I'm not surprised at all. I expect power users to have and maybe still use aged hardware. I add my own story. I've bought an HP nc8430 with Win XP at the end of 2006. It's a T7200 Intel CPU (Core 2 Duo 2 GHz). Along the years I upgraded the RAM to 4 GB and the disk to 500 GB and the OS to Ubuntu 8.04 up to 11.04 (I wait a few month before upgrading Ubuntu, to let other users find the bugs and the workarounds, and the devs to fix some of the bugs.)
In the last 3 of those 5 years my computer kept feeling faster and faster because the software got faster: we have faster browsers, faster Java VMs, faster file systems (ext4 vs ext3), etc (I develop web and Android apps). On the other side a friend of mine with Windows just replaced her post 2006 desktop with a Core i7 one because Office was running too slow on her old machine. I told her a Corei5 would be more than enough but she knows that every 3 years her computer starts to be too slow for the latest version of Office (that's basically all she uses to work) so she always buys the latest greatest hardware. She's really surprised that with the kind of work I do I'm still with that old 2006 machine.
My idea is that power users tend to take care of their machines and select the right software so they can extract performances even from old hardware. Normal users usually are at the mercy of the dominant vendors and have to pay and pay and pay.
What could make me change my machine (excluding big hw failures) is some future application that I need to run that requires more RAM than I have (having to run too many virtual machines? or a windows 7-8 one?) or is not compatible with my hardware (some new OS version not playing well with my graphic card?) or the need of new hardware (we'll see what happens with the Windows 8 desktop touchscreens). And that's a pity because I won't find a new laptop of this size with a screen as tall as the one I'm using now.
fir autocompletes to firefox on my box.
web lets me choose between web2disk, webcamstudio, webcamstudio-x-install-vloopback (whatever the first and last one are) but if I wanted to bind web to firefox I would define a bash alias. web + RETURN and that's it, no need for autocompletion, and btw I also have opera and chromium which I use regularly but not as my main browsers.
Or maybe power users want to define their own user interface and bitch about anything that makes it more difficult to achieve. Unity is definitely further away than Gnome 2 from what I like to use. I tweaked the Gnome panels and applets to behave as I want but I can't see how I can do that with Unity. So no Unity for me, not cool enough, or vice versa.
Congratulations, an interesting journal. My question is about the format: why a PDF and not a blog? The advantages of a blog are: it lets you publish the papers as soon as they arrive and it attracts people to your server every day instead of a peak of hits once per month. You choose PDF so it must have some advantages that outweighs those of a blog (or less disadvantages) and I'd love to learn about them because I'm also in the process of making a similar decision. Thanks.
I'd love to carry my main machine with me in a smartphone form factor: my phone weights 116 g vs the 2.7 kg of my laptop and 1.1 kg of my netbook. I can already attach a mouse, a keyboard and USB pen drive to my phone, a Samsung Galaxy S2, and it can output full HD video. Unfortunately it runs Android and not Ubuntu which is the OS I use to work. If anybody fixes that it would already be much better than my netbook. With a better CPU, more RAM (1 GB now) and more storage (it ceils to 32 GB now) I will run Android apps in a VM. Maybe we'll even get hackintoshes for iOS (keep an eye on these guys). It won't take a long time for the top level smartphone CPUs to be as powerful as the one in my laptop, a Core 2 Duo T7200 from 2006. We're already heading to quad core 2 GHz processors. Storage and RAM could grow as well.
Anyway, what we'll need is dual-UI, one UI to use on the small touchscreen of the device, one to use on large external screens. At the moment the only Linux based UI that works well on a small screen is the Android one. Unity IMHO is fine only between 9" and 13", I'm not using it on my 15" laptop.
Overall I feel fairly optimistic but I don't expect to be able to get one of those machines in 5 years. The main hurdles are not technical but commercial: which company is going to sell us real computers when they can sell us smart phones with the same form factor and we're going to buy them anyway? I've got a laptop, a netbook and a smartphone instead of only one device: I made at least 3 companies happy instead of one. I bet on the force of competition:-)
Agreed, but it works in bicycle racing, and people race in bunches and teams there. Never heard of anybody tampering with the transponders. Your cars should arrive alone and if the transponder doesn't match the car you disqualify it.
