People who hold opinion X see a bias against it. People who hold opinion !X also see a bias against it. Both ends cry foul and drift off to places that are "not biased" (that is, biased like all others, just in a way that is acceptable to them).
If you want to leave, leave. But nobody gives a shit about Yet Another Grand Exit. Have fun in your echo chambers.
I had a Gnawty with 2 GB and a 16 GB eMMC. GalliumOS ran just fine on it. Windows was extremely painful, even for a Big Guy, but a lightweight Linux distro that Just Worked straight out of the box was quite pleasant. It was easy to forget it wasn't a normal notebook.
An i3 C720 or C740 can even run OS X. The Broadcom network card in the C740 is not reliable in OS X, but it can be swapped for one that is. I'd say those are PCs, at least when running a full OS. Drawing a "PC/Not PC" line based on OS may make sense today, but it is going to be an ever-shifting line in the sand. Hardware form factors change too, but not quite so fast.
You can't say "eMMC soldered on = appliance, not PC" because the Macbook Pro would be "not a PC" by that definition even though it can run Windows just fine.
Yes and no. Distros that require NVRAM still don't work without modification because the UEFI implementation still doesn't have any. (I talk to the guys doing the firmware on pretty much a daily basis.) But Windows runs now on machines you wouldn't have expected. I had a CB3-111 "Gnawty" and was one of the first to attempt to run Windows 10 on it. It didn't so much run, as walk with a limp. It was a very unpleasant experience. Nine months later, they've got all that sorted out and it runs fine (up to the limits of a 16GB eMMC), but I already sold the Gnawty and bought a Peppy (C720), which was well-supported even then, including OS X on the i3 model. since the lead developer of the Chromebook coreboot project said "get a C720, they just work", then I figured just maybe I should get a C720 rather than fighting with "free" hardware. I have no regrets, except that the Peppy is not fanless like the Gnawty. It rarely makes enough noise to matter, though.
You do have to track down firmware to flash onto it, and open it to remove the write protect screw, but neither is that big a deal -- except some Braswell Chromebooks can only be flashed once and will refuse to flash themselves again. You can still flash them with an RPi and an SOIC clip, the same procedure as used for un-bricking them when a flash goes wrong.
There was some time when Chromebooks were PCs in every sense. They just came with a little different keyboard layout, or in some cases just different keytops on an ordinary layout. The Acer C710 was a laptop in every sense, with a full SATA drive bay and SODIMM slots. The C720 did away with the SODIMM slots and moved to an M.2 slot instead of a drive bay, and got slimmer as a consequence. The C740 had a similar setup. Unfortunately, later ones have gone to soldered storage too. Even the pricy Pixel 2 has a soldered-on 64GB eMMC. This doesn't mean it's not a laptop, and 64GB is actually adequate for Windows 10 and a Linux distro to coexist on their own partitions, but it does limit the usefulness as a non-ChromeOS computer. The latest releases have been uniformly soldered storage, usually 16GB and occasionally 32. You can shoehorn Windows 10 onto a 16GB drive, but expect to store everything else on flash drives and SD cards.
I like my C720, running Windows 10 and GalliumOS, but the golden age of Chromebook hacking was unfortunately quite brief and that ship has pretty much sailed.
1. Instant on. Turn on the switch ad the computer's booted. On some machines, you might have to wait for your DOS to load, but it was typically quick. No more waiting minutes (or sometimes hours in the case of Windows XP) to boot up.
Booting DOS from a floppy disk took about as long then as booting my laptop into Windows 10 does now -- fifteen seconds or so. Actually loading something useful after that takes about the same amount of time as it did then, or less. Lotus 1-2-3 did not load in 1.5 seconds like Excel does for me.
3. Games. The games were fun and didn't require investing a part of your soul and all of your spare time to play them. I still play some of them in emulation when I have some time to kill. they were unique, and there is nothing like them today.
Except there is something like them today -- them. I won't argue about the quality, as there's obviously a reason emulators exist to run them, but it's not like they just went away. If you're saying you want new games like that, you'll have to go digging. They're being made, but the market for them is small so they don't get promoted.
4. Modems. Yeah, they were slow, but you had to love that handshake/connect sound!! It's amazing how much juice they managed to get out of them near the end. There is something very primal about connecting a computer via phone line. I miss it. I read recently that modems don't really work on VOIP lines, which is what most remaining land lines consist of. That's a big bummer...
