Load it with 8GB RAM and an SSD, and it's already better than my desktop except for the CPU performance. OS requirements stay the same or decrease slowly over time (e.g. Windows gets better, linux graphics drivers get better). Browsers get better with time : Firefox is better than a year ago, then it will get Electrolysis, then it will get the rewrite in the Rust language (this may takes years, but in the end you'll get the four CPU cores used instead of one and a half)
The Web will still be full and even more full of crap made by people who don't care, malicious people, advertisers, big sites full of galleries and autoplaying crap etc. so there will be some filtering to do but it's already the case today. Likely it will be a wash : performance increases from the OS, drivers and browser will be canceled out by the performance decrease from the web content. I will still miss the times my PC was fast at anything I did and ran almost any game, that was when it had a single core 2GHz CPU and 768MB of sdram.
I checked on that X205 laptop and it is sadly a model with everything soldered down (like a mac book pro) with not even wired ethernet, and limited storage (a fifth of what old Windows netbooks have, and these could be upgraded to bigger). It is a tablet with permanently attached keyboard more than a traditional PC. In this the new tiny PC is more PC-like, as the memory is upgradeable and storage is too by the way of the mSATA slot (the next generation will probably have M.2 PCIe), external bandwith is USB 3.0 + USB 2.0 not just USB 2.0. Imagine you attach wired ethernet, hard disk and sound card to the X205's measly few USB 2.0 ports and watch it all crawl as they are sharing 30MB/s bandwith.
A cynical interpretation would be that there has been more effort to sweep them to the side. There is quite a general housing shortage in France (or rather the rents have gone up, and forget about buying), there is also quite an underclass of people never working or occasionally working (picking fruits, etc.). The social safety net is strong so starvation is vanishingly low, people "only" suffer morally for the most part.
People _DO_ abuse the system, in fact show me a country with any form of welfare that is not abused. The problem in the US is that those abuses are on both ends of the spectrum.
Actually, in my country at least the fraud from people getting undue welfare is thought to be low (far less than a billion) ; business owners not paying their fair share in the system is double or triple that (still fairly low relatively speaking). Undeclared and underdeclared labor don't contribute their share. Then there's the rather more political aspect of businesses getting contribution relieves (especially strong on the lower wages) which runs in the few tens of billions. Note that in that system the "contributions" are about proportional to wages and are a separate thing altogether from taxes.
It feels useful that employers pay very few contribution on unskilled workers, but that is contested by economists. In the end most people end up with a rather low wage (let's say 1.2x to 1.5x the US federal min wage or more) and the work isn't that "unskilled" at all as both "qualifications" and experience are demanded.
Really, what happened to Demuhcracy, Freedom? If your workplace get "facebook at work" it will be forced on you and you will be spied on at every move with eternal retention of data by an immensely rich rogue entity.
They will make a strong shadow profile on your other "you" if don't have a personal account, and if you do well you know what happens. Think about what it takes to fully get out of it. You will have to join the french legion to somewhat get rid of your facebook identity and never see your friends and family again.
Steam does log the time you've spent on every game, last time you've played it and has a "social" system which leaks to your friends such information. I guess such crap as achievements goes there to if you have a game that supports them. Sure, Valve gets some "telemetry" that is legitimately very useful to them but this is not too far from Amazon (I believe) spying and timestamping on your e-book, even right down to which page you have been reading.
I thought about "warehousing" the containers, which is a bad choice of word (esp. considering they sit outside anyway). Containers wait ashore for the boat to come in if it isn't there already, wait for their time to be moved around in that gigantic and overlord port, wait on the boat till other containers have been loaded and till everything is ready, then it's a similar dance on the other side of the ocean. Container on freight train would be pretty much routed towards its final destination already when the container ship is just approaching the US coast. But that issue of blizzards.. Oh well, sounds nightmarish.
I wonder if gigantic coal trains are included in that average, and the US is known for having many freight-only tracks. If you care about throughput but less so about speed, and don't want to spend more billions in maintenance then you run the freight trains slow, especially if you're not obstructing passenger trains (or hardly have them).