Nice specs but a bit heavy and I don't like those keyboards, with out of axis spacebar and touchpad to accommodate a number pad (only because those reduced-height screens are so wide and they have to fill up the space) http://www.system76.com/product_images/gazelle-aec32d375de9c04.png
If it were detached from the screen I would shift it to the right and that's telling.
I know, it's not just them and I won't find a laptop larger that 13" with a sane keyboard.
You're right, I didn't think of that. Anyway that doesn't solve the hardest part of the problem: how do you get traction for your OS if people can't install it as the host OS of their machines? We wouldn't have Linux even on the servers if all we could do was running it into virtual machines (not so common in the early '90s but you get the idea). TPM will lock us into the software a few companies want to sell us. Less choice and a more static world. Good for the incumbents, worse for anyone else.
I complete your answer: if the masses don't have an easy way to install the next open source OS, there won't be another open source OS. Bingo, if you are in the closed source business.
Suppose you are a Linus Torvalds some years in the future. How do you create your own OS if your PC only boots existing OSes and you don't work for a company that can buy or create non TC hardware?
Don't know, even php shines compared to that mess I saw in the examples. I'm a ZX81 old timer and I remember well that we had plenty of better languages available at those times on systems that were only a fraction of this one. Maybe its creators are nostalgic and want to inflict their mood on everybody.
It's only a matter of time but eventually Gnome 2 won't work anymore with new versions of libraries and Xservers. The only chance it has is somebody forking it and maintaining it but it's going to be a boring project, something you do only if they pay you. I say so even if I'd like to keep this Gnome 2 desktop I'm using right now unchanged for at least the next 10 years.
Not totally unusable but they made some bad decisions on fundamental issues of the GUI. I quickly revert them on any desktop I have to use that had the bad idea of copying OSX (Ubuntu global menu, icon docks, etc). You can't undo them on OSX, so I don't buy Apple.
Apple can do whatever they want with their commercial store. But I wish Jobs never thought of the concept of walled garden applied to computing. Walled gardens are harmful and people should not line up to get confined into them. If Jobs had stopped innovating when he got windows and mouses on the screens and desks of everybody (even if much of it was because he scared MS so much they had to copy what he got from Xerox) I would say he made a big contribution to humankind. He also basically invented the modern smartphone, so he was twice as great as many other famous inventors. But the innovation of the walled garden ruined it all. No computer scientist or engineer or programmer should welcome a cage being put around his/her favorite tool.
Maybe it's this kind of attrition that consumes the fun, but maybe that's related to working for others for money all the day long and working for themselves in their spare time, which is little and has to be shared with a zillion of other things. So you end up delaying all the non essential activities and you discover there are a lot of them. Just look at the polish of the programs I deliver to my customers vs the one of the programs I only have to use myself.
Agreed, any puzzle game is lame compared to the puzzles we face when programming.
To contribute anecdotal information, it seems that programmers (sample size: one, me) love racing games and NetHack (actually a very big puzzle but so varied that it's hard to think of it as such). They spent some time playing sokoban, a much smaller puzzle. They rarely play programming related games with the exception of Core Wars back in the '80s. They think Rubik's Cube is cool but can't remember anymore the solution studied on a magazine 20+ years ago and they disdain sudoku. You don't play sudoku, that's computer work. If you really have to mess with it you program a computer to solve it (but it's NP-Complete).
I second your points. There are plenty of ebooks I'd buy if I knew I can read them on any device and I can convert them in any new format that will get popular until I die. I won't buy any as long as they are DRMed. Luckily, there are some legally free ebooks around and enough interesting ones (usually not what my friends read and recommend to me). As of 2011, paper still beats electrons for everything but for ease of transport.
Actually it looks like it's got on spec-parity with the Samsung Galaxy SII, give or take some software and a smaller screen (which might be a good or bad thing according to tastes). Apparently it's still the old thick iPhone 4 case, when all the leading Android phones got releases with a thinner case last Spring. I'm a little disappointed because an iPhone that doesn't clearly beat the competition could mean that the Android manufacturers will slow down their race to better features.
The single feature that could rehabilitate this iPhone is this Siri assistant, but It must be really good. It must be also really good at understanding languages other than American English. That could be a great feature or a great failure. I'll wait and see.
