That smell is from the unwashed masses using their phones for 90% of what they used to do on a laptop. (Laptop chips are designed like the desktop chips, just with less power consumption and a lower clock rate.)
When is the last time you could take a top of the line machine that's six years old, and a mid-range but brand new machine, and be hard-pressed to tell them apart? Well, that's where we are now. Intel is having a hard time winning on the "buy an $800 computer to save $25 in power every year!" concept. Laptop noise, size, and battery life continue to improve, but if you're not unhappy with yours, why hassle replacing and reinstalling and all that? A new one won't be that much faster – unless, of course, you bought cheap in the first place.
If we as a civilization have figured out how to dock spacecraft, and refuel planes in flight, surely we can figure out how to connect an autonomous car to a contact charger. It could be a port at bumper height and the car drives very slowly into it. It could be simple robots at the station itself. I'm not saying wireless charging doesn't have its place, but it is not a requirement for an autonomous vehicle infrastructure.
A half bath would be very helpful, and if you intend to have clients in and out, it's pretty much a necessity. Even though it's not a big deal for you to go into the house to use the bathroom, do you really want to make a client do that? Once you have plumbing, you have something closer to a barebones apartment than to a shack. Unless you're just telecommuting, it's not really reasonable to build without one.
Perhaps think backward. Take a studio apartment concept, and figure out what you don't need. You don't need a kitchen, but the bathroom has a sink, so you're still good to go with convenience items and stored prepared food. Coffeemaker, mini-fridge, microwave. You don't need a bed, or if you opt for one it need not be a full-time bed. A futon might suffice. (There may be times you need to lay down, but going back in the house to do so would break your flow somehow. Like supervising compiling or rendering or 3D printing or something.) Then everything you would want in any office -- your choice of furniture and equipment.
What's also important is what doesn't go in there. Network gear is probably better left in the house, but there are cases where you might want to move it. But more importantly, don't take anything irrelevant out there. I don't mean you can't have a Rubik's Cube on your desk, I mean don't put anything out there that is totally unrelated, except in dire emergency. Otherwise you will soon feel like you are working in a closet -- because you essentially are.
Look at this space as more valuable than the house it lies behind, on a per-square-foot basis -- why would you want to store junk in the high-rent district?
You're responsible for the code you write, and if you are using existing libraries, you are responsible for tracking the packages you use. If they update, and your installer includes it, you need to update your installer. You may not feel this justifies pushing updates, especially if the change is to functions you did not use, but the program really should be checking for library updates and asking the user if they should be updated – and sometimes there are reasons why they cannot. At that point, it becomes the user's problem.
The network itself may have a pretty good track record of never totally falling over, but there is no guarantee at any given moment that there will be connectivity where you are, right now. Networks and entire countries can be cut off, and an emergency responder had best assume in a SHTF scenario that data service will be intermittent to completely unavailable. What happened to the radios in the cars? Those won't just stop working (unless it's an EMP attack, but what good is a network connection if all your gear is bricked?) and were the state of the art not that long ago. If they don't want to maintain a radio network in addition to the Internet-reliant communications, then they're going to have to pass out handhelds when it happens. If they aren't keeping any backup plan in place at all, they're complete idiots because this doesn't require buying more gear, it just means maintaining the gear they owned before. (Or someone higher up forced them to do so, for self-serving and/or malicious purposes.)
The internet being unavailable should not be a life-threatening emergency, except possibly to the degree that hospitals will be unable to access patient files who are there for treatment after whatever actually went wrong that day. Even that could be avoided if hospitals all had to mirror the host every so often, but any/. reader will know how incompetent healthcare IT has proven to be.
You're walking through a train station. The train pulls up and all the passengers pile out. If you could somehow stop time, you could easily count them all, but how can you handle it in real time? You can't even see all of them, let alone count that fast.
It's not the quantity that is uncountable. It is concealment, and the rate at which events are happening, that makes them uncountable.
Tonal languages are not, in and of themselves, an inherently bad idea. It's just one more parameter which can be used to add information density without having to rush the actual mechanics of the speaker. The fact that some people are tone-deaf may pose a problem, just like the fact that some people are color-blind makes color coding a troublesome way to transmit critical information.
