Hence the option of being a smartphone refuznik. Third option : don't get any. Spyware reading SMS is ridiculous. On a PC or any web browsing device there are grave privacy problems (get tracked all to easily) but a minesweeper game doesn't read my e-mails at least.
I was bringing that point in the somewhat philosophical context of the discussion, a small society of farmers without significant industry and infrastructure. You do find yourself needing "Ford and Daimler" and even then you might consider a filled up gas tank is worth a family's monthly income, very roughly!, if the family isn't doing well.
"Africa" or even "Ghana" is meaningless, I assume the situation can be very different from one region to another. Indeed most people don't starve, may even have computers and stuff. Get a couple hundred kilometers away from significant towns and infrastructure though, and I wonder how's that looking like. Pyongyang is nice but the rest of North Korea definitely is not.
Maybe in the future we can get an SD card made of MRAM, then you can use it as swap on an older device. And get virtually free writes for applications and data, if there's no big barrier to applications installed on it. You have similar examples of exponentially better storage upgrade for old gear, like using Compact Flash cards in an Amiga, or a cheap 2.5" IDE to mSATA adapter for laptops.
Can you ship a couple tons of grain from bumfucks, Africa to the global market, when there are no roads and have it pay more than the cost of the transport?
I don't claim to have a solution to the problems of agriculture and human feeding. The likely trend is scary (environmental collapse combined with global warming) and alternatives such as voluntarily reducing yields and global economic growth aren't that great either if we want people fed. Tech and science have a role to play but political and social issues equally so.
I may have said inaccurate things (famines in pre-industrial areas were either eradicated, occasional or frequent depending on regions/countries and eras)
What's "traditional means"? Is it organic farming on small patches with human or animal labor and saved up seeds, or industrial, chemical-based and mechanized farming on wide areas with irrigation, land management and industrial breeding of new races of seeds over decades.
Western Europe went from the former to the latter, from famine every 10 years to meat twice a day, doubled life expectancy without the use of GMO. (most of us need to back down on the meat)
I am thinking of a semi-hidden USB networking card, quite simply! if we can have the USB device (NIC) feeding the host power. You then merely need to run CAT5 to each and every desk and it all goes to a switch (that has 1Gb/s uplink to the school network). Use Power over Ethernet and 100Mb/s, micro-switches to reduce the cabling. It's perhaps a mess : bury cables in the floor, use a raised floor, cables descending from ceiling, floor cable protectors as seen on the ground in concerts? But it would seem to be the reliable solution and powering/charging the devices is nice to have.
One Wifi router per classroom is perhaps nice (with 5GHz so the teacher can at least get bandwith) It would suck big times if a couple idiots show up, install them all, let them set at max power outputs then leave the school never to be seen again. (now hope the login is "admin/password")
How exactly are GMO seeds better that non-GMO seeds with otherwise similar qualities? highly selected, high yield, adapted to the conditions and ease of farming etc., even "evil" dependency on buying seed every year. I believe you get very small gain at the cost of totally unpredictable genetic pollution of the environment and unknown costs of it.
The risk/gain seems bad to me. I'm the kind of guy to favor nuclear power and to push for a ban on agricultural GMOs. They're offensive for scientific and humane reasons.
With a network of hundreds of tablets that need to be locked down, managed, protected against malware, needing to access content etc. you'd better want them to join a Windows domain. The free Windows version won't allow that.
I think the idea sucks anyway whatever the OS is. A tablet has less display estate than A4 paper and an open book. Bright screen stealing attention is especially worrying. Wifi is a nightmare, but a USB plug on each desk that gives wired ethernet access could remedy that. Moving, overbright (with bad black levels) crap don't believe in a classroom. Give the kids something with a keyboard and a monochrome LCD.
Maybe you're running out of RAM and it's crapping out, or some stupid app is hammering the low quality flash with writes, plus garbage collection pauses.. More multi-core won't help you. Better OS (Android 5 or even Windows?), more memory, better flash (such as stacked flash that works like a single chip SSD?) or post flash memory (MRAM or other) will help. Sometimes a 15 year old PC has it better.. Its hard drive may fare much better at writes sometimes (!) and it allows swap space.
