You can dream all you want, but the PC market IS dying. It will escape into the high end, which worked really well for the Vax and the Mini's and the Unix workstations...
On the positive side, you're working with graphics and you are likely having to put lots of memory into your PC's to make them decently fast. The power consumption and cost of both GPU's and memory is going down rapidly right now, so expect to see some insanely powerful tablets for graphics work in the coming years. 3D in high resolution could easily become mainstream and that will demand GPU's powerful enough to make any CAD user happy.
CPU power on the other hand will probably not be totally satisfactory for your use. Hopefully some of the calculations can be moved to the GPU or into the Cloud or something.
In fact, flip the radio on, on a mainstream rock channel. Same tunes now as in 2008, 2005, and 2000.
You can make the same complaint about mainstream classical channels and mainstream jazz channels (although the latter can be hard to find...) Mainstream rock is the past.
There is still plenty of good rock being created, it just rarely tops the charts. In fact, there is an incredible amount of new music being made in all sorts of genres away from the mainstream. However, the sheer variety makes it difficult for any of it the get mainstream appeal, and most of it offends the ears of a significant part of the population. Therefore Autotune rules the air waves -- most people don't mind that running in the background.
My App costs 5 shells. So if two people have the App I should have made 10 shells. Person C makes a new App from scratch with the same basic functionality. If person B bought the App from C instead of my App, person B's actions cause me to have 5 shells instead of 10. I have 5 shells less than I should have, by the doing of person B. Like the orange: stealing.
And true enough, "IP" covers that too, with software patents and design patents. The greed of "IP" holders is endless.
Whole sale copying of an entire piece work is absolutely not fair usage. Back ups are for personal use for your own property.
Says who? In Denmark it was legal to make digital copies of borrowed originals for private use until 2003. Then the law was changed, and now it isn't legal any more. Copies made before the law was changed are still legal. Also, analog copies are legal, no matter how good your analog storage is.
"Absolutely not" is such a strong statement for something which varies country-by-country and government-by-government.
You know what is the far most biggest problem to the environment? It is not AGW, it is the exponential population growth. There are already several billion too many of us.
Population growth is 1% a year and falling. If humanity cannot increase efficiency by 1% a year, we deserve to die out. It is a non-problem.
Saying "population growth" is just another excuse to blame the third world, which doesn't contribute anything of significance to the problem.
Fair enough, that is physically possible. However, if we had the ability to put such enormous structures into space, it would be comparatively easy to synthesize "fossil" fuel from space solar and cut CO2 emissions to zero. Alas, we don't.
It's a bit funny that you use Raspberry Pi as an example. After all, it has code to prevent certain parts of its firmware from running unless unlocked by a license key. You cannot even boot the thing without loading proprietary firmware doing who-knows-what.
You would shade an awful lot more than just Antarctica with that proposal. Making one satellite which could do this is hard enough, and you want 150 of them.
How do you propose placing orbiting shades over Antarctica? Maybe at the same time you could put a geostationary satellite over each pole, they would be really handy for communications.
Yes, I don't mean 1000BASE-TX. I am convinced that it is possible to do 1Gbps over 2 pairs of category 5 cabling with the electronics we have today. VDSL2 can do 200Mbps on one pair of category 3, category 5 has more than 5 times as much bandwidth available. The power requirements for the DSP might still be too high for laptops (I bet the DSPs in most 10GBASE-T-switches could do it though).
It takes too long to move the hand off the keyboard to use the mouse. What you gain in precision is only worth it if you are doing multiple clicks in a row without using the keyboard in between.
If you're stuck at 100Mbps, why bother with wired ethernet at all?
Yes I know the answer, needing to access management networks which aren't reachable through Wifi. I need that too. I also need a serial port for console access. However, there is no longer a mass market for 100Mbps ethernet or serial ports on laptops.
If we are going to do RJ-11, it would make more sense to define a standard for 1Gbps over 2 pairs. It would be easy to do with the electronics available today.
I've complained about ridiculously low DPI for more than a decade. Sun black-and-white CRT's from the early 90's had acceptable resolution and sharpness (most CRT's are terribly blurry when set for useful resolutions), but at 20kg they made notebooks a bit unwieldy. Also, colour can be useful.
