The problem is that (warranted) hardware that does what I want and fits in a nondescript bag used to cost $300. Now, after the decline of netbooks, it is thought to cost $900. But thank you for recommending the Lenovo S21e. I've added it to my short list.
I actually ditched Windows completely due to better hardware support on Linux
For desktops or laptops? GNU/Linux seems to support desktop hardware fine, but lately, Windows supports small (10.1" or 11.6") laptop hardware better. I've been having trouble finding an 11.6 inch or smaller laptop that works well with GNU/Linux.*
The amount of fiddling on Ubuntu is minimal, but still there (still had to download graphics-drivers manually to get it to work), however, is nothing compared to all the fiddling I'd have to do on Windows and still not be happy / in control.
On a few laptops such as the EeeBook, volunteers for the DebianOn project couldn't get sound, Wi-Fi, or suspend working at all. Should I instead ask on Ubuntu Forums for what small laptops sold now work well with Xubuntu 15.xx?
* By "works well", I include at least graphics, multi-window window management, audio, Wi-Fi, suspend, and a bootloader that doesn't beg the user to wipe the drive every time it is turned on the way a Chromebook with Crouton does.
Incidentally, paywalled sites only show up in search results if bypassing the paywall is pretty easy.
The way these paywalled journals work is that you don't need to bypass the paywall to read the abstract, and the journal is happy with only the abstract being indexed for public search results. But it's still a gigantic rooster tease.
SSDs use "wear leveling", which spreads out writes to all pages. This means even if a page can only be rewritten 5,000 times, you'll write to tens of of thousands of other pages before you write to this one again. Is the total amount that can be written and overwritten to an SSD really that much lower than what is written to a hard drive over its life?
I think Disney and Pixar have to put out a few more movies to act as source material before there can be another Kingdom Hearts. Besides, it'll be complicated to integrate Disney's recent acquisitions (Marvel Super Heroes and Star Wars) in a way more story-driven than the "toy box" style juxtaposition of Disney Infinity.
Then why can't Konami just sell its video game division to Capcom or someone like that? At least then we won't have a "dog in the manger" situation of a video game publisher that owns copyrights but refuses to exploit them the way the founders intended.
Make something where you actually get to go about life in your home town for a long time if you never bother to set out on the adventure. Run an orchard, catch fish and sell them at market, buy clothes, decorate your home, and more. Not only could a Harvest Moon-type simulation side quest provide extra content for the early game and set up relationships that will become important later on, but the investment by players in a village that gets destroyed could rival the <spoiler>murder of Aeris Gainsborough</spoiler>. They could call it Chrono Crossing.
That's fine for CD games. But how would you go about dumping an authentic NES or Super NES Game Pak with a Square, Enix, or Taito game on it so you can play it on your emulator? For Super NES, Genesis, and Game Boy, you can buy a Retrode adapter from DragonBox. But what for NES games such as Final Fantasy and Rad Racer?
(Before you suggest "download", please read about UMG v. MP3.com.)
First, by those who appear on the site, or their relatives. Second, by those who get told about it by the first group. Third, by those who get told about it by the second group.
Once Facebook and Twitter close due to lack of ad revenue, through what medium will people instead tell other people about web sites?
My site gets traffic of up to 350GB/month (that's about 3Tbit for those who prefer bits to bytes) as a result.
How do you pay for the domain, SSL certificate, hosting, and bandwidth without ads or paywalls?
Remember that we're not going to lose the tech advances that the current internet drove
But the availability of tech advances to the public can disappear over time due to perceived lack of demand driving lack of supply. Case in point: Affordable X11/Linux-compatible laptops with a 10" screen were easy to find in 2010. They're a lot harder to find since manufacturers discontinued the category.
by people telling other people, hey look at this, and the network effects of that
But once YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook shut down due to lack of ad revenue, then through what medium will people be "telling other people, hey look at this"?
But, what web site wants to employ salespeople and (ad) designers when you can just copy and paste a line of code into a web site? Well, I think the ones that continue to do that into the future are the ones that aren't going to make money.
So how should the individual operator of a small web site recoup the cost of a domain, certificate, and VPS? That's the reason that Federated Wiki hasn't become as popular as traditional wiki software such as MediaWiki: each Federated Wiki editor needs his own web site if he wants to share his changes with anyone else.
pre-AOL web
There was no pre-AOL web. Nexus (formerly WorldWideWeb), the first web browser, was first released in December 1990. Quantum Link launched in late 1985, and it changed its name to AOL in October 1989.
