials can self-congratulate in the press for that.
The added shutdowns and restarts have some costs too.
If anyone wonders you have to do a "modprobe snd-pcsp" if you want to be able to play just a beep.
I don't understand how anything exists at all. Let's say energy from the Big Bang is not a problem (because it came from vacuum energy from.. somewhere). Then everything should be energy/photons and equal parts of matter and antimatter that meet and convert to energy then equal parts matter and antimatter again and over again.
It likely can't : with fixed reactors you can accumulate a year of neutrino data, with submarines they're always on the move. We can imagine putting a mesh of dozens or hundreds neutrinos detectors on the ocean floors (or otherwise have a lot of neutrinos detectors in many places, ocean or sea floor is just one place they can work) at a staggering cost, not sure if that would work.
On the global antineutrino map 2015 you can't even see the low power reactors in Israel and North Korea (one for each) that are only used for producing bomb plutonium. But they're likely turned off or used infrequently.
On the other hand if you install the nvidia driver then you get 80x25 text.
Nouveau likes to set a 2048x1536 graphical console (!) or on a lower end CRT monitor, 1600x1200.
Used to have one of the drivers display a blank console : log in works etc. but the monitor was entirely black (which on a proper non-LCD looks as if it is turned off)
By fucking with boot options or config files you can eventually get a 80x25 console. If anyone ever got a 80x50 console let me know.
Welcome to Windows 95 : fast graphics, and it is a file server where you can just right-click a directory and share it on the network. At the same time you can use the desktop and even play 3D games or DOS games. If you have enough RAM just run the version with bug fixes, called Windows 98SE.