Ah yes.. once you enter 64bit mode, 16bit mode and 16bit virtual machine (VM86) are unavailable. So after booting your 64bit OS it's as if the chip is 32/64bit only, like most 64bit CPU are I believe (e.g. Sparc, MIPS, PPC..)
1) Full 64bit may work on linux and BSDs, but on Windows you need 32bit at least for backward compatibility (or even compatibilty with current 32bit software). Hybrid 32/64bit mode (called x32, with 32bit pointers) could also find use on mobile platform where the cheap offering only have 512MB or 1GB ram (but you lose good ASLR)
3)4) things are working somewhat this way already (chip with 2 cores and GT3 graphics, etc.) with GPU power and features and reliability increasing with each gen. But sometimes we do want a fast CPU and a weak GPU, if that's cheaper or the GPU performance is meaningless (software dev, high quality video encoding, image editing/photo processing on software that doesn't use the GPU..). You're also overlooking that on e.g. ultrabooks you will find the high end GPU, but the (short term average?) power budget for the whole chip is 15 watts. So it's both high end and low performance (relatively), and expensive (the $1000 thin laptop). More people are interested in a $500 laptop with lower end chip.
I thought it was the hardened PowerPC 750 variant (i.e., a G3) at up to 200MHz. The MIPS R3000 I found on wikipedia runs at 10 to 15MHz ^. R3000 is very old (late 80s)
If you need a coolant and want to manufacture it on site why not make ammonia from the hydrogen, heat and electricity. It will be a bit inefficient too but is probably easier to handle and can be used for many things too (fuel for vehicles and portable generators or fuel cells, chemicals, ammo and bombs - we need ecological bombs to kill people with less harm for the environment)
What makes me sad is the CPU leaks in games. (in versions 3.8.x and 3.10.x). Gnome's minesweeper uses a ton of CPU (for a minesweeper!) and occasionnally locks up. The reversi (Iagno) will consistently lock up with 100% of one core use mid-game right when things become decisive. Also chess used to be bugged (but not in the 2.x versions) with illegal moves and me getting randomly handed the control of the opposing pieces! (illegal castling typically, which I also witnessed in "Microsoft Chess" once. Some dumbfounding artificial stupidity could happen too such as letting a pawn advance right to queen promotion on the very beginning of the game) Chess to have been fixed since.
Quite some time ago they added a nice feature, opening plain text links such as http://this.is.a.link.com without needing to mess with copy paste or add an extension to get the same feature. Before that there was the time when the search in the URL bar became "smart".. I hated the change at first but now I find it much better than the old way (simple left-to-right alphabetical completion)
Or there are a lot of small things like scrolling with the middle mouse button, alt-d to reach the URL bar not only ctrl-L, which are not new but missing on most other browsers. I still think that GUI-wise Firefox is on the top, most browsers you can't fucking change anything (e.g. Chromium, Midori, Qupzilla : the GUI is frozen or almost). If Internet Explorer was available on Linux I'd like to give it a try there lol.
Or you might right-click anywhere outside of the tabs and URL bar, and click on "Menu bar", then the menu is shown permanently. No add-on, no options editing and you get a Windows 2.0 compliant / Motif compliant application already.
Why would you heat restroom water in a hot country? I know a guy who was grown in a hot country (a former colony), no winter at those lattitudes. There was no hot water anywhere, to shower he used the water directly. Then it was not hard to step outside and dry up.
What happens even with the first generation of hardware? Servers could go 99% idle, and they'll throttle down already. The system will work adequately if there's a target for minimum heat production and some folding@home kind of computing runs if needed to meet it.
I wash hands with cold water. Only at the McDonalds we're guaranteed to get warm water in the toilets (with no way to make it cold. I always assumed it was so you don't drink it and order a drink instead. Now I don't go to the McDonalds, I'd rather eat rotten vegetables and dog shit)
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Hence the option of being a smartphone refuznik. Third option : don't get any. Spyware reading SMS is ridiculous. On a PC or any web browsing device there are grave privacy problems (get tracked all to easily) but a minesweeper game doesn't read my e-mails at least.
