The RGI pdf does acknolewdge this regarding spreadsheets, it says :
"Pour des besoins d’échanges d’informations sous forme de tableaux, l’utilisation d’OOXML est tolérée"
Which I'll translate as "For needs of exchanging information under the form of spreadsheets, the use of OOXML is tolerated". Though I feel like it's a bit ambiguous : "tableau" means a two-dimensional array of data here, similar to English "table". So I guess most spreadsheets are okay, if they're not complex VBA programs disguised as documents.
Microsoft uses that same "feature" to trick people into signing up for a Microsoft account during Windows 8.1's setup. Lesson learned : I'll never sign up for a microsoft account (which means I will never be able to buy a Metro application I suppose, even if I had a compatible OS or device)
/s/cable/DSL, if you wish. In my country cable is fairly uncommon but does exist. Sometimes a row of public housing has it, or a city block because there were a trend of installing cable in the 80s or whenever ; else by large most every housing has a phone line and at least one antenna connector on the wall to plug a TV in.
There no consistency in where you will find phone plugs in the home (if phone line was installed 40 years ago in a 100 year old house for instance), so the DSL modem (which contains a router, wifi and ethernet switch if not more) may be located damn anywhere but it's common anyway to have it next to the TV. I guess that millions people run some consumer electronic device over wifi whereas a short ethernet cable would do it, out of ignorance or lack of care. Perhaps in some case two boxes of consumer shit, one stacked on top of the other communicate in wifi. That's a bit ridiculous as the latency is a bit worse and it's a waste of 2.4GHz spectrum.
You used TLC drives rather than MLC, worse by one or two orders of magnitude or more ; and those number are what SMART tells you, it's a dumb count ill-related to the physical realities. If you use an MLC drive and ignore the SMART count, then I believe it's a ton better, bigger drives are better than smaller ones too.. Then they'll die without notice but less often.
If you want some "fun" order a "Kingfast" 30GB SSD and install windows 7 32bit on it.. Now that's probably a shit ton worse than any Samsung 850. If you want to go guinea pig with an Intel 750 400GB : that may be the best consumer SSD (but it's quite new)
Still, I'll believe what you said. With HDDs, you get about the same reliability whether you buy the cheapest one or the most expensive ones (save for industrial defects like the 7200.11 and some other well known ones). With SSDs it's almost a crapshoot though there is e.g. a tech site doing long write tests, where most good MLC disks fare well. To me it's a bit like CRT vs LCD monitors : a low end CRT is a ton more solid than a low end LCD (can display black, higher refresh rate, lasts 10 years minimum). The best kind of LCD would be good though (say recent 2560x1440 VA panel)
I'm waiting for the patent on Apple's original iPod connector to expire so I can get a portable media player compatible with it.. or by then, everyone will have forgotten about it. Don't get your hopes up.. I don't even know of a single media player compatible with the iPod connector.
- I like the UI for bookmarks (star icon + little notepad icon) - easier to set the search egine (recent UI change, and before that removing the separate hidden setting for search engine in the URL bar) - major performance increase, though one bad web page slows it down.
You seem to be one of these "memory is here to be used" people, and it's fine but there are many of us commoners that don't see a need to upgrade to a new computer with ddr3, or even ddr4 (which will be on cheap computers in 2016). Almost any ddr2 PC is still fine for most daily use and they're often capped at 4GB max (mine has two fried slots)
So memory is not that cheap. Imagine if Chrome used 40GB, out of your 32GB:)
Raspberry Pi is some kind of Unix workstation with USB peripherals and a big firmware blob you have to cater to. Seems more complex than even a PC that runs DOS. A microcontroller that only runs your program, not an OS is simpler still.
Nvidia uses the concept of neural networks to promote its oncoming Pascal GPU : the new features are massive internal and external bandwith (the attached stacked memory is a big deal, and there's an interconnect ; well, I suppose internal buses are wider/faster) and FP16 (half precision floats) carried over from mobile GPU. The half floats are meant to save bandwith and power.
So nvidia goes and say, well we can use that for NN. It's kind of marketing spin but at least using a GPU is cheap (next to designing your own hardware or say, using a mainframe)
HTML5 video is some kind of moving target? I remember how years ago on slashdot it was about some raw video streaming with the universal ability of doing a right-click and "save as". But then it needed DRM. And then, it sucks because you want the ability to change video stream on the fly depending on bandwith. So you have "MSE", which is bleeding edge. Meaning unfinished, not supported, perhaps has the potential to up the CPU hungriness again. Whatever, give me something that works in flash 11.2, it "only" requires an old 3GHz PC to play (if you don't have h264 hardware)
Not direct hardware access per se, but we'll end up with OpenGL and even OpenCL code running if all goes like planned, under other names such as WebGL, WebCL. That may effect a pseudo denial-of-service through driver crash or overheating, or lead to a web page increasing your power consumption by 100 watts. Perhaps some javascript you automatically run will steal your CPU/GPU cycles for someone to profit from.