The character set used is not necessarily tied to this – it would be perfectly workable to retain the character set but speak a non-tonal language, and it is perfectly workable to write a tonal language in a phonetic alphabet. It just takes a lot of diacritical marks. If keeping the density high is an important goal, Hangul retains that feature while using a phonetic system by forming the characters into blocks representing syllables.
The most telling argument against change is that with the vast majority able to read and write, it would take a very large investment to change the writing system. Hangul did it in an era where most people couldn't read – the investment was correspondingly smaller, and it was the right move at the right time. Another argument is that even as languages drift or even have completely different origins, the writing system remains comprehensible to all users Such is not necessarily the case with phonetic languages – given enough time, what's written and what's spoken will diverge even if the spelling made perfect sense at the time it was codified. So maybe the thought process is:
1. It will take a lot of time and money. 2. It will break the means of communication between the multiple languages spoken in the country. 3. It will only provide temporary benefits. 4. The status quo puts up a significant barrier to foreign meddling.
I happen to live in California, and while autonomous vehicles will have to deal with mountains eventually, that's not their primary target. If I want to see snow, the mountains are a couple hours away. Chains or 4WD/AWD are required. I would guess this will be one of the last holdouts for human drivers. However, they don't get buried under multiple feet of lake effect snow over and over again throughout the course of a winter, which was really the problem I was thinking of -- and a problem that must be tackled if these cars are to see any success in Michigan, northeast Illinois, northern Indiana and Ohio, upstate New York, and southern Ontario. It's not a substantial problem here, as we lack massive bodies of fresh water for systems to tap into, freeze, and dump on the land.
I also said "sunny days in California don't expose the hazards", and there are many of them. While the other conditions certainly exist, they aren't as relentless even if they can be as episodically intense. That's part of why people pay so damn much to live here!
This is actually good news for everyone, not just people in Michigan. If self-driving vehicles can deal with the weather conditions there, they should be able to deal with them in the rest of the country, and most other countries as well. Sunny days in California don't expose the hazards posed by rain, snow, slush, and black ice.
If you pull the drivers or otherwise open the box and find chips in it, you have a shit box. 3/16 is insane for anything other than a portable system where weight is at an absolute premium (I'd rather have heavy magnets and light boxes than light magnets and heavy boxes), but 3/8 can be done well. As you have noted, the thinner it is, the more critical it is that everything fits perfectly because there is less edge adhesive holding everything together.
It's also true that there is a large difference between studio monitors and stage gear. Stage gear often compromises on fidelity for the sake of power handling and portability. These Tannoys would be near useless in a nightclub – they'd never be heard, and the advantages of Dual Concentric are mostly lost more than ten feet away. That's exactly why there are different types of gear.:)
Most speakers, even high-quality ones, are medium-density fiberboard (MDF) with a wood veneer over them. Real wood has resonances, MDF much less so.
I have a pair of Tannoy SRM-12B studio monitors at my workstation and they look like wood, but they're clearly not as revealed by the places where the incredibly thin (about 0.7mm I'd say) wood finish has broken away. They still work perfectly. I am driving them with a mere 80W/ch class AB solid-state amplifier, but they can't handle more than 100W/ch anyhow. They have self-resetting breakers though, which I have seen get tripped once or twice when the amp has fed them a nasty transient. (The amp itself also has similar protection, and sometimes it's a race to see which one trips first. If it resets in seconds, the amp tripped. If it resets in minutes, the speakers tripped.)
In any case, these are hardly what you'd consider cheap crap. They are 40 years old, but are absolutely professional quality. They're 5/8 inch thick MDF.
The trick is to time it so that you're just getting caught up to the real-time stream as the game ends. You know the result at about the same time as everyone else, and you don't have to sit through halftime, or commentary, or God Bless America in the seventh inning. (That one is a particular pet peeve of mine.)
Another thing you can do is watch one event live and use the DVR to skim another during the commercials and commentary and dead time. Or, you can turn your attention from a game that looks like a foregone conclusion, but record it just in case it ends up in an epic comeback.