With your clarification, you now appear to claim that all web search sucks. Now let's work on defining the problem in more detail: What do you want web search to do for you? And how are all the major search engines failing at it?
People used stolen time and university hardware in those days because it was very expensive. These days it is as cheap as chips. No-one will ever be going back to those days.
If there are no advertisers to fund the distribution of compelling articles, videos, and social networking platforms, how many people will continue to subscribe to home Internet? Probably not nearly as many. This means ISPs will have to spread their fixed costs across fewer customers. Internet won't be "cheap as chips" anymore.
It will be the likes of YouTube and Twitter that will go, but even those will be replaced by something equivalent as long as people have an urge to upload their cat videos.
Sure, you can buy a domain, buy some S3 static hosting by Amazon, and put your blog and videos on an S3 site. But without YouTube and Twitter, how will your blog and videos get any exposure?
All advertisements targeted at minors should be straight up banned, there is no space in any caring modern thoughtful society for adults who would economically target children's pocket money in order to live to extreme excess.
If taken literally, this would prohibit retail and food service establishments from posting help wanted ads advertising the intent to hire teens for summer jobs. How else should teens find companies willing to hire them in order to have work experience before graduating from high school?
In what way is DuckDuckGo or Bing noticeably better in this respect? Last time I tried five queries at Bing It On, Google earned 3.5 points and Bing earned 1.5.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that (warranted) hardware that does what I want and fits in a nondescript bag used to cost $300. Now, after the decline of netbooks, it is thought to cost $900. But thank you for recommending the Lenovo S21e. I've added it to my short list.
Windows supports small (10.1" or 11.6") laptop hardware better
Get a [...] MacBook Air
For three times the price. That just supports Windows fans' "Windows is more affordable than UNIX" canard.
The single best feature of Ubuntu is apt-get
How does it compare to yum in Fedora and CentOS?
I actually ditched Windows completely due to better hardware support on Linux
For desktops or laptops? GNU/Linux seems to support desktop hardware fine, but lately, Windows supports small (10.1" or 11.6") laptop hardware better. I've been having trouble finding an 11.6 inch or smaller laptop that works well with GNU/Linux.*
The amount of fiddling on Ubuntu is minimal, but still there (still had to download graphics-drivers manually to get it to work), however, is nothing compared to all the fiddling I'd have to do on Windows and still not be happy / in control.
On a few laptops such as the EeeBook, volunteers for the DebianOn project couldn't get sound, Wi-Fi, or suspend working at all. Should I instead ask on Ubuntu Forums for what small laptops sold now work well with Xubuntu 15.xx?
* By "works well", I include at least graphics, multi-window window management, audio, Wi-Fi, suspend, and a bootloader that doesn't beg the user to wipe the drive every time it is turned on the way a Chromebook with Crouton does.
Incidentally, paywalled sites only show up in search results if bypassing the paywall is pretty easy.
The way these paywalled journals work is that you don't need to bypass the paywall to read the abstract, and the journal is happy with only the abstract being indexed for public search results. But it's still a gigantic rooster tease.
SSDs use "wear leveling", which spreads out writes to all pages. This means even if a page can only be rewritten 5,000 times, you'll write to tens of of thousands of other pages before you write to this one again. Is the total amount that can be written and overwritten to an SSD really that much lower than what is written to a hard drive over its life?
But could it get any worse than a Deus Ex-themed eroge subtitled Pronounced Day of Sex?
I think Disney and Pixar have to put out a few more movies to act as source material before there can be another Kingdom Hearts. Besides, it'll be complicated to integrate Disney's recent acquisitions (Marvel Super Heroes and Star Wars) in a way more story-driven than the "toy box" style juxtaposition of Disney Infinity.
Then why can't Konami just sell its video game division to Capcom or someone like that? At least then we won't have a "dog in the manger" situation of a video game publisher that owns copyrights but refuses to exploit them the way the founders intended.
Make something where you actually get to go about life in your home town for a long time if you never bother to set out on the adventure. Run an orchard, catch fish and sell them at market, buy clothes, decorate your home, and more. Not only could a Harvest Moon-type simulation side quest provide extra content for the early game and set up relationships that will become important later on, but the investment by players in a village that gets destroyed could rival the <spoiler>murder of Aeris Gainsborough</spoiler>. They could call it Chrono Crossing.
