Browsers used to come with a mail client, news reader and webpage composer even though since about 2001 every new internet user uses webmail, USENET has been dead and 99% users never write then host HTML pages.
I feel the same mostly, but (repeating myself on slashdot stories) the UI is not so evil as it takes five seconds to get the menu bar back. I haven't investigated how to get the title bar back under Windows, I think that that is more wrong.
>"Have your browser habits shifted recently?
I have just taken to blocking third party cookies (after running a few days with Lightbeam extension, followed with a hiatus). The preferences GUI is flawed there, as this is semi-hidden : cookies preferences appear out of nothing only when you tell you want custom parameters for history, which is a wtf. I assumed there were no cookies preferences. With that and using ublock I feel reasonably good i.e. more crap is blocked than 95% browsers out there. but I'm still tracked by many other means nonetheless.
Now use OpenGL 4.3 or 4.4, and you find yourself tied to Windows again, perhaps Mac, and a tiny portion of linux users with recent AMD or nvidia hardware, recent distro and proprietary driver installed.
When putting an iso's contents on a small USB drive (while keeping the fat32 filesystem and the rest of the files!) the less place it's taking, the better ; with debian you also typically only need DVD-1. If you do need off-line packages in DVD-2 and DVD-3, you can have the iso files stored anywhere and mount them anyway?
DVD-R are somewhat unreliable so you're less likely to fail with a smaller iso, that would be another excuse.
You can do indeed, but it's still expensive, relatively power hungry so it doesn't get built into desktop motherboards and laptops or consumer networking equipment. So it is still years away, even though it's many years old already. If it does come around I think by then we'll have PCIe 4.0 in our computers, 10nm CPU for Intel and 14nm for everyone else (or 7nm for Intel, 10nm or 14nm for competitors).
It has a menu bar and the menu bar can be left permanently enabled, so the GUI conforms better to Windows 3.0 / Motif UI guidelines than the competition. About FirefoxOS, the main wtf is the lack of ad blocking (though manually adding a hosts file by using a PC from the command line might be a workaround). Else the lack of "applications" is the main feature. Well better yet don't use a fucking smartphone then you'll be able to look at people around you instead of spending 10 minutes writing text messages to your trashy girlfriend.
The solution to get those dial up users hooked to broadband is to run fiber, which is cheaper than running new last-mile copper (which would go to fiber after one hop anyway) Then, fiber is at Gbps speed because the signal doesn't degrade (over the distance for one cable to the consumer anyway), else we'd be
So dial up users may or may not need 1Gbps, but they need that tech which gives them 1Gbps anyway. What remains is only a political/economics problem ; if anything, fiber makes most sense in rural areas (much easier to get the cable through than in urban areas, cheaper to get 1Gbps fiber than 512K DSL)
I learned that there exist a 2.5Gb/s ethernet speed on RJ45 cable, which should be a credible upgrade for future consumer hardware (10Gb is not it seems)
As to the fiber, well the equipment and the fiber do it. Perhaps that 2Gbps is just 1Gbps full duplex by the way, but it's not like installing 1Gbps fiber and network interface is more expensive than installing 10Mbps or 100Mbps fiber. In fact you would have to go out of your way to find or build equipment that only supports 100Mbps, so it would be more expensive than 1Gbps.
If you don't want or need 3D acceleration (OpenGL/Direct3D), you can possibly get hardware that only supports 2D but that's specialty hardware for server boards, you'll pay more for it (I looked it up, there's a 2-watt 2D card on PCIe 1x that costs > $70 + shipping from a far away place, while a 2D/3D card that eats up to 9 watts costs less than half that)
I have not done calculations, but there is conventional wisdom that it is very hard to get to the Sun, you need a lot of delta-v to get that orbital change. Assuming a lot of propeller left, you would likely get slightly closer to the Sun and get stuck there, then tiny push from the radiation pressure would slowly make you recede outwards.
You underestimate the longevity of a desktop computer, if it's not affected by past "plagues" (no-brand memory plague, PSU plague, capacitor plague and some problems with lead-free solder)
I think we're gonna see a huge problem again in 2020 if Windows 7 is EOL'ed then.
I suppose you could disguise it as a real space launch, substitute a real satellite with the evil "payload" at the last moments possible before launch. Then pretend your launch is going wrong, or give it a sensible orbit but have the payload maneuver to deorbit above the US. If you can detect a US launch and have your bomb asplode just before the US rocket hits it, the better.
But not only this is a ridiculous evil plan, you will mostly succeed at destroying or ruining many satellites that belong to many nations or companies on Earth, and seriously piss off everyone.
But the problem is you have to tell users "no, you don't want to play that game", "no, you don't want to use the software that came with your camera", "no, you can't use that VPN software, please spend three years learning unix shell and networking". While we're happy reinstalling linux every year, we don't know what we're missing from the old, CP/M and DOS-like ways.. download any binary program and run it and it can do everything.