I don't miss modems at all. Only being connected to one resource at a time, and having a time limit there, and having to disconnect to check somewhere else (and quite possibly getting a busy signal) -- that all sucked. So did being bumped off by Call Waiting.
7. The simplicity and closeness to hardware. You can't manipulate hardware nowadays like you used to. Everything was easy to get to via software. The software itself was simple and straightforward. You don't get that today.
Sure you do, if you want to work on hardware of that level. It's still produced, and it's still in service. If you want to write for embedded systems, go right ahead. There's a need for it.
The things I don't miss... 4. Single tasking. We are spoiled nowadays with our ability to run multiple programs at the same time. Back then, on some computers, just loading up a DOS file directory would cause you to lose all your work. Thanks to multitasking, we can emulate our beloved old computers at the same time we can do something else.
Hydrogen gets trapped if it is available. If it's not, the graphene still oxidizes without it. If you're not inclined to read the linked article, then I'm not going to summarize it for you.
It's not that I'm looking for this myself -- the Greater Los Angeles area is fairly well studded with maker spaces. But it would be wonderful to have something of that nature in every major city and a lot of smaller ones, with signage visible from every main highway. They could be the McDonald's of maker spaces and I'd still consider it a Good Thing.
The city center *is* better, in the sense that you can catch a cab in or out any time of day or night. Try flagging a cab at 3 AM in Auburn Hills. They probably went home after the bars closed and they took all the drunks on the scenic route.
If they've got 3D printers, I might well give them a spin. Same if they have color laser printers that can be rented exclusively (no sharing and worrying about other people seeing your porn^Wconfidential printouts). A light-duty CNC mill would also be an attraction.
While they might have the color laser printers, I doubt they allow any one person or group to corner it like that, and I see no mention of the other two things I'd want to see. I can make coffee without their help, thank you very much.
They would also set fire to the small fragments of paper that inevitably gathered in the housing if left unattended. Vacuuming out the printers was a daily activity when I had to work with them. Both fortunately (for noise) and unfortunately, they stood in foam-lined fiberglass shells which gathered even more paper chads. Not only did these have to be removed for cleaning, they had to be cleaned themselves.
Seriously, the first time the manufacturer doesn't have a part in stock, they're fucked -- unless they're still keeping a supply at a distribution center somewhere.
The costs of relying on someone else's reliability instead of your own redundancy is that the number of situations that get out of your hands increases dramatically.
Same situation here. I have a machine I built in mid-2011 around the best AMD CPU available (Phenom II x6 1090T, released in 2010 -- couldn't find the 1100T at that moment) and it still runs in the middle of the i5 pack today. Even Ryzen is only a tempter. I don't need more CPU, if the cost is a new motherboard and RAM as well.
I'd agree Windows has something to do with it, whether by not turning off parts it could be resting, or by running shit in the background. My laptop is actually a hacked Acer C720 (Chromebook) running Windows 10. It got at least 6 hours of runtime in Chrome OS if I let it dim the screen, and it got upwards of four with Gallium OS (an Xubuntu-based distro) without allowing the screen to go dim the instant the adapter stops feeding it, and with a Minecraft server running 24/7. Under the same conditions (including the Minecraft server), Windows runs for maybe three and a half hours. I really don't think this is bad for full backlight and a Java VM running at all times, but it's demonstrably less than a Linux distro is able to do with the same hardware and the same CPU load and backlight brightess.
Road maintenance crews have no right to on-the-job privacy unless they're using the porta-potty or something similar, as they're out in public. The rest, you have a point. California has some laws that seem intentionally designed to facilitate their abuse, and the wiretapping laws are among them -- but this doesn't seem to be a case of abuse, and attempting to hold this up as such is more likely to tighten the grip of authority than pry loose from it. I hope the ACLU isn't jumping on this one, they need a better test case.
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And this is how you get hugboxes.
People who hold opinion X see a bias against it. People who hold opinion !X also see a bias against it. Both ends cry foul and drift off to places that are "not biased" (that is, biased like all others, just in a way that is acceptable to them).
If you want to leave, leave. But nobody gives a shit about Yet Another Grand Exit. Have fun in your echo chambers.
I had a Gnawty with 2 GB and a 16 GB eMMC. GalliumOS ran just fine on it. Windows was extremely painful, even for a Big Guy, but a lightweight Linux distro that Just Worked straight out of the box was quite pleasant. It was easy to forget it wasn't a normal notebook.