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I'm not surprised at all. I expect power users to have and maybe still use aged hardware. I add my own story. I've bought an HP nc8430 with Win XP at the end of 2006. It's a T7200 Intel CPU (Core 2 Duo 2 GHz). Along the years I upgraded the RAM to 4 GB and the disk to 500 GB and the OS to Ubuntu 8.04 up to 11.04 (I wait a few month before upgrading Ubuntu, to let other users find the bugs and the workarounds, and the devs to fix some of the bugs.)
In the last 3 of those 5 years my computer kept feeling faster and faster because the software got faster: we have faster browsers, faster Java VMs, faster file systems (ext4 vs ext3), etc (I develop web and Android apps). On the other side a friend of mine with Windows just replaced her post 2006 desktop with a Core i7 one because Office was running too slow on her old machine. I told her a Corei5 would be more than enough but she knows that every 3 years her computer starts to be too slow for the latest version of Office (that's basically all she uses to work) so she always buys the latest greatest hardware. She's really surprised that with the kind of work I do I'm still with that old 2006 machine.
My idea is that power users tend to take care of their machines and select the right software so they can extract performances even from old hardware. Normal users usually are at the mercy of the dominant vendors and have to pay and pay and pay.
What could make me change my machine (excluding big hw failures) is some future application that I need to run that requires more RAM than I have (having to run too many virtual machines? or a windows 7-8 one?) or is not compatible with my hardware (some new OS version not playing well with my graphic card?) or the need of new hardware (we'll see what happens with the Windows 8 desktop touchscreens). And that's a pity because I won't find a new laptop of this size with a screen as tall as the one I'm using now.
fir autocompletes to firefox on my box.
web lets me choose between web2disk, webcamstudio, webcamstudio-x-install-vloopback (whatever the first and last one are) but if I wanted to bind web to firefox I would define a bash alias. web + RETURN and that's it, no need for autocompletion, and btw I also have opera and chromium which I use regularly but not as my main browsers.
Or maybe power users want to define their own user interface and bitch about anything that makes it more difficult to achieve. Unity is definitely further away than Gnome 2 from what I like to use. I tweaked the Gnome panels and applets to behave as I want but I can't see how I can do that with Unity. So no Unity for me, not cool enough, or vice versa.
Congratulations, an interesting journal. My question is about the format: why a PDF and not a blog? The advantages of a blog are: it lets you publish the papers as soon as they arrive and it attracts people to your server every day instead of a peak of hits once per month. You choose PDF so it must have some advantages that outweighs those of a blog (or less disadvantages) and I'd love to learn about them because I'm also in the process of making a similar decision. Thanks.
I don't think I'll need to dual boot it.
I'd love to carry my main machine with me in a smartphone form factor: my phone weights 116 g vs the 2.7 kg of my laptop and 1.1 kg of my netbook. I can already attach a mouse, a keyboard and USB pen drive to my phone, a Samsung Galaxy S2, and it can output full HD video. Unfortunately it runs Android and not Ubuntu which is the OS I use to work. If anybody fixes that it would already be much better than my netbook. With a better CPU, more RAM (1 GB now) and more storage (it ceils to 32 GB now) I will run Android apps in a VM. Maybe we'll even get hackintoshes for iOS (keep an eye on these guys). It won't take a long time for the top level smartphone CPUs to be as powerful as the one in my laptop, a Core 2 Duo T7200 from 2006. We're already heading to quad core 2 GHz processors. Storage and RAM could grow as well.
Anyway, what we'll need is dual-UI, one UI to use on the small touchscreen of the device, one to use on large external screens. At the moment the only Linux based UI that works well on a small screen is the Android one. Unity IMHO is fine only between 9" and 13", I'm not using it on my 15" laptop.
Overall I feel fairly optimistic but I don't expect to be able to get one of those machines in 5 years. The main hurdles are not technical but commercial: which company is going to sell us real computers when they can sell us smart phones with the same form factor and we're going to buy them anyway? I've got a laptop, a netbook and a smartphone instead of only one device: I made at least 3 companies happy instead of one. I bet on the force of competition :-)
Or the modern reduced height 13" laptop screens.
This is a site for geeks and a Debian tablet is definitely geekier than an iOS or an Android one.
Of course. Both cars and neutrinos can speed into tunnels between Switzerland and Italy so there must be a way.
Agreed, but it works in bicycle racing, and people race in bunches and teams there. Never heard of anybody tampering with the transponders. Your cars should arrive alone and if the transponder doesn't match the car you disqualify it.
Promoveatur ut amoveatur, promoting for removing.