Cross can also mean "Wrong" or "No" in the west.
Even Windows 3.1 had shaded UI elements!, you have to get back to Windows 2.x, before the 90s.
I was bringing that point in the somewhat philosophical context of the discussion, a small society of farmers without significant industry and infrastructure. You do find yourself needing "Ford and Daimler" and even then you might consider a filled up gas tank is worth a family's monthly income, very roughly!, if the family isn't doing well.
"Africa" or even "Ghana" is meaningless, I assume the situation can be very different from one region to another. Indeed most people don't starve, may even have computers and stuff. Get a couple hundred kilometers away from significant towns and infrastructure though, and I wonder how's that looking like. Pyongyang is nice but the rest of North Korea definitely is not.
Maybe in the future we can get an SD card made of MRAM, then you can use it as swap on an older device. And get virtually free writes for applications and data, if there's no big barrier to applications installed on it.
You have similar examples of exponentially better storage upgrade for old gear, like using Compact Flash cards in an Amiga, or a cheap 2.5" IDE to mSATA adapter for laptops.
Can you ship a couple tons of grain from bumfucks, Africa to the global market, when there are no roads and have it pay more than the cost of the transport?
I don't claim to have a solution to the problems of agriculture and human feeding. The likely trend is scary (environmental collapse combined with global warming) and alternatives such as voluntarily reducing yields and global economic growth aren't that great either if we want people fed.
Tech and science have a role to play but political and social issues equally so.
But GMO use all that and they claim it works because it's GMO?
I may have said inaccurate things (famines in pre-industrial areas were either eradicated, occasional or frequent depending on regions/countries and eras)
What's "traditional means"?
Is it organic farming on small patches with human or animal labor and saved up seeds, or industrial, chemical-based and mechanized farming on wide areas with irrigation, land management and industrial breeding of new races of seeds over decades.
Western Europe went from the former to the latter, from famine every 10 years to meat twice a day, doubled life expectancy without the use of GMO. (most of us need to back down on the meat)
I am thinking of a semi-hidden USB networking card, quite simply! if we can have the USB device (NIC) feeding the host power.
You then merely need to run CAT5 to each and every desk and it all goes to a switch (that has 1Gb/s uplink to the school network). Use Power over Ethernet and 100Mb/s, micro-switches to reduce the cabling.
It's perhaps a mess : bury cables in the floor, use a raised floor, cables descending from ceiling, floor cable protectors as seen on the ground in concerts? But it would seem to be the reliable solution and powering/charging the devices is nice to have.
One Wifi router per classroom is perhaps nice (with 5GHz so the teacher can at least get bandwith)
It would suck big times if a couple idiots show up, install them all, let them set at max power outputs then leave the school never to be seen again. (now hope the login is "admin/password")
How exactly are GMO seeds better that non-GMO seeds with otherwise similar qualities? highly selected, high yield, adapted to the conditions and ease of farming etc., even "evil" dependency on buying seed every year.
I believe you get very small gain at the cost of totally unpredictable genetic pollution of the environment and unknown costs of it.
The risk/gain seems bad to me. I'm the kind of guy to favor nuclear power and to push for a ban on agricultural GMOs. They're offensive for scientific and humane reasons.
With a network of hundreds of tablets that need to be locked down, managed, protected against malware, needing to access content etc. you'd better want them to join a Windows domain. The free Windows version won't allow that.
I think the idea sucks anyway whatever the OS is. A tablet has less display estate than A4 paper and an open book. Bright screen stealing attention is especially worrying. Wifi is a nightmare, but a USB plug on each desk that gives wired ethernet access could remedy that.
Moving, overbright (with bad black levels) crap don't believe in a classroom. Give the kids something with a keyboard and a monochrome LCD.
Maybe you're running out of RAM and it's crapping out, or some stupid app is hammering the low quality flash with writes, plus garbage collection pauses..