I see, there's the "Preferred Applications" applet under Mate (and maybe Cinnamon) that allows about the same and it is a godsend. You can set the default program for sound files and default program for video, separate (if I want the playlist-based music player, I open it separately with one click). Nice, quick and gets rid of the totem video player. I believe that's about the one feature Mate gained over old Gnome 2, along with a "control center" that sums up the stuff in "Preferences" and "Administration" menus, and few/subtle file manager improvements.
I hate "modern" crap that's "modern" for the sake of it, but just from screenshots I believe it looks a lot better than KDE 4. I also suppose you can run it without OpenGL, with disabled animations etc. so it should be usable. Doesn't mean I'll switch to it, as it is a pain to get whole new set of applications (file manager, pdf reader, terminal etc.)
Solar over a particular square kilometer is very much finite in the span of a day, a year or a century. Vacuum energy is virtually infinite too (aside the problem you most probably can't extract work from it) but say, if it takes collecting an Earth's volume energy for a year just to move a finger once, it is not useful at all.
I'm thinking of DLP projectors, or even a black and white CRT display. Something is spinning or scanning so fast that not only it avoids lighting up certain zones, it's so precise that it gives you a recognizable picture with human people and faces etc. and so fast they seem to be moving.
Let's say you have infrared lights, an infrared camera filming the rain and a black and white DLP projector trained on it (reverse video), acting as a car headlight. You would need a very low latency though, or perhaps the system is studying the rain and doing motion compensation to compensate latency (but that would add latency of its own)
A desktop distros even starts lots of crap such as cups, samba etc. just in case you need it. (even avahi daemon which you perhaps never need)
I went to some lengthes to disable avahi daemon, but the rest is useful. A quite illiterate user had success sharing a folder on the network by right-clicking on it (which was that easy in Windows 95, but grew more complex over time). That's a pretty big success for a linux desktop, and the user did it to watch video on a set top box and it worked. I was impressed to see that.
I loved Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, it was a perfect OS for running games. DirectX 9, sound, joystick input (I had to extract the.inf file for the Xbox 360 controller and feed it to device manager), even wifi and the semi-poor support to run DOS games. It was a slightly improved version of Windows XP with graphical effects turned off and ctrl-alt-del as the log in.
The netinstaller can install the desktop. I installed Ubuntu 10.04 that way by the way and wow, that was impressive all the way (on the target desktop, hit F12 and boot from ethernet, hit enter to launch the text mode installer. A rather short while after, you got a really good looking GTK2 desktop with everything on the latest security updates). That saves a lot of time and bandwith vs wget-ing the iso, putting it on media etc. Then debian squeeze was kind of the debian version of ubuntu 10.04 (lenny was close to 8.04).
The screenshots aren't looking bad but that Gnome quest for removing menu bars goes a bit far. What if you find yourself with no free space in a file manager window to right-click on. I tell people to use "Edit / Paste" or "File / Create a new folder" in that case.
Were these "non-smart" phones that came with a browser and ran Java apps? Or you were just unlucky and bought some crap. I remember that era as one of gimmicky phones with a run for the latest "features". Look, there's a color screen! Micro-payments to buy shit! Or a key presses itself in your pocket and it goes straight to the WAP browser, loading the portal page configured by the carrier.
But these days, you can still get a non-smart phone with a very bland firmware. They want you to feel like the phone can't do anything (instead of loading it with "multimedia" features - though there are some - and a slow ass kiddy firmware) The best feature is USB power, so there's no need to get and carry proprietary chargers anymore. No need for special USB either, 5V 500mA is enough. Even a 10 minute trickle will add enough juice to carry on if you forgot to plug the phone in the last few days.
I tried Linux Mint Debian and it feels slightly better, but my sound card is less well recognised out of the box. It has that debian feature of Alsamixer only showing one stereo output and nothing else, which I could live with but in some media players changing the volume changes the global sound volume. I don't want to tweak every app and/or write Alsa or pulseaudio config files. Also tried the Cinnamon desktop at the same time : it's a better desktop than Mate but eats a ton of CPU (up to making video feel a bit jerky, and that's just xvid files). So back to Ubuntu Mint with Mate. If I wanted a stable and light OS with a 3D desktop, I would have to install Windows 8.
What about panels charging the batteries during the day, then release energy at the evening (before night and beginning of night), then charge batteries from grid during off-peak night, then release it during the morning.
That gets more complex though and you'd want to add more complexity (smart water heater or something), I'd be wary of that complexity i.e. more and more stuff to build, buy and maintain.
Slashdot Mirror
Browsers used to come with a mail client, news reader and webpage composer even though since about 2001 every new internet user uses webmail, USENET has been dead and 99% users never write then host HTML pages.
