I remember how Ubuntu 10.04 came out, I installed it from the network (no need for a DVD or USB drive!) and I thought that great, the linux desktop is done. Stable, great looking. Then just a year later, it's back to a mess, great user fragmentation among distros and DEs, and then in a continual state of transition (and I need to buy USB drives to install linux mint).
Ubuntu MATE possibly is a very good idea, but it's now an also-ran. It feels to me sort of like it's downstread from Mint, too. Too bad that if I install a 9-month version, I know I'll have to come back shortly thereafter (perhaps in six months or less if I install it later) to do the reinstall or upgrade.
I remember readings that jazz bands are under dire pressure from dead people's recordings (a lot of them pre-WW2) which causes them to disband or fail to get some hold in the first place. That is exacerbated by technology, as it is rather trivial to store some 100GB and make a playlist ; and that's full quality music not a 128K MP3 from the year 2000. (and the internet can give the content of an old record that stayed in very good condition) It is very easy to make an "audiophile digital player network audio transport" too : add a cheap sound card to the kind of PC businesses were throwing out five years ago (and use the cheapest cable you can find). Gives you the same quality as a $5000 CD player.
I do think some artists are very much threatened by this. Though acoustic bands playing in bars and whatever places isn't something the evil record companies would care much about, and/or the record from the evil major companies are enabling this problem anyway (whether acquiring them was legit or they were torrented)
Disk space is cheap, but it fills up! Will you pay me a *fast* 64GB USB thumb drive, or a controller card and a 1TB 2.5" drive? That's about two hundred bucks and then I'll want a backup HDD, and a SD card to put in cell phones.
Mind you I think that FLAC is awesome, but high bitrate lossy might be a good idea. Especially when you're spending half an hour copying music to a flash drive that's hugely more expensive per GB than a hard drive. Vorbis is outdated btw, when there's Opus.
The new Macbook is a netbook without the VGA, RJ45 and USB plugs. Can you even plug headpgones or speakers in? If they want to use both a mouse and a printer, they even need to plug a dongle into the dongle. If the mouse is a wireless 2.4GHz one, that will be a dongle in the dongle in the dongle.
What gives is, if you want to buy new hardware then wait for Ubuntu 16.04 or Debian 9..
Even with older graphics (such as the Radeon HD 6000 in pretty current APUs) you get barely adequate support now. If you find yourself with a little bug when using the proprietary driver, and another little bug when using the open source one, that's a pain. Also, on that computer there's a CRT monitor and with linux/Xorg (as usual) a lot of resolutions and refreshes are missing, so I need a script to add them (instead of entries in xorg.conf in older times) but the display outputs are named differently between the open source and proprietary drivers.
Indeed with digital TVs I witnessed some crappy sound disruption that made the show unwatchable, at times. With analog TV, we did have a digital sound track called NICAM, which could get disrupted : then we got fall back to analog mono sound. Some TVs had the option, sometimes on the remote to force analog mono sound, which is useful if it's constantly jumping back and forth between the analog mono and digital stereo track.
A good FM receiver may have a switch to stay in mono for about the same reason!, this time it's purely analog but you have mono + "stereo information" that are combined to form a real stereo signal (LP records are similar), if reception is bad there's a fall back to using the mono part only.
Where I am in France, if I tune in to AM I mostly hear a shit ton of spanish language spoken very fast, and broadcasts from across the Mediterranean. That requires using an old radio with a needle though, as most every radio with a digits display and electronic tuning just fails at receiving anything (some might work better if adding a piece of antenna or wire, but there has to be a connector on the back) French AM station are a handful of national radios you can receive on FM anyway, only useful for grandmas and remote places (or from abroad, I guess)
Chip amplifiers are very much worth it (class D amps). That's a chip, but it only amplifies sound, supported by a few capacitors etc. You could have an uncomputerized car radio, with even a knob and needle rather than the "press the + button 95 times or do a search" feature, that uses the chip amp.