Regarding ships there's the time and expense wasted in loading/unloading and warehousing (sort of the equivalent of your TSA and checking luggages). It should be a lot easier to drive your container to a freight rail station and have it loaded on a train. Especially, the train would allow a "get this shipped under two weeks" scenario which can only be guaranteed with airplanes today. Or a similar, semi-hard deadline.
Wow, I never thought about middle click pasting on Wayland. It's a feature I don't think about anymore, and I find myself mistakingly trying to use it while under Windows. I will thus keep running X11 forever if Wayland can't get its act together about it, or alternatively I will run Wayland with the built-in X11 server on top to manage the entire desktop or if that's possible every window or surface except the panels and video games.
Better to have homeless people on welfare in the streets rather than only drunken frat boys, small criminals and drug addicts. Problem in the US is you don't give them enough welfare (or at all) and no healthcare, hell homeful people at full time min wage employment don't even have healthcare. Nationalise all the evul healthcare companies (this cuts red tape), make the price of medicines drop, make welfare easier to get (less red tape) and redistribute the half a trillion or so you've saved in welfare.
supposedly, a predefined set of gestures will be allowed and you will be able to be more by $0.99 a piece. Controversial gestures will be banned from the gesture store unless you jailbreak yourself, but then you may be terminated.
I wonder how do you lock down the browser (some sort of kiosk mode to not get distracted), run it as a separate instance if you want to keep general purpose browser windows on the side and not have have the application getting slow, unresponsive or crashing, and I wonder if you aggressively update the browser as needed for security or use Internet Explorer instead.
Oh, silly me, I've found out about the firefox -p -no-remote option while typing this post. Then there's some customization of the user profile to do so that I can even differentiate that second instance easily. Made for myself a "youtube firefox".
... but it had me thinking the product was maritime sensors that harvest energy from the oceans. There's indeed a number of potential energy sources in the ocean, that is sun, wind, waves and water constantly pushing you in various directions or even living and dead organic matter.
I believe we badly need thousands upon thousands of sensors floating in the oceans, because they're poorly known and we have many severe changes going on (collapse and blooms of species, warming of layers, acidification), we need to understand about the sixth extinction and about dangers and opportunities.
Was watching a movie on my low end CRT and the movie went totally black (light was turned off or something), my buddy said the screen looked like it's turned off. Sure there are some issues, a test I've just done is a full screen terminal, black but some reflections from the environment and most glaring glow from the bright scrollbar and its reflection on the side. Regarding cost : I would say about the same between a low end CRT from 10 years ago and a midrange LCD today (sure with about twice the surface area, 1920x1080 instead of 1024x768, sharpness and probably better whites)
People don't have the expectation of spending that price anymore sadly, and will go for something $50/€50 cheaper (or likely, the laptop vendor makes that choice for them)
Too bad some people buy "computer grade" 5.1 systems (to be plugged on a computer admittedly) which then sucks as much as the 2.1 stuff : (bad and punchy) lows, highs and no mediums. That was an Altec Lansing kit. I've heard sound coming out of very recent low end TVs too : it is as weak and narrow as sound coming out of a smartphone.
I hope people would try a real stereo system (even if cheap), it's about like a real 5.1 system but without the 5.1 so obviously you don't get the whole experience, but you don't need a receiver and a subwoofer so it's a small fraction of the cost. You do get bass (not 40Hz bass), mediums and low-mediums though so you can actually hear the movie and music.
I'd be curious to try 2D glasses if someone has ever made them. By that I mean have the same polarisation for both eyes so you throw out one of the two images and look at the other one.
In fact a new revision of the 3DS is being launched with a camera that's looking at you so it knows where your eyes are, and the screen stereoscopic system is oriented towards them. A few more buttons, whatever features, rumoured CPU increase but Nintendo is just secretive about the hardware since at least the wii U.
Maybe even deduplication, done "after the fact" : if people have some identical shards that came from storing and uploading identical files, then you could request it from anyone. That'd be where it becomes a grey area, but perhaps not more than the legal status of caches, proxy and such.