Nice specs but a bit heavy and I don't like those keyboards, with out of axis spacebar and touchpad to accommodate a number pad (only because those reduced-height screens are so wide and they have to fill up the space) http://www.system76.com/product_images/gazelle-aec32d375de9c04.png If it were detached from the screen I would shift it to the right and that's telling.
I know, it's not just them and I won't find a laptop larger that 13" with a sane keyboard.
You're right, I didn't think of that. Anyway that doesn't solve the hardest part of the problem: how do you get traction for your OS if people can't install it as the host OS of their machines? We wouldn't have Linux even on the servers if all we could do was running it into virtual machines (not so common in the early '90s but you get the idea). TPM will lock us into the software a few companies want to sell us. Less choice and a more static world. Good for the incumbents, worse for anyone else.
I complete your answer: if the masses don't have an easy way to install the next open source OS, there won't be another open source OS. Bingo, if you are in the closed source business.
Suppose you are a Linus Torvalds some years in the future. How do you create your own OS if your PC only boots existing OSes and you don't work for a company that can buy or create non TC hardware?
Don't know, even php shines compared to that mess I saw in the examples. I'm a ZX81 old timer and I remember well that we had plenty of better languages available at those times on systems that were only a fraction of this one. Maybe its creators are nostalgic and want to inflict their mood on everybody.
It's only a matter of time but eventually Gnome 2 won't work anymore with new versions of libraries and Xservers. The only chance it has is somebody forking it and maintaining it but it's going to be a boring project, something you do only if they pay you. I say so even if I'd like to keep this Gnome 2 desktop I'm using right now unchanged for at least the next 10 years.
Not totally unusable but they made some bad decisions on fundamental issues of the GUI. I quickly revert them on any desktop I have to use that had the bad idea of copying OSX (Ubuntu global menu, icon docks, etc). You can't undo them on OSX, so I don't buy Apple.
I can't see any wide open desert out here.
Apple can do whatever they want with their commercial store. But I wish Jobs never thought of the concept of walled garden applied to computing. Walled gardens are harmful and people should not line up to get confined into them. If Jobs had stopped innovating when he got windows and mouses on the screens and desks of everybody (even if much of it was because he scared MS so much they had to copy what he got from Xerox) I would say he made a big contribution to humankind. He also basically invented the modern smartphone, so he was twice as great as many other famous inventors. But the innovation of the walled garden ruined it all. No computer scientist or engineer or programmer should welcome a cage being put around his/her favorite tool.
+1 insightful
Maybe it's this kind of attrition that consumes the fun, but maybe that's related to working for others for money all the day long and working for themselves in their spare time, which is little and has to be shared with a zillion of other things. So you end up delaying all the non essential activities and you discover there are a lot of them. Just look at the polish of the programs I deliver to my customers vs the one of the programs I only have to use myself.
Agreed, any puzzle game is lame compared to the puzzles we face when programming.
To contribute anecdotal information, it seems that programmers (sample size: one, me) love racing games and NetHack (actually a very big puzzle but so varied that it's hard to think of it as such). They spent some time playing sokoban, a much smaller puzzle. They rarely play programming related games with the exception of Core Wars back in the '80s. They think Rubik's Cube is cool but can't remember anymore the solution studied on a magazine 20+ years ago and they disdain sudoku. You don't play sudoku, that's computer work. If you really have to mess with it you program a computer to solve it (but it's NP-Complete).
I second your points. There are plenty of ebooks I'd buy if I knew I can read them on any device and I can convert them in any new format that will get popular until I die. I won't buy any as long as they are DRMed. Luckily, there are some legally free ebooks around and enough interesting ones (usually not what my friends read and recommend to me). As of 2011, paper still beats electrons for everything but for ease of transport.
Actually it looks like it's got on spec-parity with the Samsung Galaxy SII, give or take some software and a smaller screen (which might be a good or bad thing according to tastes). Apparently it's still the old thick iPhone 4 case, when all the leading Android phones got releases with a thinner case last Spring. I'm a little disappointed because an iPhone that doesn't clearly beat the competition could mean that the Android manufacturers will slow down their race to better features.
The single feature that could rehabilitate this iPhone is this Siri assistant, but It must be really good. It must be also really good at understanding languages other than American English. That could be a great feature or a great failure. I'll wait and see.
I didn't know that. Thank you.