Bluetooth transmitter could sit in there.. as long as it's a small module wired as an analog input, next to "aux in".
I do have a cell phone which receives radio without the cable. It is nice for listening to some talk/news and occasionally a bit of music while walking and bored, but it is not really good for that.
Other cell phones, you can use a jack cable instead of a headphone, that is more convenient if you never use earbuds.
That's S3 mode stand by, if you can accept the name and limitations. Such as : don't actually cut the power, never mind the occasionally possible network issues, or particular linux issues (when powered back up, it sends my graphics card in "emergency mode" i.e. fan at 100% speed and it stays at 100% speed till I reboot)
Amazingly but unsurprisingly, Google Earth the 3D package that does about the same thing as the 2D Google maps is like an order of magnitude less demanding on hardware resources. It even requires little GPU performance (a geforce 6100 is more than fine for instance)
So I may recommend it as an alternative if Google Maps is too slow, or if you need something to run on old or very slow hardware. Roads/streets can be enabled with one click - you end up with something that looks like a superposition of plan and aerial photos, and street view is available.
Yet it may fail to display the damn little pictures. At least on linux (ubuntu 14.04 derivate), the embedded browser seems to fail depending on what version you use. Had to rip out "google-earth-stable" from my system, then install "googleearth-package" which is kind of like setup.exe files that act as downloaders for Windows software. Then run "make-googleearth-package" which you can helpfully find by typing "mak" and hitting tab, tab, or by searching for it with such thing as " find/usr -name '*google*' ". How wonderfully user friendly is that! But unexpectedly, I've just fixed the problem. It went from version 7.1.2.2041-r0 to version 6.0.3.2197, go figure. It seemed slow at first but that's a matter of repopulating the cache.
AMD still has too low single-thread performance and if you care about that, Intel came out with Celeron G1620 and Pentium G2020 (now updated with the same as Haswell) and has ruled the low end too.
AMD ironically requires a more expensive motherboard and an aftermarket heatsink/fan if you go for that old six-core CPU. (but I do have that opinion that a CPU with four or six or more cores is most needed for games, unless you're a professional who works all the time with lots of big pictures or video) I would get an AMD set up only knowingly, knowing that's is barely better than Phenom II / C2Q 9550 performance. Flagship recent AMD CPU are A10 7850K and Athlon 860K, still a lot slower than an Intel 2500K. Fortunately I lost interest in games, as they required to spend hundreds $/€ for incremental graphics improvements and they required to use Vista/7/8.
Weren't workstations of the 80s and 90s just powerful microcomputers? CPU with memory protection (e.g. 68010 plus MMU), SCSI disks, high resolution (about a megapixel), several megabytes of memory, advanced OS : Unix-like, Windows NT or something else.
By that measure, any good low end desktop computer is a workstation. By 2001, that had Windows XP and Ultra DMA IDE modes ; a decade or less later we had SATA with NCQ (no need for SCSI), support for dual monitor and SMP as standard (dual and quad core).
There is a nice improvement going from AHCI to NVMe protocol, though. I/O gets lower latency, less CPU intensive, less "blocking".
That may seem "philosophical" still. At a first approximation latency is halved. The tech will be a good thing to have once the drives get plentiful and cheap.
I mean these are so ridiculously powerful cards that if one buy one, that may be because you wanted to run some demanding and advanced game. There are at least a handful available now for linux desktops. But if you use an open source driver, and it manages to run the game without crashing or debilitating bugs, the driver will likely bottleneck you so much you get like 10% or 20% of the performance. Way to waste a computer upgrade, both GPU and CPU - you do need to upgrade the latter to play advanced and recent games, too.
The slowest of these cards does over 2 teraflops, there's no way you can remotely use that level of performance and features in games with an open source driver anyway.
I don't have a FirefoxOS device to experience it, but they say they added that feature in an 1.x version. I remember thinking that crap, I thought it's the smartphone for normal people and should be a less intrusive smartphone : if you want to check mail go to the mail app. But you do have legitimate notifications on a phone : SMS and missed calls.