Problem with redundancy : your data needs to be uploaded twice or more (but when you'll download it, there will be more sources to send it)
I have some small radio/CD thing with separate speakers that sits unused (Philips). It has modern features : MP3, aux in, older ipod dock (interfacing with it is illegal because of patents) and even a remote. So, it ought to be somewhat ideal for listening to radio but.. the speakers while better than what many people deal with (most consumer electronics crap) aren't that good, those on my PC are better. I once figured out the feature to auto-scan all the FM stations and store then in memory, but there are only 20 slots and I can get well very 30 radio stations. That means switching between the station with next/previous or the keypad numbers on the remote only covers the spectrum up to 100MHz. That is fucking infuriating, for lack of other words:).
I can listen to the FM on the dumbphone, switching stations is easier there.
In the 90s you could get a FM tuner card for a a PC, but they don't seem to exist anymore? Sure I found one (PCIe 1x) but it does HDMI in, composite in and TV tuner, which I don't need. I want just the FM. Maybe old analog TV tuner cards you can find in stashes of old stuff can work, if you can recommend me some good linux software to use one.
Any CRT can produce black unless it's semi-defective, same is not true of LCD. The issue is low end LCDs are everywhere (including on a laptop with high end CPU I've seen) and they are about unfixable, whereas any low end CRT can be somewhat properly set up.
Yahoo News (I think) decided to show me a video story about Kim Jong Un not afraid of showing off himself atop a rusty submarine.
That means rust doesn't have as much a connotation of worthless trash as it used to, and/or those stupid media automated system that are based on what's "trending" are happy to show Kim Jong Un stories because people clicked on the Kim Jong Un pictures. Next time the top story was Kim Jong Un flying a plane. I even read a story about recent discovery of remains of a secret nazi base and ended up looking at a Hitler slideshow at the bottom of the story, nice high quality pics.
So, I'm lost regarding what people think about things and what is popular. (in the twittery web 2.0/web 3.0 scene)
Slashdot Mirror
Load it with 8GB RAM and an SSD, and it's already better than my desktop except for the CPU performance.
OS requirements stay the same or decrease slowly over time (e.g. Windows gets better, linux graphics drivers get better).
Browsers get better with time : Firefox is better than a year ago, then it will get Electrolysis, then it will get the rewrite in the Rust language (this may takes years, but in the end you'll get the four CPU cores used instead of one and a half)
The Web will still be full and even more full of crap made by people who don't care, malicious people, advertisers, big sites full of galleries and autoplaying crap etc. so there will be some filtering to do but it's already the case today. Likely it will be a wash : performance increases from the OS, drivers and browser will be canceled out by the performance decrease from the web content.
I will still miss the times my PC was fast at anything I did and ran almost any game, that was when it had a single core 2GHz CPU and 768MB of sdram.
I checked on that X205 laptop and it is sadly a model with everything soldered down (like a mac book pro) with not even wired ethernet, and limited storage (a fifth of what old Windows netbooks have, and these could be upgraded to bigger).
It is a tablet with permanently attached keyboard more than a traditional PC. In this the new tiny PC is more PC-like, as the memory is upgradeable and storage is too by the way of the mSATA slot (the next generation will probably have M.2 PCIe), external bandwith is USB 3.0 + USB 2.0 not just USB 2.0. Imagine you attach wired ethernet, hard disk and sound card to the X205's measly few USB 2.0 ports and watch it all crawl as they are sharing 30MB/s bandwith.
A cynical interpretation would be that there has been more effort to sweep them to the side.
There is quite a general housing shortage in France (or rather the rents have gone up, and forget about buying), there is also quite an underclass of people never working or occasionally working (picking fruits, etc.). The social safety net is strong so starvation is vanishingly low, people "only" suffer morally for the most part.
People _DO_ abuse the system, in fact show me a country with any form of welfare that is not abused. The problem in the US is that those abuses are on both ends of the spectrum.
Actually, in my country at least the fraud from people getting undue welfare is thought to be low (far less than a billion) ; business owners not paying their fair share in the system is double or triple that (still fairly low relatively speaking). Undeclared and underdeclared labor don't contribute their share. Then there's the rather more political aspect of businesses getting contribution relieves (especially strong on the lower wages) which runs in the few tens of billions. Note that in that system the "contributions" are about proportional to wages and are a separate thing altogether from taxes.