You can't do "real" colour. If you set a TV camera for outdoor light and bring it inside, are the weird yellow colours somehow more real? Even though you never notice that everything is weirdly yellow when you are inside? What about if you do the opposite and see everything in blue?
To do it "right" you would need to recreate the whole environment with ambient light and all, to give your brain the chance to run its colour correction. Or just go there and see for yourself.
The relationship between Apple and the GCC project has been rather strained. Much like the Webkit situation really, except Apple is moving to LLVM to get rid of GCC.
Drivers ARE the problem. nVidia wants to run the whole graphics driver show with no interference from the kernel. However, this laptop (and many others this year) has TWO video cards which can drive the same display. Two drivers communicating is reasonably easy if they both let the kernel decide when they each get to play. Alas, no such luck with nVidia.
Reading PDF's is vastly nicer on a high DPI screen. A Retina display would mean being able to have a typical reference PDF page made for A4 open on one side while doing work on the other side. My eyes are good, but the pixels are too damn large right now.
I don't want a larger display, 17" notebooks are unwieldy.
Because the Macbook Pro Retina is the only laptop in the world with comparable specifications. Also, while the architecture is somewhat oddball and the manufacturer evil, Macs are reasonably popular and there are very few models to choose from. Therefore Linux support tends to end up quite good, simply because it is likely that some kernel hacker cares about the model you bought. In addition, "BIOS" upgrades for Macs are few, which makes things easier.
In comparison, a random Acer has a much more standard architecture, but in all likelihood you are one of less than 10 Linux users in the world who use that particular model. If something model-specific does not work and you cannot fix it yourself, it will likely not get fixed.
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You can dream all you want, but the PC market IS dying. It will escape into the high end, which worked really well for the Vax and the Mini's and the Unix workstations...
On the positive side, you're working with graphics and you are likely having to put lots of memory into your PC's to make them decently fast. The power consumption and cost of both GPU's and memory is going down rapidly right now, so expect to see some insanely powerful tablets for graphics work in the coming years. 3D in high resolution could easily become mainstream and that will demand GPU's powerful enough to make any CAD user happy.
CPU power on the other hand will probably not be totally satisfactory for your use. Hopefully some of the calculations can be moved to the GPU or into the Cloud or something.
In fact, flip the radio on, on a mainstream rock channel. Same tunes now as in 2008, 2005, and 2000.
You can make the same complaint about mainstream classical channels and mainstream jazz channels (although the latter can be hard to find...) Mainstream rock is the past.
There is still plenty of good rock being created, it just rarely tops the charts. In fact, there is an incredible amount of new music being made in all sorts of genres away from the mainstream. However, the sheer variety makes it difficult for any of it the get mainstream appeal, and most of it offends the ears of a significant part of the population. Therefore Autotune rules the air waves -- most people don't mind that running in the background.
Just forget about broadcast radio.
My App costs 5 shells. So if two people have the App I should have made 10 shells. Person C makes a new App from scratch with the same basic functionality.
If person B bought the App from C instead of my App, person B's actions cause me to have 5 shells instead of 10.
I have 5 shells less than I should have, by the doing of person B.
Like the orange: stealing.
And true enough, "IP" covers that too, with software patents and design patents. The greed of "IP" holders is endless.
Fraud requires some kind of deception though. Copyright infringement is rarely fraud.
Whole sale copying of an entire piece work is absolutely not fair usage. Back ups are for personal use for your own property.
Says who? In Denmark it was legal to make digital copies of borrowed originals for private use until 2003. Then the law was changed, and now it isn't legal any more. Copies made before the law was changed are still legal. Also, analog copies are legal, no matter how good your analog storage is.
"Absolutely not" is such a strong statement for something which varies country-by-country and government-by-government.
You know what is the far most biggest problem to the environment? It is not AGW, it is the exponential population growth. There are already several billion too many of us.
Population growth is 1% a year and falling. If humanity cannot increase efficiency by 1% a year, we deserve to die out. It is a non-problem.
Saying "population growth" is just another excuse to blame the third world, which doesn't contribute anything of significance to the problem.
World population growth is currently 1% a year. If humanity cannot get 1% better at growing food every year, we deserve to die out.
Growth rate is falling, so it will get even easier in the future.