I stream sports sometimes, but it's either because I can't watch it live without going to a sports bar (no cable/satellite), or because it's not one of the Big Four – or even American. I've become quite the fan of snooker over the last four years, as evidenced by the fact that I consider the final of the 2015 World Championship to be one of the best, most riveting sporting events I've ever watched. Eleven and a half hours, and I watched it all (no skimming), though not all in one sitting. Even if I could have watched it live, recording it would have allowed cutting out inter-frame time, the mid-session intervals, and pointless "hype" commentary, and go to double speed during the times when a player spends three minutes pondering a particularly nasty position. This can easily cut two hours out of those eleven and a half, without missing anything.
With a 64-bit signed seconds value you can go +/- 292 billion years. With a 64-bit value for the fractional part, you could easily increase the resolution to attoseconds (1E-18, 60 bits). Both those limits are not very constraining.
Sure, you say that now, but when it comes time to fix the Y2.92×10^6K bug, are you willing to pay for it?
It's probably still heavily mixed with salts and/or chlorine compounds. They might be solid inclusions because of the freezing process, but it will still be necessary to treat the water before using. That's not to say the water isn't immensely useful -- it will be! It just may take more work than "hey let's put a farm next to it and mine ice".
All you little people, all you technologists, all you celebrities, all the way up to Tim Cook? You can go fuck yourselves. We want to live in a world where only the rich, powerful, and the government are the only ones entitled to keep their data safe. We don't give a flying fuck about your obsessive-compulsive need to hide everything, own your data, and control your own life; go take your meds, go call your therapist, go take a time-out somewhere cool dark and quiet, but get the hell out of our faces, out of our way, out of your meddling! We are not making us 'safe', we are making this country by the money, of the money, and for the money safe from the ravages of democracy. FUCK YOU, BUDDY!
SATA SSDs are cheaper. They're also quite a bit slower (except for random 4k reads and writes) because they are bandwidth-constrained by the SATA III bus to somewhat less than 600MB/s (typically around 520-550MB/s). Even the $80 SSD I bought for my C720 saturates this on both reads AND writes. You'll pay 50-100% more for NVMe, but if you have the interface, it's quite worthwhile to take advantage of it as the saturated bandwidth is in excess of five times that of SATA III.
This is true, the slot is SATA III only. However, last I checked, there were no NVMe SSDs in 2242 form factor anyhow. 2260, yes, but the C720 only has space for a 2242.
Also the mPCIe connector is generally missing, although it is included on the ones intended for WWAN use. There is a hack out there that turns the missing mPCIe contacts into an extra USB port, but I fear neither my hands nor my eyes are up to the task any longer.
You have totally missed my point. I said it's good for the desktop. Small form factor PCs are shipping with M.2 slots so it's good there too. What I was lamenting is the loss of M.2 slots from notebooks, where everything is going to soldered-on and non-upgradable. That is where I would really want to use one of these, though they'd have to get the size down to 2260 at least, and preferably 2242. I expect I'll keep my hacked Chromebook around for years just because it's among the last of its breed -- thin, light, compact, with good battery life, yet with upgradable storage.
This is all well and good, and I'd love to put one in the desktop system. The shame is that fewer devices are shipping with M.2 slots anymore. I bought an Acer C720 Chromebook specifically because it does have such a slot, though it supports only SATA III and 2242 drives. What will this fit in other than a desktop? Small form factor boxes, yes, but otherwise... not much, in the future. And that's just a shame.
I'm dual-booting Windows 10 and Linux Mint Cinnamon 18 on an Acer C720 Chromebook. The i3 version (which I did not spring for) will also Hackintosh quite acceptably.
Slashdot Mirror
Desktop CPUs aren't dead, they just smell funny.
That smell is from the unwashed masses using their phones for 90% of what they used to do on a laptop. (Laptop chips are designed like the desktop chips, just with less power consumption and a lower clock rate.)