I don't know about security issues, seems like the GPU, its firmware and its driver are security choke points? One trivial example would be javascript malware grabs your GPU framebuffer or surfaces to be composited and sends them somewhere.
I converted a fairly old and small ISP box that was intended to do ADSL modem, router and wifi access point. After some protacted flashing through USB and a Windows program, it got a more "vanilla" and unrestricted firmware, then configuration was done with telnet and vi rather than the web interface. It became a 802.11b to wired ethernet bridge, with a "homeplug" type thing hooked to the RJ45 ethernet plug. On the other side, a PC with a 802.11g thumbkey, whose speed I had to set to 5.5 Mbps instead of 11 for more reliability. A free wifi extender, unencrypted (security through low performance and low range)
I'm sure Julian Assange knew the request would not be granted and it's probably a simple maneuver to remember us which side France is on. Since 2009 France is officially a full NATO member and a couple years later, it showed full allegiance and with the US it attacked Libya, a sovereign country. If we hold this to the same standards as the invasion of Iraq then that was a particularly abject and monstrous crime, which also makes France directly responsible for the rise of Islamic State.
In France, foreign policy affairs are typically directed by the president, who is totally unaccountable once elected (a republican monarch). There's never any debate about foreign policy, esp. in the media. The president styles himself as left-wing, though that is contested. But I haven't heard anything on the left about NATO and the wars, though it seems to me there's that obvious elephant in the room, that France is fully allied to the US, UK, Saudi etc. which implies embracing the neocons goals and methods. More directly to the point I will say that Hollande and Fabius are comparable to Bush, Cheney, Tony Blair etc. and that the neocons cabbal is the gravest threat from the West since the nazis. Denouncing the US threat is fine (it's one of the few most dangerous countries on Earth) but it does not make intellectual sense to stop at the US or UK border and fail to consider that France is in. We need some great (democratic) purge that throws pro-war officials out of office. France need not embrace a dangerous ideology that worships death and destruction of States, presenting them with a convert-or-die deal (join the Empire or we'll destroy you) or pushing Arabs to kill one another to increase weapons sales.
It does work wonderfully, especially for the common random hardware that's two or three to nine year-old. But you still get some shit like editing the grub line for the first couple boots if you have some video card. Or the state of your alsa + pulseaudio depends a lot on what sound card or distro you're using : if I change one or the other I get a different set up - and if my music player isn't pleased by the result it decides that its volume slider will control the master volume.
Sure we have EWMH, and simply X11 or Xorg stuff so if I really wanted to do some of the stuff it'd be possible. Perhaps I can find a way to query pulseaudio volume and change it (for example). It's just not easy to figure out what is easily done, and some fear to miss out on something because I'm not running KDE, or FVWM2, or fluxbox, openbox etc.
Btw I simply have an applet for hotkeys in "Control Center" with which I've just added a few bindings to change gamma (such as xgamma -gamma 1.09). Can't do win+n kind of shortcuts and had to use ctrl-alt-t, but the basic feature is there.
Laptops from taiwanese motherboard brands may offer the option too (MSI, Asus, Gigabyte) and are interesting on their own right too (thick enough laptop so there's cooling, VGA + HDMI + ethernet instead of just HDMI, no stickers..)
Under Windows you have Autohotkey, which I used for a number of things in the XP days such as hotkeys to change display gamma, sound volume, instantly launch a terminal etc.
Windows is ridiculously crippled for some things but it can have its own very powerful things. Another example was a freeware to minimize windows to the system tray, it could be configured so that a middle click on the minimize button does it. Under linux this will be impossible, funnily, or non trivial to do and it's certainly desktop or WM specific.
To the "Muzzy" mind associated to those people that go on rampage and maim, kill and do convert-or-die etc. it's also Iran that is crazy, as well as Shia Arabs, for following teachings and rituals coming from the wrong bunch of 1300-year-old dead men.
I cared enough to waste that much time writing that too long post above. That shall be a reminder to how much time is wasted installing windows. Yup with another OS and an equally slow PC you can be done in about 20 minutes.