Fair enough, that is physically possible. However, if we had the ability to put such enormous structures into space, it would be comparatively easy to synthesize "fossil" fuel from space solar and cut CO2 emissions to zero. Alas, we don't.
If you can factor really large prime numbers, you are a long way to breaking private/public-key encryption.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." From Bill Gates: "The Road Ahead".
There is no technical problem with implementing a system where the owner of the machine has the root key. That gives you all 3.
It's a bit funny that you use Raspberry Pi as an example. After all, it has code to prevent certain parts of its firmware from running unless unlocked by a license key. You cannot even boot the thing without loading proprietary firmware doing who-knows-what.
(Disclaimer, I own one)
You would shade an awful lot more than just Antarctica with that proposal. Making one satellite which could do this is hard enough, and you want 150 of them.
How do you propose placing orbiting shades over Antarctica? Maybe at the same time you could put a geostationary satellite over each pole, they would be really handy for communications.
It is quite amusing to hear Lennart talk about user experience driving everything in the lower level stacks.
man systemctl and weep.
Yes, I don't mean 1000BASE-TX. I am convinced that it is possible to do 1Gbps over 2 pairs of category 5 cabling with the electronics we have today. VDSL2 can do 200Mbps on one pair of category 3, category 5 has more than 5 times as much bandwidth available. The power requirements for the DSP might still be too high for laptops (I bet the DSPs in most 10GBASE-T-switches could do it though).
It takes too long to move the hand off the keyboard to use the mouse. What you gain in precision is only worth it if you are doing multiple clicks in a row without using the keyboard in between.
If you're stuck at 100Mbps, why bother with wired ethernet at all?
Yes I know the answer, needing to access management networks which aren't reachable through Wifi. I need that too. I also need a serial port for console access. However, there is no longer a mass market for 100Mbps ethernet or serial ports on laptops.
If we are going to do RJ-11, it would make more sense to define a standard for 1Gbps over 2 pairs. It would be easy to do with the electronics available today.
I've complained about ridiculously low DPI for more than a decade. Sun black-and-white CRT's from the early 90's had acceptable resolution and sharpness (most CRT's are terribly blurry when set for useful resolutions), but at 20kg they made notebooks a bit unwieldy. Also, colour can be useful.
You can't do "real" colour. If you set a TV camera for outdoor light and bring it inside, are the weird yellow colours somehow more real? Even though you never notice that everything is weirdly yellow when you are inside? What about if you do the opposite and see everything in blue?
To do it "right" you would need to recreate the whole environment with ambient light and all, to give your brain the chance to run its colour correction. Or just go there and see for yourself.
The relationship between Apple and the GCC project has been rather strained. Much like the Webkit situation really, except Apple is moving to LLVM to get rid of GCC.
Drivers ARE the problem. nVidia wants to run the whole graphics driver show with no interference from the kernel. However, this laptop (and many others this year) has TWO video cards which can drive the same display. Two drivers communicating is reasonably easy if they both let the kernel decide when they each get to play. Alas, no such luck with nVidia.
so it's not like there is anything one is missing - except X11.
In other words, practically everything is missing.
And yes you can run X11 on a Mac. That will make you install Linux real fast.
Reading PDF's is vastly nicer on a high DPI screen. A Retina display would mean being able to have a typical reference PDF page made for A4 open on one side while doing work on the other side. My eyes are good, but the pixels are too damn large right now.
I don't want a larger display, 17" notebooks are unwieldy.
You don't get any more on screen with a Retina display because most stuff is scaled.
That may be true on Mac OS X, but this article is about running Linux. You can certainly make web pages show smaller text in Linux.
Because the Macbook Pro Retina is the only laptop in the world with comparable specifications. Also, while the architecture is somewhat oddball and the manufacturer evil, Macs are reasonably popular and there are very few models to choose from. Therefore Linux support tends to end up quite good, simply because it is likely that some kernel hacker cares about the model you bought. In addition, "BIOS" upgrades for Macs are few, which makes things easier.
In comparison, a random Acer has a much more standard architecture, but in all likelihood you are one of less than 10 Linux users in the world who use that particular model. If something model-specific does not work and you cannot fix it yourself, it will likely not get fixed.