When is the last time you could take a top of the line machine that's six years old, and a mid-range but brand new machine, and be hard-pressed to tell them apart? Well, that's where we are now. Intel is having a hard time winning on the "buy an $800 computer to save $25 in power every year!" concept. Laptop noise, size, and battery life continue to improve, but if you're not unhappy with yours, why hassle replacing and reinstalling and all that? A new one won't be that much faster – unless, of course, you bought cheap in the first place.
If we as a civilization have figured out how to dock spacecraft, and refuel planes in flight, surely we can figure out how to connect an autonomous car to a contact charger. It could be a port at bumper height and the car drives very slowly into it. It could be simple robots at the station itself. I'm not saying wireless charging doesn't have its place, but it is not a requirement for an autonomous vehicle infrastructure.
Maybe they just couldn't find all the depressed users who aren't on 7 to 11 social networks. Because they're not on social networks.
Titty Sprinkles explained.
A half bath would be very helpful, and if you intend to have clients in and out, it's pretty much a necessity. Even though it's not a big deal for you to go into the house to use the bathroom, do you really want to make a client do that? Once you have plumbing, you have something closer to a barebones apartment than to a shack. Unless you're just telecommuting, it's not really reasonable to build without one.
Perhaps think backward. Take a studio apartment concept, and figure out what you don't need. You don't need a kitchen, but the bathroom has a sink, so you're still good to go with convenience items and stored prepared food. Coffeemaker, mini-fridge, microwave. You don't need a bed, or if you opt for one it need not be a full-time bed. A futon might suffice. (There may be times you need to lay down, but going back in the house to do so would break your flow somehow. Like supervising compiling or rendering or 3D printing or something.) Then everything you would want in any office -- your choice of furniture and equipment.
What's also important is what doesn't go in there. Network gear is probably better left in the house, but there are cases where you might want to move it. But more importantly, don't take anything irrelevant out there. I don't mean you can't have a Rubik's Cube on your desk, I mean don't put anything out there that is totally unrelated, except in dire emergency. Otherwise you will soon feel like you are working in a closet -- because you essentially are.
Look at this space as more valuable than the house it lies behind, on a per-square-foot basis -- why would you want to store junk in the high-rent district?
You're responsible for the code you write, and if you are using existing libraries, you are responsible for tracking the packages you use. If they update, and your installer includes it, you need to update your installer. You may not feel this justifies pushing updates, especially if the change is to functions you did not use, but the program really should be checking for library updates and asking the user if they should be updated – and sometimes there are reasons why they cannot. At that point, it becomes the user's problem.
The network itself may have a pretty good track record of never totally falling over, but there is no guarantee at any given moment that there will be connectivity where you are, right now. Networks and entire countries can be cut off, and an emergency responder had best assume in a SHTF scenario that data service will be intermittent to completely unavailable. What happened to the radios in the cars? Those won't just stop working (unless it's an EMP attack, but what good is a network connection if all your gear is bricked?) and were the state of the art not that long ago. If they don't want to maintain a radio network in addition to the Internet-reliant communications, then they're going to have to pass out handhelds when it happens. If they aren't keeping any backup plan in place at all, they're complete idiots because this doesn't require buying more gear, it just means maintaining the gear they owned before. (Or someone higher up forced them to do so, for self-serving and/or malicious purposes.)
The internet being unavailable should not be a life-threatening emergency, except possibly to the degree that hospitals will be unable to access patient files who are there for treatment after whatever actually went wrong that day. Even that could be avoided if hospitals all had to mirror the host every so often, but any /. reader will know how incompetent healthcare IT has proven to be.
You're walking through a train station. The train pulls up and all the passengers pile out. If you could somehow stop time, you could easily count them all, but how can you handle it in real time? You can't even see all of them, let alone count that fast.
It's not the quantity that is uncountable. It is concealment, and the rate at which events are happening, that makes them uncountable.
Tonal languages are not, in and of themselves, an inherently bad idea. It's just one more parameter which can be used to add information density without having to rush the actual mechanics of the speaker. The fact that some people are tone-deaf may pose a problem, just like the fact that some people are color-blind makes color coding a troublesome way to transmit critical information.