That's fine for CD games. But how would you go about dumping an authentic NES or Super NES Game Pak with a Square, Enix, or Taito game on it so you can play it on your emulator? For Super NES, Genesis, and Game Boy, you can buy a Retrode adapter from DragonBox. But what for NES games such as Final Fantasy and Rad Racer?
(Before you suggest "download", please read about UMG v. MP3.com.)
First, by those who appear on the site, or their relatives. Second, by those who get told about it by the first group. Third, by those who get told about it by the second group.
Once Facebook and Twitter close due to lack of ad revenue, through what medium will people instead tell other people about web sites?
My site gets traffic of up to 350GB/month (that's about 3Tbit for those who prefer bits to bytes) as a result.
How do you pay for the domain, SSL certificate, hosting, and bandwidth without ads or paywalls?
Remember that we're not going to lose the tech advances that the current internet drove
But the availability of tech advances to the public can disappear over time due to perceived lack of demand driving lack of supply. Case in point: Affordable X11/Linux-compatible laptops with a 10" screen were easy to find in 2010. They're a lot harder to find since manufacturers discontinued the category.
by people telling other people, hey look at this, and the network effects of that
But once YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook shut down due to lack of ad revenue, then through what medium will people be "telling other people, hey look at this"?
There is no advertising anywhere that improves the web experience
What are Craigslist and eBay and Amazon.com if not ads?
If you exclude e-commerce and other sites where ads are the content, the known alternatives for paying the hosting bills and writers' salaries are either a not-for-profit company with an endowment or paywalls. But buying a year's subscription to read one article is impractical in a web of linking, searching, and sharing. And it'll remain impractical until microtransactions are figured out.
[A paywall] usually makes customers just go nuclear on the site and decide that they do not need it after all.
Until you hit eight paywalls in the first ten relevant results for a search query.
But, what web site wants to employ salespeople and (ad) designers when you can just copy and paste a line of code into a web site? Well, I think the ones that continue to do that into the future are the ones that aren't going to make money.
So how should the individual operator of a small web site recoup the cost of a domain, certificate, and VPS? That's the reason that Federated Wiki hasn't become as popular as traditional wiki software such as MediaWiki: each Federated Wiki editor needs his own web site if he wants to share his changes with anyone else.
pre-AOL web
There was no pre-AOL web. Nexus (formerly WorldWideWeb), the first web browser, was first released in December 1990. Quantum Link launched in late 1985, and it changed its name to AOL in October 1989.
With your clarification, you now appear to claim that all web search sucks. Now let's work on defining the problem in more detail: What do you want web search to do for you? And how are all the major search engines failing at it?
People used stolen time and university hardware in those days because it was very expensive. These days it is as cheap as chips. No-one will ever be going back to those days.
If there are no advertisers to fund the distribution of compelling articles, videos, and social networking platforms, how many people will continue to subscribe to home Internet? Probably not nearly as many. This means ISPs will have to spread their fixed costs across fewer customers. Internet won't be "cheap as chips" anymore.
It will be the likes of YouTube and Twitter that will go, but even those will be replaced by something equivalent as long as people have an urge to upload their cat videos.
Sure, you can buy a domain, buy some S3 static hosting by Amazon, and put your blog and videos on an S3 site. But without YouTube and Twitter, how will your blog and videos get any exposure?
The internet would be improved by 100% if all ad supported sites died today.
Slashdot is ad supported. So this 100% improvement would lose your comments on Slashdot. Perhaps the red site is more your style?
Really? I thought Pop-Tarts ads implied that they'll make your head swell up (video, 2 minutes).
All advertisements targeted at minors should be straight up banned, there is no space in any caring modern thoughtful society for adults who would economically target children's pocket money in order to live to extreme excess.
If taken literally, this would prohibit retail and food service establishments from posting help wanted ads advertising the intent to hire teens for summer jobs. How else should teens find companies willing to hire them in order to have work experience before graduating from high school?
Firefox 42 and later show an indicator for HTML5 audio and video, as does Chrome. If you cannot wait for 42 to leave beta, install Noise Control for Firefox. Set Flash to "click to play".
Google search frankly sucks.
In what way is DuckDuckGo or Bing noticeably better in this respect? Last time I tried five queries at Bing It On, Google earned 3.5 points and Bing earned 1.5.
8 GB is still a $40 overage fee if your ISP charges $5 per GB. If you can't get cable or DSL, you're stuck on satellite or fixed cellular.