It feels useful that employers pay very few contribution on unskilled workers, but that is contested by economists. In the end most people end up with a rather low wage (let's say 1.2x to 1.5x the US federal min wage or more) and the work isn't that "unskilled" at all as both "qualifications" and experience are demanded.
Really, what happened to Demuhcracy, Freedom? If your workplace get "facebook at work" it will be forced on you and you will be spied on at every move with eternal retention of data by an immensely rich rogue entity.
They will make a strong shadow profile on your other "you" if don't have a personal account, and if you do well you know what happens. Think about what it takes to fully get out of it. You will have to join the french legion to somewhat get rid of your facebook identity and never see your friends and family again.
Steam does log the time you've spent on every game, last time you've played it and has a "social" system which leaks to your friends such information. I guess such crap as achievements goes there to if you have a game that supports them.
Sure, Valve gets some "telemetry" that is legitimately very useful to them but this is not too far from Amazon (I believe) spying and timestamping on your e-book, even right down to which page you have been reading.
I thought about "warehousing" the containers, which is a bad choice of word (esp. considering they sit outside anyway). Containers wait ashore for the boat to come in if it isn't there already, wait for their time to be moved around in that gigantic and overlord port, wait on the boat till other containers have been loaded and till everything is ready, then it's a similar dance on the other side of the ocean.
Container on freight train would be pretty much routed towards its final destination already when the container ship is just approaching the US coast.
But that issue of blizzards.. Oh well, sounds nightmarish.
I wonder if gigantic coal trains are included in that average, and the US is known for having many freight-only tracks. If you care about throughput but less so about speed, and don't want to spend more billions in maintenance then you run the freight trains slow, especially if you're not obstructing passenger trains (or hardly have them).
Regarding ships there's the time and expense wasted in loading/unloading and warehousing (sort of the equivalent of your TSA and checking luggages). It should be a lot easier to drive your container to a freight rail station and have it loaded on a train.
Especially, the train would allow a "get this shipped under two weeks" scenario which can only be guaranteed with airplanes today. Or a similar, semi-hard deadline.
That's not to say the economics aren't dubious.
Wow, I never thought about middle click pasting on Wayland. It's a feature I don't think about anymore, and I find myself mistakingly trying to use it while under Windows.
I will thus keep running X11 forever if Wayland can't get its act together about it, or alternatively I will run Wayland with the built-in X11 server on top to manage the entire desktop or if that's possible every window or surface except the panels and video games.
Better to have homeless people on welfare in the streets rather than only drunken frat boys, small criminals and drug addicts. Problem in the US is you don't give them enough welfare (or at all) and no healthcare, hell homeful people at full time min wage employment don't even have healthcare. Nationalise all the evul healthcare companies (this cuts red tape), make the price of medicines drop, make welfare easier to get (less red tape) and redistribute the half a trillion or so you've saved in welfare.
Or right-click almost anywhere.
supposedly, a predefined set of gestures will be allowed and you will be able to be more by $0.99 a piece. Controversial gestures will be banned from the gesture store unless you jailbreak yourself, but then you may be terminated.
That sounds good if you simply want keypresses to not land accidentally in another computer's receiver.
Time to get the "telephone cord" style of cord back on keyboards. It was invented so you can move the cord more easily.
I wonder how do you lock down the browser (some sort of kiosk mode to not get distracted), run it as a separate instance if you want to keep general purpose browser windows on the side and not have have the application getting slow, unresponsive or crashing, and I wonder if you aggressively update the browser as needed for security or use Internet Explorer instead.
Oh, silly me, I've found out about the firefox -p -no-remote option while typing this post. Then there's some customization of the user profile to do so that I can even differentiate that second instance easily. Made for myself a "youtube firefox".
... but it had me thinking the product was maritime sensors that harvest energy from the oceans.
There's indeed a number of potential energy sources in the ocean, that is sun, wind, waves and water constantly pushing you in various directions or even living and dead organic matter.