The character set used is not necessarily tied to this – it would be perfectly workable to retain the character set but speak a non-tonal language, and it is perfectly workable to write a tonal language in a phonetic alphabet. It just takes a lot of diacritical marks. If keeping the density high is an important goal, Hangul retains that feature while using a phonetic system by forming the characters into blocks representing syllables.
The most telling argument against change is that with the vast majority able to read and write, it would take a very large investment to change the writing system. Hangul did it in an era where most people couldn't read – the investment was correspondingly smaller, and it was the right move at the right time. Another argument is that even as languages drift or even have completely different origins, the writing system remains comprehensible to all users Such is not necessarily the case with phonetic languages – given enough time, what's written and what's spoken will diverge even if the spelling made perfect sense at the time it was codified. So maybe the thought process is:
1. It will take a lot of time and money.
2. It will break the means of communication between the multiple languages spoken in the country.
3. It will only provide temporary benefits.
4. The status quo puts up a significant barrier to foreign meddling.
Don't underestimate the power of the fourth one.
I'm still on 2.2. Did they skip 3 altogether?
From the link in TFS:
longterm: 3.18.45 2016-11-30
longterm: 3.16.39 2016-11-20
longterm: 3.12.68 2016-11-29
longterm: 3.10.104 2016-10-21
longterm: 3.4.113 2016-10-26
longterm: 3.2.84 2016-11-20
Seriously, should I have used lmgtfy?
I happen to live in California, and while autonomous vehicles will have to deal with mountains eventually, that's not their primary target. If I want to see snow, the mountains are a couple hours away. Chains or 4WD/AWD are required. I would guess this will be one of the last holdouts for human drivers. However, they don't get buried under multiple feet of lake effect snow over and over again throughout the course of a winter, which was really the problem I was thinking of -- and a problem that must be tackled if these cars are to see any success in Michigan, northeast Illinois, northern Indiana and Ohio, upstate New York, and southern Ontario. It's not a substantial problem here, as we lack massive bodies of fresh water for systems to tap into, freeze, and dump on the land.
I also said "sunny days in California don't expose the hazards", and there are many of them. While the other conditions certainly exist, they aren't as relentless even if they can be as episodically intense. That's part of why people pay so damn much to live here!
This is actually good news for everyone, not just people in Michigan. If self-driving vehicles can deal with the weather conditions there, they should be able to deal with them in the rest of the country, and most other countries as well. Sunny days in California don't expose the hazards posed by rain, snow, slush, and black ice.
If you pull the drivers or otherwise open the box and find chips in it, you have a shit box. 3/16 is insane for anything other than a portable system where weight is at an absolute premium (I'd rather have heavy magnets and light boxes than light magnets and heavy boxes), but 3/8 can be done well. As you have noted, the thinner it is, the more critical it is that everything fits perfectly because there is less edge adhesive holding everything together.
It's also true that there is a large difference between studio monitors and stage gear. Stage gear often compromises on fidelity for the sake of power handling and portability. These Tannoys would be near useless in a nightclub – they'd never be heard, and the advantages of Dual Concentric are mostly lost more than ten feet away. That's exactly why there are different types of gear. :)
You think that's bad? You haven't seen the state of your hovercraft lately.
Most speakers, even high-quality ones, are medium-density fiberboard (MDF) with a wood veneer over them. Real wood has resonances, MDF much less so.
I have a pair of Tannoy SRM-12B studio monitors at my workstation and they look like wood, but they're clearly not as revealed by the places where the incredibly thin (about 0.7mm I'd say) wood finish has broken away. They still work perfectly. I am driving them with a mere 80W/ch class AB solid-state amplifier, but they can't handle more than 100W/ch anyhow. They have self-resetting breakers though, which I have seen get tripped once or twice when the amp has fed them a nasty transient. (The amp itself also has similar protection, and sometimes it's a race to see which one trips first. If it resets in seconds, the amp tripped. If it resets in minutes, the speakers tripped.)
In any case, these are hardly what you'd consider cheap crap. They are 40 years old, but are absolutely professional quality. They're 5/8 inch thick MDF.
Who will they sell their products to if they don't cut costs to the bone and therefore get priced out of the market?
The race to the bottom has a logical endpoint (a crash) but refusing to engage in it just leads to becoming irrelevant that much sooner.