I feel the same mostly, but (repeating myself on slashdot stories) the UI is not so evil as it takes five seconds to get the menu bar back.
I haven't investigated how to get the title bar back under Windows, I think that that is more wrong.
>"Have your browser habits shifted recently?
I have just taken to blocking third party cookies (after running a few days with Lightbeam extension, followed with a hiatus).
The preferences GUI is flawed there, as this is semi-hidden : cookies preferences appear out of nothing only when you tell you want custom parameters for history, which is a wtf. I assumed there were no cookies preferences.
With that and using ublock I feel reasonably good i.e. more crap is blocked than 95% browsers out there. but I'm still tracked by many other means nonetheless.
Now use OpenGL 4.3 or 4.4, and you find yourself tied to Windows again, perhaps Mac, and a tiny portion of linux users with recent AMD or nvidia hardware, recent distro and proprietary driver installed.
When putting an iso's contents on a small USB drive (while keeping the fat32 filesystem and the rest of the files!) the less place it's taking, the better ; with debian you also typically only need DVD-1.
If you do need off-line packages in DVD-2 and DVD-3, you can have the iso files stored anywhere and mount them anyway?
DVD-R are somewhat unreliable so you're less likely to fail with a smaller iso, that would be another excuse.
You can do indeed, but it's still expensive, relatively power hungry so it doesn't get built into desktop motherboards and laptops or consumer networking equipment.
So it is still years away, even though it's many years old already. If it does come around I think by then we'll have PCIe 4.0 in our computers, 10nm CPU for Intel and 14nm for everyone else (or 7nm for Intel, 10nm or 14nm for competitors).
It has a menu bar and the menu bar can be left permanently enabled, so the GUI conforms better to Windows 3.0 / Motif UI guidelines than the competition.
About FirefoxOS, the main wtf is the lack of ad blocking (though manually adding a hosts file by using a PC from the command line might be a workaround). Else the lack of "applications" is the main feature. Well better yet don't use a fucking smartphone then you'll be able to look at people around you instead of spending 10 minutes writing text messages to your trashy girlfriend.
The solution to get those dial up users hooked to broadband is to run fiber, which is cheaper than running new last-mile copper (which would go to fiber after one hop anyway)
Then, fiber is at Gbps speed because the signal doesn't degrade (over the distance for one cable to the consumer anyway), else we'd be
So dial up users may or may not need 1Gbps, but they need that tech which gives them 1Gbps anyway.
What remains is only a political/economics problem ; if anything, fiber makes most sense in rural areas (much easier to get the cable through than in urban areas, cheaper to get 1Gbps fiber than 512K DSL)
I learned that there exist a 2.5Gb/s ethernet speed on RJ45 cable, which should be a credible upgrade for future consumer hardware (10Gb is not it seems)
As to the fiber, well the equipment and the fiber do it. Perhaps that 2Gbps is just 1Gbps full duplex by the way, but it's not like installing 1Gbps fiber and network interface is more expensive than installing 10Mbps or 100Mbps fiber. In fact you would have to go out of your way to find or build equipment that only supports 100Mbps, so it would be more expensive than 1Gbps.
If you don't want or need 3D acceleration (OpenGL/Direct3D), you can possibly get hardware that only supports 2D but that's specialty hardware for server boards, you'll pay more for it (I looked it up, there's a 2-watt 2D card on PCIe 1x that costs > $70 + shipping from a far away place, while a 2D/3D card that eats up to 9 watts costs less than half that)
I have not done calculations, but there is conventional wisdom that it is very hard to get to the Sun, you need a lot of delta-v to get that orbital change. Assuming a lot of propeller left, you would likely get slightly closer to the Sun and get stuck there, then tiny push from the radiation pressure would slowly make you recede outwards.
You underestimate the longevity of a desktop computer, if it's not affected by past "plagues" (no-brand memory plague, PSU plague, capacitor plague and some problems with lead-free solder)
I think we're gonna see a huge problem again in 2020 if Windows 7 is EOL'ed then.
I suppose you could disguise it as a real space launch, substitute a real satellite with the evil "payload" at the last moments possible before launch. Then pretend your launch is going wrong, or give it a sensible orbit but have the payload maneuver to deorbit above the US. If you can detect a US launch and have your bomb asplode just before the US rocket hits it, the better.
But not only this is a ridiculous evil plan, you will mostly succeed at destroying or ruining many satellites that belong to many nations or companies on Earth, and seriously piss off everyone.
But the problem is you have to tell users "no, you don't want to play that game", "no, you don't want to use the software that came with your camera", "no, you can't use that VPN software, please spend three years learning unix shell and networking".
While we're happy reinstalling linux every year, we don't know what we're missing from the old, CP/M and DOS-like ways.. download any binary program and run it and it can do everything.