An i3 C720 or C740 can even run OS X. The Broadcom network card in the C740 is not reliable in OS X, but it can be swapped for one that is. I'd say those are PCs, at least when running a full OS. Drawing a "PC/Not PC" line based on OS may make sense today, but it is going to be an ever-shifting line in the sand. Hardware form factors change too, but not quite so fast.
You can't say "eMMC soldered on = appliance, not PC" because the Macbook Pro would be "not a PC" by that definition even though it can run Windows just fine.
You can re-flash it back to stock with a Raspberry Pi and an SOIC clip, even if it is not functional enough to convince it to flash itself.
Yes and no. Distros that require NVRAM still don't work without modification because the UEFI implementation still doesn't have any. (I talk to the guys doing the firmware on pretty much a daily basis.) But Windows runs now on machines you wouldn't have expected. I had a CB3-111 "Gnawty" and was one of the first to attempt to run Windows 10 on it. It didn't so much run, as walk with a limp. It was a very unpleasant experience. Nine months later, they've got all that sorted out and it runs fine (up to the limits of a 16GB eMMC), but I already sold the Gnawty and bought a Peppy (C720), which was well-supported even then, including OS X on the i3 model. since the lead developer of the Chromebook coreboot project said "get a C720, they just work", then I figured just maybe I should get a C720 rather than fighting with "free" hardware. I have no regrets, except that the Peppy is not fanless like the Gnawty. It rarely makes enough noise to matter, though.
Here's one of the places they hang out.
You do have to track down firmware to flash onto it, and open it to remove the write protect screw, but neither is that big a deal -- except some Braswell Chromebooks can only be flashed once and will refuse to flash themselves again. You can still flash them with an RPi and an SOIC clip, the same procedure as used for un-bricking them when a flash goes wrong.
There was some time when Chromebooks were PCs in every sense. They just came with a little different keyboard layout, or in some cases just different keytops on an ordinary layout. The Acer C710 was a laptop in every sense, with a full SATA drive bay and SODIMM slots. The C720 did away with the SODIMM slots and moved to an M.2 slot instead of a drive bay, and got slimmer as a consequence. The C740 had a similar setup. Unfortunately, later ones have gone to soldered storage too. Even the pricy Pixel 2 has a soldered-on 64GB eMMC. This doesn't mean it's not a laptop, and 64GB is actually adequate for Windows 10 and a Linux distro to coexist on their own partitions, but it does limit the usefulness as a non-ChromeOS computer. The latest releases have been uniformly soldered storage, usually 16GB and occasionally 32. You can shoehorn Windows 10 onto a 16GB drive, but expect to store everything else on flash drives and SD cards.
I like my C720, running Windows 10 and GalliumOS, but the golden age of Chromebook hacking was unfortunately quite brief and that ship has pretty much sailed.
Thanks to anti-vaxers, you just may get your beloved polio back.
There is still a mechanical disc eject, it just requires the Emergency Repair Tool to activate. This has been an ongoing joke since the first Mac.
1. Instant on. Turn on the switch ad the computer's booted. On some machines, you might have to wait for your DOS to load, but it was typically quick. No more waiting minutes (or sometimes hours in the case of Windows XP) to boot up.
Booting DOS from a floppy disk took about as long then as booting my laptop into Windows 10 does now -- fifteen seconds or so. Actually loading something useful after that takes about the same amount of time as it did then, or less. Lotus 1-2-3 did not load in 1.5 seconds like Excel does for me.
3. Games. The games were fun and didn't require investing a part of your soul and all of your spare time to play them. I still play some of them in emulation when I have some time to kill. they were unique, and there is nothing like them today.
Except there is something like them today -- them. I won't argue about the quality, as there's obviously a reason emulators exist to run them, but it's not like they just went away. If you're saying you want new games like that, you'll have to go digging. They're being made, but the market for them is small so they don't get promoted.
4. Modems. Yeah, they were slow, but you had to love that handshake/connect sound!! It's amazing how much juice they managed to get out of them near the end. There is something very primal about connecting a computer via phone line. I miss it. I read recently that modems don't really work on VOIP lines, which is what most remaining land lines consist of. That's a big bummer...
I don't miss modems at all. Only being connected to one resource at a time, and having a time limit there, and having to disconnect to check somewhere else (and quite possibly getting a busy signal) -- that all sucked. So did being bumped off by Call Waiting.
7. The simplicity and closeness to hardware. You can't manipulate hardware nowadays like you used to. Everything was easy to get to via software. The software itself was simple and straightforward. You don't get that today.
Sure you do, if you want to work on hardware of that level. It's still produced, and it's still in service. If you want to write for embedded systems, go right ahead. There's a need for it.