The trick is to time it so that you're just getting caught up to the real-time stream as the game ends. You know the result at about the same time as everyone else, and you don't have to sit through halftime, or commentary, or God Bless America in the seventh inning. (That one is a particular pet peeve of mine.)
Another thing you can do is watch one event live and use the DVR to skim another during the commercials and commentary and dead time. Or, you can turn your attention from a game that looks like a foregone conclusion, but record it just in case it ends up in an epic comeback.
I stream sports sometimes, but it's either because I can't watch it live without going to a sports bar (no cable/satellite), or because it's not one of the Big Four – or even American. I've become quite the fan of snooker over the last four years, as evidenced by the fact that I consider the final of the 2015 World Championship to be one of the best, most riveting sporting events I've ever watched. Eleven and a half hours, and I watched it all (no skimming), though not all in one sitting. Even if I could have watched it live, recording it would have allowed cutting out inter-frame time, the mid-session intervals, and pointless "hype" commentary, and go to double speed during the times when a player spends three minutes pondering a particularly nasty position. This can easily cut two hours out of those eleven and a half, without missing anything.
With a 64-bit signed seconds value you can go +/- 292 billion years. With a 64-bit value for the fractional part, you could easily increase the resolution to attoseconds (1E-18, 60 bits). Both those limits are not very constraining.
Sure, you say that now, but when it comes time to fix the Y2.92×10^6K bug, are you willing to pay for it?
It's probably still heavily mixed with salts and/or chlorine compounds. They might be solid inclusions because of the freezing process, but it will still be necessary to treat the water before using. That's not to say the water isn't immensely useful -- it will be! It just may take more work than "hey let's put a farm next to it and mine ice".
All you little people, all you technologists, all you celebrities, all the way up to Tim Cook? You can go fuck yourselves. We want to live in a world where only the rich, powerful, and the government are the only ones entitled to keep their data safe. We don't give a flying fuck about your obsessive-compulsive need to hide everything, own your data, and control your own life; go take your meds, go call your therapist, go take a time-out somewhere cool dark and quiet, but get the hell out of our faces, out of our way, out of your meddling! We are not making us 'safe', we are making this country by the money, of the money, and for the money safe from the ravages of democracy. FUCK YOU, BUDDY!
SATA SSDs are cheaper. They're also quite a bit slower (except for random 4k reads and writes) because they are bandwidth-constrained by the SATA III bus to somewhat less than 600MB/s (typically around 520-550MB/s). Even the $80 SSD I bought for my C720 saturates this on both reads AND writes. You'll pay 50-100% more for NVMe, but if you have the interface, it's quite worthwhile to take advantage of it as the saturated bandwidth is in excess of five times that of SATA III.
This is true, the slot is SATA III only. However, last I checked, there were no NVMe SSDs in 2242 form factor anyhow. 2260, yes, but the C720 only has space for a 2242.
Also the mPCIe connector is generally missing, although it is included on the ones intended for WWAN use. There is a hack out there that turns the missing mPCIe contacts into an extra USB port, but I fear neither my hands nor my eyes are up to the task any longer.
You have totally missed my point. I said it's good for the desktop. Small form factor PCs are shipping with M.2 slots so it's good there too. What I was lamenting is the loss of M.2 slots from notebooks, where everything is going to soldered-on and non-upgradable. That is where I would really want to use one of these, though they'd have to get the size down to 2260 at least, and preferably 2242. I expect I'll keep my hacked Chromebook around for years just because it's among the last of its breed -- thin, light, compact, with good battery life, yet with upgradable storage.
This is all well and good, and I'd love to put one in the desktop system. The shame is that fewer devices are shipping with M.2 slots anymore. I bought an Acer C720 Chromebook specifically because it does have such a slot, though it supports only SATA III and 2242 drives. What will this fit in other than a desktop? Small form factor boxes, yes, but otherwise... not much, in the future. And that's just a shame.
I'm dual-booting Windows 10 and Linux Mint Cinnamon 18 on an Acer C720 Chromebook. The i3 version (which I did not spring for) will also Hackintosh quite acceptably.