It's funny to install windows updates if you have a somewhat slow (in modern terms) computer. Go get a torrented Windows 7 with updates rolled in till a few monthes ago. Install Windows.. with the custom stuff (updates + script that installs IE and.Net) it takes about two hours to install. Then it takes about an hour to boot, reboot, install Firefox (downloaded with ftp.exe), change wallpaper etc., install some shit and an AV (this is a single core low power PC with 1GB and old HDD) Then it takes a shit lot of time to find Windows updates. Two days later, it's still not finding them! I give up. PC's getting a pain to use, I go for upgrading it to 1.5GB or 2GB. cool, turns out I've plugged a 2GB module in, it now has 3GB. The PC still is miserable but has a lot of ram just like my everyday beast! Wait.. Now the fucking "windows updates" software that was stuck at "checking for updates" now finds updates (about 63 of them). WTF? (I had tried some.bat file found on the net to "unstuck" it, but dunno if the RAM ugprade did something or it wanted just one more reboot..)
So, in conclusion (tl;dr) there's some dark ugly voodoo that determines if Windows Updates will actually work. If it does, it's of course extremely CPU and memory intensive : if you have 1GB RAM or perhaps even 2GB RAM (which runs very low if you use programs) the PC could be so much fucking slow at installing updates that you run the risk of getting infected. I mean, two days of running Windows with unpatched old zero-days and what not! It makes me feels really dirty. Also, it's self evident that Windows 7 is about as bad as Vista on resources use.
But it was not like that time with XP + IE6 where I got obviously infected before I was even done setting it up. Not sure if the Windows 7 PC is infected or not. Got to 98% memory use and swap hell with only windows (indexing etc. disabled), avast and firefox running (and task manager) ; firefox was only taking less than 20%. Had to kill firefox and disable the antivirus (killing firefox through task manager didn't go so well : not working, and "firefox is not responding" message not coming because of swap hell. Firefox got killed just when I had opened a command prompt which would have served me to kill it) Got enough RAM to run, you guess it.. Windows Update! I installed that one critical update available and rebooted.
Slashdot Mirror
The RGI pdf does acknolewdge this regarding spreadsheets, it says :
"Pour des besoins d’échanges d’informations sous forme de tableaux, l’utilisation d’OOXML est
tolérée"
Which I'll translate as "For needs of exchanging information under the form of spreadsheets, the use of OOXML is tolerated".
Though I feel like it's a bit ambiguous : "tableau" means a two-dimensional array of data here, similar to English "table". So I guess most spreadsheets are okay, if they're not complex VBA programs disguised as documents.
Lol :
America must lead this movement of humanity into space lest other powers that do not share our values and belief system fill this leadership vacuum.
Do they mean the USSR is about to form again? or what?
Microsoft uses that same "feature" to trick people into signing up for a Microsoft account during Windows 8.1's setup.
Lesson learned : I'll never sign up for a microsoft account (which means I will never be able to buy a Metro application I suppose, even if I had a compatible OS or device)
/s/cable/DSL, if you wish.
In my country cable is fairly uncommon but does exist. Sometimes a row of public housing has it, or a city block because there were a trend of installing cable in the 80s or whenever ; else by large most every housing has a phone line and at least one antenna connector on the wall to plug a TV in.
There no consistency in where you will find phone plugs in the home (if phone line was installed 40 years ago in a 100 year old house for instance), so the DSL modem (which contains a router, wifi and ethernet switch if not more) may be located damn anywhere but it's common anyway to have it next to the TV.
I guess that millions people run some consumer electronic device over wifi whereas a short ethernet cable would do it, out of ignorance or lack of care. Perhaps in some case two boxes of consumer shit, one stacked on top of the other communicate in wifi. That's a bit ridiculous as the latency is a bit worse and it's a waste of 2.4GHz spectrum.
You used TLC drives rather than MLC, worse by one or two orders of magnitude or more ; and those number are what SMART tells you, it's a dumb count ill-related to the physical realities.
If you use an MLC drive and ignore the SMART count, then I believe it's a ton better, bigger drives are better than smaller ones too.. Then they'll die without notice but less often.
If you want some "fun" order a "Kingfast" 30GB SSD and install windows 7 32bit on it.. Now that's probably a shit ton worse than any Samsung 850.
If you want to go guinea pig with an Intel 750 400GB : that may be the best consumer SSD (but it's quite new)
Still, I'll believe what you said. With HDDs, you get about the same reliability whether you buy the cheapest one or the most expensive ones (save for industrial defects like the 7200.11 and some other well known ones). With SSDs it's almost a crapshoot though there is e.g. a tech site doing long write tests, where most good MLC disks fare well. To me it's a bit like CRT vs LCD monitors : a low end CRT is a ton more solid than a low end LCD (can display black, higher refresh rate, lasts 10 years minimum). The best kind of LCD would be good though (say recent 2560x1440 VA panel)
But a Ferrari is useless, does something like 10 mpg (?) and you're more likely to kill someone or yourself with it.