The things I don't miss... 4. Single tasking. We are spoiled nowadays with our ability to run multiple programs at the same time. Back then, on some computers, just loading up a DOS file directory would cause you to lose all your work. Thanks to multitasking, we can emulate our beloved old computers at the same time we can do something else.
And yet I still need two computers.
So it's a smaller red switch, or perhaps black now, but it's still there on the back of the power supply.
Oh, you have a machine that didn't provide one? Don't blame "the times", blame the manufacturer.
Hydrogen gets trapped if it is available. If it's not, the graphene still oxidizes without it. If you're not inclined to read the linked article, then I'm not going to summarize it for you.
It's not that I'm looking for this myself -- the Greater Los Angeles area is fairly well studded with maker spaces. But it would be wonderful to have something of that nature in every major city and a lot of smaller ones, with signage visible from every main highway. They could be the McDonald's of maker spaces and I'd still consider it a Good Thing.
The city center *is* better, in the sense that you can catch a cab in or out any time of day or night. Try flagging a cab at 3 AM in Auburn Hills. They probably went home after the bars closed and they took all the drunks on the scenic route.
If they've got 3D printers, I might well give them a spin. Same if they have color laser printers that can be rented exclusively (no sharing and worrying about other people seeing your porn^Wconfidential printouts). A light-duty CNC mill would also be an attraction.
While they might have the color laser printers, I doubt they allow any one person or group to corner it like that, and I see no mention of the other two things I'd want to see. I can make coffee without their help, thank you very much.
They would also set fire to the small fragments of paper that inevitably gathered in the housing if left unattended. Vacuuming out the printers was a daily activity when I had to work with them. Both fortunately (for noise) and unfortunately, they stood in foam-lined fiberglass shells which gathered even more paper chads. Not only did these have to be removed for cleaning, they had to be cleaned themselves.
Then the better term is structural isomer. It is still untrue that carbon + oxygen has to form CO or CO.
But there's no need to take my word for it. Graphite oxide (includes graphene oxide as a subdivision).
Seriously, the first time the manufacturer doesn't have a part in stock, they're fucked -- unless they're still keeping a supply at a distribution center somewhere.
The costs of relying on someone else's reliability instead of your own redundancy is that the number of situations that get out of your hands increases dramatically.
Same situation here. I have a machine I built in mid-2011 around the best AMD CPU available (Phenom II x6 1090T, released in 2010 -- couldn't find the 1100T at that moment) and it still runs in the middle of the i5 pack today. Even Ryzen is only a tempter. I don't need more CPU, if the cost is a new motherboard and RAM as well.
It dropped my links.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPPDrXHjJx8
https://www.youtube.com/embed/pW14YuZjEZw
People seem to think this is anything more than turning up the heat on the frog pot. We've been getting slowly boiled for a long, long time.
Welcome to the United States.
Zappa had it nailed on the jobless recovery too.
Food Gathering in Post-Industrial America, 1992
I'm no chemistry expert, but isn't graphene oxide simply CO2?
Only the same way graphene is diamond.
Allotropes.
I'd agree Windows has something to do with it, whether by not turning off parts it could be resting, or by running shit in the background. My laptop is actually a hacked Acer C720 (Chromebook) running Windows 10. It got at least 6 hours of runtime in Chrome OS if I let it dim the screen, and it got upwards of four with Gallium OS (an Xubuntu-based distro) without allowing the screen to go dim the instant the adapter stops feeding it, and with a Minecraft server running 24/7. Under the same conditions (including the Minecraft server), Windows runs for maybe three and a half hours. I really don't think this is bad for full backlight and a Java VM running at all times, but it's demonstrably less than a Linux distro is able to do with the same hardware and the same CPU load and backlight brightess.
Except it's not "almost never", I see stories like this on the front page every week or two. Pounding on it more than that just induces burnout.
Sure, CNN doesn't want to talk about climate change.
That's why they run stories like this. To appease their big sponsors and parent corporation.
Right.
Road maintenance crews have no right to on-the-job privacy unless they're using the porta-potty or something similar, as they're out in public. The rest, you have a point. California has some laws that seem intentionally designed to facilitate their abuse, and the wiretapping laws are among them -- but this doesn't seem to be a case of abuse, and attempting to hold this up as such is more likely to tighten the grip of authority than pry loose from it. I hope the ACLU isn't jumping on this one, they need a better test case.
He will get receipts, or how would he prove to the court that he paid?