More multi-core won't help you. Better OS (Android 5 or even Windows?), more memory, better flash (such as stacked flash that works like a single chip SSD?) or post flash memory (MRAM or other) will help. Sometimes a 15 year old PC has it better.. Its hard drive may fare much better at writes sometimes (!) and it allows swap space.
Ah yes.. once you enter 64bit mode, 16bit mode and 16bit virtual machine (VM86) are unavailable. So after booting your 64bit OS it's as if the chip is 32/64bit only, like most 64bit CPU are I believe (e.g. Sparc, MIPS, PPC..)
1) Full 64bit may work on linux and BSDs, but on Windows you need 32bit at least for backward compatibility (or even compatibilty with current 32bit software). Hybrid 32/64bit mode (called x32, with 32bit pointers) could also find use on mobile platform where the cheap offering only have 512MB or 1GB ram (but you lose good ASLR)
3)4) things are working somewhat this way already (chip with 2 cores and GT3 graphics, etc.) with GPU power and features and reliability increasing with each gen. But sometimes we do want a fast CPU and a weak GPU, if that's cheaper or the GPU performance is meaningless (software dev, high quality video encoding, image editing/photo processing on software that doesn't use the GPU..). You're also overlooking that on e.g. ultrabooks you will find the high end GPU, but the (short term average?) power budget for the whole chip is 15 watts. So it's both high end and low performance (relatively), and expensive (the $1000 thin laptop). More people are interested in a $500 laptop with lower end chip.
I thought it was the hardened PowerPC 750 variant (i.e., a G3) at up to 200MHz.
The MIPS R3000 I found on wikipedia runs at 10 to 15MHz ^. R3000 is very old (late 80s)
If you need a coolant and want to manufacture it on site why not make ammonia from the hydrogen, heat and electricity. It will be a bit inefficient too but is probably easier to handle and can be used for many things too (fuel for vehicles and portable generators or fuel cells, chemicals, ammo and bombs - we need ecological bombs to kill people with less harm for the environment)
What makes me sad is the CPU leaks in games. (in versions 3.8.x and 3.10.x). Gnome's minesweeper uses a ton of CPU (for a minesweeper!) and occasionnally locks up. The reversi (Iagno) will consistently lock up with 100% of one core use mid-game right when things become decisive. Also chess used to be bugged (but not in the 2.x versions) with illegal moves and me getting randomly handed the control of the opposing pieces! (illegal castling typically, which I also witnessed in "Microsoft Chess" once. Some dumbfounding artificial stupidity could happen too such as letting a pawn advance right to queen promotion on the very beginning of the game)
Chess to have been fixed since.
Quite some time ago they added a nice feature, opening plain text links such as http://this.is.a.link.com without needing to mess with copy paste or add an extension to get the same feature.
Before that there was the time when the search in the URL bar became "smart".. I hated the change at first but now I find it much better than the old way (simple left-to-right alphabetical completion)
Or there are a lot of small things like scrolling with the middle mouse button, alt-d to reach the URL bar not only ctrl-L, which are not new but missing on most other browsers. I still think that GUI-wise Firefox is on the top, most browsers you can't fucking change anything (e.g. Chromium, Midori, Qupzilla : the GUI is frozen or almost).
If Internet Explorer was available on Linux I'd like to give it a try there lol.
Or you might right-click anywhere outside of the tabs and URL bar, and click on "Menu bar", then the menu is shown permanently. No add-on, no options editing and you get a Windows 2.0 compliant / Motif compliant application already.
Why would you heat restroom water in a hot country?
I know a guy who was grown in a hot country (a former colony), no winter at those lattitudes. There was no hot water anywhere, to shower he used the water directly. Then it was not hard to step outside and dry up.
What happens even with the first generation of hardware? Servers could go 99% idle, and they'll throttle down already. The system will work adequately if there's a target for minimum heat production and some folding@home kind of computing runs if needed to meet it.
I wash hands with cold water. Only at the McDonalds we're guaranteed to get warm water in the toilets (with no way to make it cold. I always assumed it was so you don't drink it and order a drink instead. Now I don't go to the McDonalds, I'd rather eat rotten vegetables and dog shit)
That's because you're subsidized by a family of six that rents a two-bedroom flat.