I'm waiting for the patent on Apple's original iPod connector to expire so I can get a portable media player compatible with it.. or by then, everyone will have forgotten about it.
Don't get your hopes up.. I don't even know of a single media player compatible with the iPod connector.
- I like the UI for bookmarks (star icon + little notepad icon)
- easier to set the search egine (recent UI change, and before that removing the separate hidden setting for search engine in the URL bar)
- major performance increase, though one bad web page slows it down.
You seem to be one of these "memory is here to be used" people, and it's fine but there are many of us commoners that don't see a need to upgrade to a new computer with ddr3, or even ddr4 (which will be on cheap computers in 2016).
Almost any ddr2 PC is still fine for most daily use and they're often capped at 4GB max (mine has two fried slots)
So memory is not that cheap. Imagine if Chrome used 40GB, out of your 32GB :)
Raspberry Pi is some kind of Unix workstation with USB peripherals and a big firmware blob you have to cater to. Seems more complex than even a PC that runs DOS. A microcontroller that only runs your program, not an OS is simpler still.
Nvidia uses the concept of neural networks to promote its oncoming Pascal GPU : the new features are massive internal and external bandwith (the attached stacked memory is a big deal, and there's an interconnect ; well, I suppose internal buses are wider/faster) and FP16 (half precision floats) carried over from mobile GPU.
The half floats are meant to save bandwith and power.
So nvidia goes and say, well we can use that for NN. It's kind of marketing spin but at least using a GPU is cheap (next to designing your own hardware or say, using a mainframe)
HTML5 video is some kind of moving target? I remember how years ago on slashdot it was about some raw video streaming with the universal ability of doing a right-click and "save as". But then it needed DRM. And then, it sucks because you want the ability to change video stream on the fly depending on bandwith. So you have "MSE", which is bleeding edge. Meaning unfinished, not supported, perhaps has the potential to up the CPU hungriness again.
Whatever, give me something that works in flash 11.2, it "only" requires an old 3GHz PC to play (if you don't have h264 hardware)
Not direct hardware access per se, but we'll end up with OpenGL and even OpenCL code running if all goes like planned, under other names such as WebGL, WebCL. That may effect a pseudo denial-of-service through driver crash or overheating, or lead to a web page increasing your power consumption by 100 watts. Perhaps some javascript you automatically run will steal your CPU/GPU cycles for someone to profit from.
I don't know about security issues, seems like the GPU, its firmware and its driver are security choke points? One trivial example would be javascript malware grabs your GPU framebuffer or surfaces to be composited and sends them somewhere.
I converted a fairly old and small ISP box that was intended to do ADSL modem, router and wifi access point. After some protacted flashing through USB and a Windows program, it got a more "vanilla" and unrestricted firmware, then configuration was done with telnet and vi rather than the web interface. It became a 802.11b to wired ethernet bridge, with a "homeplug" type thing hooked to the RJ45 ethernet plug.
On the other side, a PC with a 802.11g thumbkey, whose speed I had to set to 5.5 Mbps instead of 11 for more reliability. A free wifi extender, unencrypted (security through low performance and low range)
I'm sure Julian Assange knew the request would not be granted and it's probably a simple maneuver to remember us which side France is on.
Since 2009 France is officially a full NATO member and a couple years later, it showed full allegiance and with the US it attacked Libya, a sovereign country. If we hold this to the same standards as the invasion of Iraq then that was a particularly abject and monstrous crime, which also makes France directly responsible for the rise of Islamic State.
In France, foreign policy affairs are typically directed by the president, who is totally unaccountable once elected (a republican monarch). There's never any debate about foreign policy, esp. in the media. The president styles himself as left-wing, though that is contested. But I haven't heard anything on the left about NATO and the wars, though it seems to me there's that obvious elephant in the room, that France is fully allied to the US, UK, Saudi etc. which implies embracing the neocons goals and methods.
More directly to the point I will say that Hollande and Fabius are comparable to Bush, Cheney, Tony Blair etc. and that the neocons cabbal is the gravest threat from the West since the nazis. Denouncing the US threat is fine (it's one of the few most dangerous countries on Earth) but it does not make intellectual sense to stop at the US or UK border and fail to consider that France is in. We need some great (democratic) purge that throws pro-war officials out of office. France need not embrace a dangerous ideology that worships death and destruction of States, presenting them with a convert-or-die deal (join the Empire or we'll destroy you) or pushing Arabs to kill one another to increase weapons sales.