I see, there's the "Preferred Applications" applet under Mate (and maybe Cinnamon) that allows about the same and it is a godsend.
You can set the default program for sound files and default program for video, separate (if I want the playlist-based music player, I open it separately with one click). Nice, quick and gets rid of the totem video player.
I believe that's about the one feature Mate gained over old Gnome 2, along with a "control center" that sums up the stuff in "Preferences" and "Administration" menus, and few/subtle file manager improvements.
I hate "modern" crap that's "modern" for the sake of it, but just from screenshots I believe it looks a lot better than KDE 4.
I also suppose you can run it without OpenGL, with disabled animations etc. so it should be usable.
Doesn't mean I'll switch to it, as it is a pain to get whole new set of applications (file manager, pdf reader, terminal etc.)
Solar over a particular square kilometer is very much finite in the span of a day, a year or a century.
Vacuum energy is virtually infinite too (aside the problem you most probably can't extract work from it) but say, if it takes collecting an Earth's volume energy for a year just to move a finger once, it is not useful at all.
I'm thinking of DLP projectors, or even a black and white CRT display. Something is spinning or scanning so fast that not only it avoids lighting up certain zones, it's so precise that it gives you a recognizable picture with human people and faces etc. and so fast they seem to be moving.
Let's say you have infrared lights, an infrared camera filming the rain and a black and white DLP projector trained on it (reverse video), acting as a car headlight. You would need a very low latency though, or perhaps the system is studying the rain and doing motion compensation to compensate latency (but that would add latency of its own)
Yes, most noticeably antivirus software.
A desktop distros even starts lots of crap such as cups, samba etc. just in case you need it. (even avahi daemon which you perhaps never need)
I went to some lengthes to disable avahi daemon, but the rest is useful. A quite illiterate user had success sharing a folder on the network by right-clicking on it (which was that easy in Windows 95, but grew more complex over time). That's a pretty big success for a linux desktop, and the user did it to watch video on a set top box and it worked. I was impressed to see that.
I loved Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, it was a perfect OS for running games. DirectX 9, sound, joystick input (I had to extract the .inf file for the Xbox 360 controller and feed it to device manager), even wifi and the semi-poor support to run DOS games.
It was a slightly improved version of Windows XP with graphical effects turned off and ctrl-alt-del as the log in.
The netinstaller can install the desktop. I installed Ubuntu 10.04 that way by the way and wow, that was impressive all the way (on the target desktop, hit F12 and boot from ethernet, hit enter to launch the text mode installer. A rather short while after, you got a really good looking GTK2 desktop with everything on the latest security updates).
That saves a lot of time and bandwith vs wget-ing the iso, putting it on media etc.
Then debian squeeze was kind of the debian version of ubuntu 10.04 (lenny was close to 8.04).
The screenshots aren't looking bad but that Gnome quest for removing menu bars goes a bit far. What if you find yourself with no free space in a file manager window to right-click on. I tell people to use "Edit / Paste" or "File / Create a new folder" in that case.
Were these "non-smart" phones that came with a browser and ran Java apps?
Or you were just unlucky and bought some crap. I remember that era as one of gimmicky phones with a run for the latest "features". Look, there's a color screen! Micro-payments to buy shit! Or a key presses itself in your pocket and it goes straight to the WAP browser, loading the portal page configured by the carrier.
But these days, you can still get a non-smart phone with a very bland firmware. They want you to feel like the phone can't do anything (instead of loading it with "multimedia" features - though there are some - and a slow ass kiddy firmware)
The best feature is USB power, so there's no need to get and carry proprietary chargers anymore. No need for special USB either, 5V 500mA is enough. Even a 10 minute trickle will add enough juice to carry on if you forgot to plug the phone in the last few days.
I tried Linux Mint Debian and it feels slightly better, but my sound card is less well recognised out of the box. It has that debian feature of Alsamixer only showing one stereo output and nothing else, which I could live with but in some media players changing the volume changes the global sound volume. I don't want to tweak every app and/or write Alsa or pulseaudio config files. Also tried the Cinnamon desktop at the same time : it's a better desktop than Mate but eats a ton of CPU (up to making video feel a bit jerky, and that's just xvid files). So back to Ubuntu Mint with Mate. If I wanted a stable and light OS with a 3D desktop, I would have to install Windows 8.
What about panels charging the batteries during the day, then release energy at the evening (before night and beginning of night), then charge batteries from grid during off-peak night, then release it during the morning.
That gets more complex though and you'd want to add more complexity (smart water heater or something), I'd be wary of that complexity i.e. more and more stuff to build, buy and maintain.
me there again, I forgot or didn't take the time to add some positive tone in my post, now dl'ing Ubuntu Mate 15.04 for i386 anyway!