I believe we badly need thousands upon thousands of sensors floating in the oceans, because they're poorly known and we have many severe changes going on (collapse and blooms of species, warming of layers, acidification), we need to understand about the sixth extinction and about dangers and opportunities.
Was watching a movie on my low end CRT and the movie went totally black (light was turned off or something), my buddy said the screen looked like it's turned off.
Sure there are some issues, a test I've just done is a full screen terminal, black but some reflections from the environment and most glaring glow from the bright scrollbar and its reflection on the side.
Regarding cost : I would say about the same between a low end CRT from 10 years ago and a midrange LCD today (sure with about twice the surface area, 1920x1080 instead of 1024x768, sharpness and probably better whites)
People don't have the expectation of spending that price anymore sadly, and will go for something $50/€50 cheaper (or likely, the laptop vendor makes that choice for them)
Too bad some people buy "computer grade" 5.1 systems (to be plugged on a computer admittedly) which then sucks as much as the 2.1 stuff : (bad and punchy) lows, highs and no mediums. That was an Altec Lansing kit.
I've heard sound coming out of very recent low end TVs too : it is as weak and narrow as sound coming out of a smartphone.
I hope people would try a real stereo system (even if cheap), it's about like a real 5.1 system but without the 5.1 so obviously you don't get the whole experience, but you don't need a receiver and a subwoofer so it's a small fraction of the cost. You do get bass (not 40Hz bass), mediums and low-mediums though so you can actually hear the movie and music.
I'd be curious to try 2D glasses if someone has ever made them. By that I mean have the same polarisation for both eyes so you throw out one of the two images and look at the other one.
In fact a new revision of the 3DS is being launched with a camera that's looking at you so it knows where your eyes are, and the screen stereoscopic system is oriented towards them.
A few more buttons, whatever features, rumoured CPU increase but Nintendo is just secretive about the hardware since at least the wii U.
Maybe even deduplication, done "after the fact" : if people have some identical shards that came from storing and uploading identical files, then you could request it from anyone. That'd be where it becomes a grey area, but perhaps not more than the legal status of caches, proxy and such.
Problem with redundancy : your data needs to be uploaded twice or more (but when you'll download it, there will be more sources to send it)
In most countries there are no caps but the "soft cap" is how slow the upload speed anyway, like around 120KB/s on a maxed out DSL line.
I have some small radio/CD thing with separate speakers that sits unused (Philips). It has modern features : MP3, aux in, older ipod dock (interfacing with it is illegal because of patents) and even a remote. :).
So, it ought to be somewhat ideal for listening to radio but.. the speakers while better than what many people deal with (most consumer electronics crap) aren't that good, those on my PC are better.
I once figured out the feature to auto-scan all the FM stations and store then in memory, but there are only 20 slots and I can get well very 30 radio stations. That means switching between the station with next/previous or the keypad numbers on the remote only covers the spectrum up to 100MHz. That is fucking infuriating, for lack of other words
I can listen to the FM on the dumbphone, switching stations is easier there.
In the 90s you could get a FM tuner card for a a PC, but they don't seem to exist anymore?
Sure I found one (PCIe 1x) but it does HDMI in, composite in and TV tuner, which I don't need. I want just the FM. Maybe old analog TV tuner cards you can find in stashes of old stuff can work, if you can recommend me some good linux software to use one.
Any CRT can produce black unless it's semi-defective, same is not true of LCD.
The issue is low end LCDs are everywhere (including on a laptop with high end CPU I've seen) and they are about unfixable, whereas any low end CRT can be somewhat properly set up.
Yahoo News (I think) decided to show me a video story about Kim Jong Un not afraid of showing off himself atop a rusty submarine.
That means rust doesn't have as much a connotation of worthless trash as it used to, and/or those stupid media automated system that are based on what's "trending" are happy to show Kim Jong Un stories because people clicked on the Kim Jong Un pictures. Next time the top story was Kim Jong Un flying a plane.
I even read a story about recent discovery of remains of a secret nazi base and ended up looking at a Hitler slideshow at the bottom of the story, nice high quality pics.
So, I'm lost regarding what people think about things and what is popular. (in the twittery web 2.0/web 3.0 scene)