It does work wonderfully, especially for the common random hardware that's two or three to nine year-old. But you still get some shit like editing the grub line for the first couple boots if you have some video card. Or the state of your alsa + pulseaudio depends a lot on what sound card or distro you're using : if I change one or the other I get a different set up - and if my music player isn't pleased by the result it decides that its volume slider will control the master volume.
Thanks :)
Sure we have EWMH, and simply X11 or Xorg stuff so if I really wanted to do some of the stuff it'd be possible. Perhaps I can find a way to query pulseaudio volume and change it (for example). It's just not easy to figure out what is easily done, and some fear to miss out on something because I'm not running KDE, or FVWM2, or fluxbox, openbox etc.
Btw I simply have an applet for hotkeys in "Control Center" with which I've just added a few bindings to change gamma (such as xgamma -gamma 1.09). Can't do win+n kind of shortcuts and had to use ctrl-alt-t, but the basic feature is there.
Laptops from taiwanese motherboard brands may offer the option too (MSI, Asus, Gigabyte) and are interesting on their own right too (thick enough laptop so there's cooling, VGA + HDMI + ethernet instead of just HDMI, no stickers..)
Under Windows you have Autohotkey, which I used for a number of things in the XP days such as hotkeys to change display gamma, sound volume, instantly launch a terminal etc.
Windows is ridiculously crippled for some things but it can have its own very powerful things. Another example was a freeware to minimize windows to the system tray, it could be configured so that a middle click on the minimize button does it. Under linux this will be impossible, funnily, or non trivial to do and it's certainly desktop or WM specific.
Wow you're being treated worse than homeless people are in some countries.
I'm loving that quote from Bastiat, though unlike him I'll be inclined to believe it's desireable :)
To the "Muzzy" mind associated to those people that go on rampage and maim, kill and do convert-or-die etc. it's also Iran that is crazy, as well as Shia Arabs, for following teachings and rituals coming from the wrong bunch of 1300-year-old dead men.
Then if things go bad the system could halt to a crawl because all resources are spent drawing windows.
If I have audio or an important networked program going on, they should have bigger or equal priority than window draw.
I cared enough to waste that much time writing that too long post above. That shall be a reminder to how much time is wasted installing windows. Yup with another OS and an equally slow PC you can be done in about 20 minutes.
It's funny to install windows updates if you have a somewhat slow (in modern terms) computer. Go get a torrented Windows 7 with updates rolled in till a few monthes ago. Install Windows.. with the custom stuff (updates + script that installs IE and .Net) it takes about two hours to install. .bat file found on the net to "unstuck" it, but dunno if the RAM ugprade did something or it wanted just one more reboot..)
Then it takes about an hour to boot, reboot, install Firefox (downloaded with ftp.exe), change wallpaper etc., install some shit and an AV (this is a single core low power PC with 1GB and old HDD)
Then it takes a shit lot of time to find Windows updates. Two days later, it's still not finding them!
I give up. PC's getting a pain to use, I go for upgrading it to 1.5GB or 2GB. cool, turns out I've plugged a 2GB module in, it now has 3GB. The PC still is miserable but has a lot of ram just like my everyday beast!
Wait.. Now the fucking "windows updates" software that was stuck at "checking for updates" now finds updates (about 63 of them). WTF? (I had tried some
So, in conclusion (tl;dr) there's some dark ugly voodoo that determines if Windows Updates will actually work. If it does, it's of course extremely CPU and memory intensive : if you have 1GB RAM or perhaps even 2GB RAM (which runs very low if you use programs) the PC could be so much fucking slow at installing updates that you run the risk of getting infected. I mean, two days of running Windows with unpatched old zero-days and what not! It makes me feels really dirty. Also, it's self evident that Windows 7 is about as bad as Vista on resources use.
But it was not like that time with XP + IE6 where I got obviously infected before I was even done setting it up.
Not sure if the Windows 7 PC is infected or not. Got to 98% memory use and swap hell with only windows (indexing etc. disabled), avast and firefox running (and task manager) ; firefox was only taking less than 20%. Had to kill firefox and disable the antivirus (killing firefox through task manager didn't go so well : not working, and "firefox is not responding" message not coming because of swap hell. Firefox got killed just when I had opened a command prompt which would have served me to kill it)
Got enough RAM to run, you guess it.. Windows Update! I installed that one critical update available and rebooted.