So.. is the web notification feature somewhat old already? Found this on push notification, says it's supported by no desktop browser https://developer.mozilla.org/... And just "notifications", whatever they are : purportedly supported by Chrome 22 and Firefox 22, but I don't know what they are about https://developer.mozilla.org/...
We've always had "web apps" : the CUPS configuration interface, the web mail I was using in 2001, slash fucking dot. Well, there was a web before those things. But it looks good when done in moderation (or in some cases, a "web 1.0" application is good). For now we don't seem to have a solution : we get the good, the bad and the garbage unless we go to the trouble of filtering everything. Perhaps something like "javascript can't use more than 640K on a page" would have worked.
I remember slashdot before it used javascript to load comments : expanding a reply meant loading a new web page, either in another tab or in the current tab and do a back/forward dance (reloading the original page if you hit back). That was a pain in the ass and I opened many tabs just to read one slashdot story (more tabs for TFA or links given in comments)
With LLVM using an intermediate representation of code (LLVM IR) and CLR another : MSIL, now called CIL, does that mean it goes C# -> LLVM bytecode ->.NET bytecode?, does the JIT does both steps at once, why doesn't that mean every single language with a LLVM target can now run on the CoreCLR?, was LLVM modified, was what's in my first question horribly wrong?
Note that 90% of energy is wasted in datacenters for autoplaying videos, tracking, web 2.0, "we recommend you these stories", inefficient implementations etc. Client devices could do with a single MIPS core and an unlit monochrome LCD, servers could run tight code written in C or whatever instead of PHP etc., and serve actual content rather than padding all pages with background noise and 3000x2000 background pictures.
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I remember how Ubuntu 10.04 came out, I installed it from the network (no need for a DVD or USB drive!) and I thought that great, the linux desktop is done. Stable, great looking. Then just a year later, it's back to a mess, great user fragmentation among distros and DEs, and then in a continual state of transition (and I need to buy USB drives to install linux mint).
Ubuntu MATE possibly is a very good idea, but it's now an also-ran. It feels to me sort of like it's downstread from Mint, too. Too bad that if I install a 9-month version, I know I'll have to come back shortly thereafter (perhaps in six months or less if I install it later) to do the reinstall or upgrade.
I remember readings that jazz bands are under dire pressure from dead people's recordings (a lot of them pre-WW2) which causes them to disband or fail to get some hold in the first place. That is exacerbated by technology, as it is rather trivial to store some 100GB and make a playlist ; and that's full quality music not a 128K MP3 from the year 2000. (and the internet can give the content of an old record that stayed in very good condition)
It is very easy to make an "audiophile digital player network audio transport" too : add a cheap sound card to the kind of PC businesses were throwing out five years ago (and use the cheapest cable you can find). Gives you the same quality as a $5000 CD player.
I do think some artists are very much threatened by this. Though acoustic bands playing in bars and whatever places isn't something the evil record companies would care much about, and/or the record from the evil major companies are enabling this problem anyway (whether acquiring them was legit or they were torrented)
Some people do use 2560x1440 over VGA (at a reduced refresh), that's a workaround that can be used on some Intel graphics.
Disk space is cheap, but it fills up!
Will you pay me a *fast* 64GB USB thumb drive, or a controller card and a 1TB 2.5" drive?
That's about two hundred bucks and then I'll want a backup HDD, and a SD card to put in cell phones.
Mind you I think that FLAC is awesome, but high bitrate lossy might be a good idea. Especially when you're spending half an hour copying music to a flash drive that's hugely more expensive per GB than a hard drive.
Vorbis is outdated btw, when there's Opus.
The new Macbook is a netbook without the VGA, RJ45 and USB plugs. Can you even plug headpgones or speakers in? If they want to use both a mouse and a printer, they even need to plug a dongle into the dongle. If the mouse is a wireless 2.4GHz one, that will be a dongle in the dongle in the dongle.
So, you have a small, semi-failing computer thing and the solution is to add another small computer thing with a different set of limitations.
Just in for slashdot and in exclusivity, here's a zoom of the Cantor set at 2^1048576 :
_ _
What gives is, if you want to buy new hardware then wait for Ubuntu 16.04 or Debian 9..
Even with older graphics (such as the Radeon HD 6000 in pretty current APUs) you get barely adequate support now.
If you find yourself with a little bug when using the proprietary driver, and another little bug when using the open source one, that's a pain. Also, on that computer there's a CRT monitor and with linux/Xorg (as usual) a lot of resolutions and refreshes are missing, so I need a script to add them (instead of entries in xorg.conf in older times) but the display outputs are named differently between the open source and proprietary drivers.
Indeed with digital TVs I witnessed some crappy sound disruption that made the show unwatchable, at times.
With analog TV, we did have a digital sound track called NICAM, which could get disrupted : then we got fall back to analog mono sound. Some TVs had the option, sometimes on the remote to force analog mono sound, which is useful if it's constantly jumping back and forth between the analog mono and digital stereo track.
A good FM receiver may have a switch to stay in mono for about the same reason!, this time it's purely analog but you have mono + "stereo information" that are combined to form a real stereo signal (LP records are similar), if reception is bad there's a fall back to using the mono part only.
Where I am in France, if I tune in to AM I mostly hear a shit ton of spanish language spoken very fast, and broadcasts from across the Mediterranean. That requires using an old radio with a needle though, as most every radio with a digits display and electronic tuning just fails at receiving anything (some might work better if adding a piece of antenna or wire, but there has to be a connector on the back)
French AM station are a handful of national radios you can receive on FM anyway, only useful for grandmas and remote places (or from abroad, I guess)
Chip amplifiers are very much worth it (class D amps). That's a chip, but it only amplifies sound, supported by a few capacitors etc.
You could have an uncomputerized car radio, with even a knob and needle rather than the "press the + button 95 times or do a search" feature, that uses the chip amp.
Bluetooth transmitter could sit in there.. as long as it's a small module wired as an analog input, next to "aux in".
I do have a cell phone which receives radio without the cable. It is nice for listening to some talk/news and occasionally a bit of music while walking and bored, but it is not really good for that.
Other cell phones, you can use a jack cable instead of a headphone, that is more convenient if you never use earbuds.
That's S3 mode stand by, if you can accept the name and limitations. Such as : don't actually cut the power, never mind the occasionally possible network issues, or particular linux issues (when powered back up, it sends my graphics card in "emergency mode" i.e. fan at 100% speed and it stays at 100% speed till I reboot)
Amazingly but unsurprisingly, Google Earth the 3D package that does about the same thing as the 2D Google maps is like an order of magnitude less demanding on hardware resources. It even requires little GPU performance (a geforce 6100 is more than fine for instance)
So I may recommend it as an alternative if Google Maps is too slow, or if you need something to run on old or very slow hardware. Roads/streets can be enabled with one click - you end up with something that looks like a superposition of plan and aerial photos, and street view is available.
Yet it may fail to display the damn little pictures. At least on linux (ubuntu 14.04 derivate), the embedded browser seems to fail depending on what version you use. Had to rip out "google-earth-stable" from my system, then install "googleearth-package" which is kind of like setup.exe files that act as downloaders for Windows software. Then run "make-googleearth-package" which you can helpfully find by typing "mak" and hitting tab, tab, or by searching for it with such thing as " find /usr -name '*google*' ". How wonderfully user friendly is that!
But unexpectedly, I've just fixed the problem.
It went from version 7.1.2.2041-r0 to version 6.0.3.2197, go figure. It seemed slow at first but that's a matter of repopulating the cache.
AMD still has too low single-thread performance and if you care about that, Intel came out with Celeron G1620 and Pentium G2020 (now updated with the same as Haswell) and has ruled the low end too.
AMD ironically requires a more expensive motherboard and an aftermarket heatsink/fan if you go for that old six-core CPU. (but I do have that opinion that a CPU with four or six or more cores is most needed for games, unless you're a professional who works all the time with lots of big pictures or video)
I would get an AMD set up only knowingly, knowing that's is barely better than Phenom II / C2Q 9550 performance. Flagship recent AMD CPU are A10 7850K and Athlon 860K, still a lot slower than an Intel 2500K.
Fortunately I lost interest in games, as they required to spend hundreds $/€ for incremental graphics improvements and they required to use Vista/7/8.
Weren't workstations of the 80s and 90s just powerful microcomputers?
CPU with memory protection (e.g. 68010 plus MMU), SCSI disks, high resolution (about a megapixel), several megabytes of memory, advanced OS : Unix-like, Windows NT or something else.
By that measure, any good low end desktop computer is a workstation. By 2001, that had Windows XP and Ultra DMA IDE modes ; a decade or less later we had SATA with NCQ (no need for SCSI), support for dual monitor and SMP as standard (dual and quad core).
There is a nice improvement going from AHCI to NVMe protocol, though. I/O gets lower latency, less CPU intensive, less "blocking".
That may seem "philosophical" still. At a first approximation latency is halved. The tech will be a good thing to have once the drives get plentiful and cheap.
I mean these are so ridiculously powerful cards that if one buy one, that may be because you wanted to run some demanding and advanced game. There are at least a handful available now for linux desktops. But if you use an open source driver, and it manages to run the game without crashing or debilitating bugs, the driver will likely bottleneck you so much you get like 10% or 20% of the performance.
Way to waste a computer upgrade, both GPU and CPU - you do need to upgrade the latter to play advanced and recent games, too.
The slowest of these cards does over 2 teraflops, there's no way you can remotely use that level of performance and features in games with an open source driver anyway.
Or if you want to get evil, asm.js ..
Then write a javascript interpreter in C#
I don't have a FirefoxOS device to experience it, but they say they added that feature in an 1.x version. I remember thinking that crap, I thought it's the smartphone for normal people and should be a less intrusive smartphone : if you want to check mail go to the mail app. But you do have legitimate notifications on a phone : SMS and missed calls.
So.. is the web notification feature somewhat old already?
Found this on push notification, says it's supported by no desktop browser
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
And just "notifications", whatever they are : purportedly supported by Chrome 22 and Firefox 22, but I don't know what they are about
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
We've always had "web apps" : the CUPS configuration interface, the web mail I was using in 2001, slash fucking dot.
Well, there was a web before those things. But it looks good when done in moderation (or in some cases, a "web 1.0" application is good). For now we don't seem to have a solution : we get the good, the bad and the garbage unless we go to the trouble of filtering everything. Perhaps something like "javascript can't use more than 640K on a page" would have worked.
I remember slashdot before it used javascript to load comments : expanding a reply meant loading a new web page, either in another tab or in the current tab and do a back/forward dance (reloading the original page if you hit back). That was a pain in the ass and I opened many tabs just to read one slashdot story (more tabs for TFA or links given in comments)
Internet Explorer looks interesting, but it's currently lacking a linux version!
With LLVM using an intermediate representation of code (LLVM IR) and CLR another : MSIL, now called CIL, does that mean it goes C# -> LLVM bytecode -> .NET bytecode?, does the JIT does both steps at once, why doesn't that mean every single language with a LLVM target can now run on the CoreCLR?, was LLVM modified, was what's in my first question horribly wrong?
Note that 90% of energy is wasted in datacenters for autoplaying videos, tracking, web 2.0, "we recommend you these stories", inefficient implementations etc.
Client devices could do with a single MIPS core and an unlit monochrome LCD, servers could run tight code written in C or whatever instead of PHP etc., and serve actual content rather than padding all pages with background noise and 3000x2000 background pictures.