Ubuntu's default desktop, you know the one everyone hates, yeah, that one, does a reasonable job of scaling for 4K out of the box, no fiddling required, since 14.04.
As for 4K monitors - work supplied me with a notebook with a 4K built-in screen, then when they said "get whatever you want for your desktop monitor...." In a way, I shot myself in the foot there, 1920x1080 is all the resolution my eyes "need" though 4K does look nicer, in those situations where it's useable at all. Oh, and I didn't really splurge that much, my 4K 30" (I think, maybe 28, been awhile now) was in the $700 range. My co-workers who were "being frugal" and getting 2 1080p monitors and a special stand to hold them were spending more.
Much of KDE also runs in Windows (KDEwin), not sure if that applies to Konqueror. There were a couple of KDE tools I used to use in my Windows desktops, but since I went away from Kubuntu, my KDEwin use has also faded.
I don't know that maintaining a web browser in the face of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera and the rest makes any sense?
Also, a standalone mail client? I haven't used one of those in nearly 5 years now. So, do I care that it hasn't updated? Do its users want it to become more like Outlook? I think probably not.
My gripe with KDE the last time I tried to use it was lack of font scaling support for 4K screens... I assume that KDE5 is addressing that, but how well? Next time I set up a desktop I might try it, but for now I'm happy enough with what comes "out of the box" with Ubuntu, and was unhappy enough with the last Kubuntu I tried that I've left KDE to go grow up some.
I hope it does continue to improve, I used to really prefer KDE to Gnome.
2005 I had an engineer ask me about "switching to Linux" - I explained that all the usual apps are available, except Autocad, but they're open source versions with slight variations in capability. He commented back "so, I'd have to learn new names for Word, Photoshop, and all that?" "Yep, that's how it's done." "Well, I guess that's more learning curve than I'm really ready for."
Learning ANYTHING different is more learning curve than most people are ready for. They have to use Windows on at least some of their work tasks, so they just don't want to bother with having things work differently in other situations.
It's not that Linux is better, or worse, it's different, that's enough to kill it.
Microsoft isn't special this way, Apple did the same thing to the original iPad, within 3 years of release it was worthless, thanks to software "upgrades."
My atom based netbook wouldn't even run XP tolerably well.
They're not super speedy, but they were competitive with decent systems from a year or two before they came out - when outfitted with XP SP2... as SP2 got "security patches" over the years, they devolved into useless delay machines. If you re-install XP from the discs that came with the (disc-player-less) systems, they'll be restored to their 2006 performance levels.
My wife's new notebook lost Miracast capability with the 8/12/16 Windows Security update. Miracast worked fine out of the box for several months, suddenly stopped for no apparent reason, checked update logs, 8/12/16 was the latest, unapplied it, Miracast is back. Windows 10 Home - no (easy) options to suppress automatic updates. Hurray for progress. They killed the Atom based Netbook / Nettop generation of PCs with updates to XP, too.
MCI made major inroads into AT&T's business, building line of sight microwave towers all over the place - lasted for about 20 years before the tech was obsoleted, by fiber I think.
Problem with data rates like this LOS, is the loss from raindrops, birds, etc. If the signal spreads and multipaths too much, the data rate will have to drop.
All good points - it's not just finding something that looks like an axe and starting chopping... that list of tree-felling equipment is rather long and not easy to come by during times of short supplies.
I thought I was pretty good at felling trees with my chainsaws & rope, the first 10 or so that I took down were all "easy lies" they wanted to fall where I wanted them to fall. The last big one I took down was leaning toward the house (had already dropped a major chunk of canopy during a storm and put a hole in the roof) - I roped it off and went to work chopping, when it let go, it went not where I was pulling it to, but straight sideways - landed between a bench and a big clay pot, less than 6 inches clearance on either side, zero damage... all is well that ends well, but that was a rather humbling experience after so many trees falling exactly where I wanted them to.
These fools were sitting on a high water table, maybe 15' of head required to get it out, the wells themselves may go down to 200', but it's the final lift that counts. We have a well that's 170' deep, but all we have to do is open the valve and it flows - about 11 months of the year. We've got shallow pumps for the other month.
Depends on how much "to shit" you are preparing for. Hurricanes happen, and that can result in anywhere from a couple of days to a few months of "camping in your own home" afterwards. I doubt we'll all be hunting Pokemon one day and playing Mad Max in real life the next, it's probably going to be a bunch of little shocks that bring civilization down, bit by bit. And, the less civilization we've got, the longer it will take to recover from disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, floods, guys at the electrical sub-station screwing up and blowing the grid, etc.
If the last time you swung an axe you were 35, and now you're doing it at age 55, without decent sleep the night before, slightly hungry, and pre-occupied with other things while you're trying to get the wood split... it becomes a very different thing. Compound that with the risk of injury being much higher due to lack of available medical care...
If you had just split a half-dozen logs last month, you'll know better your limits of exhaustion, technique to back up the log while holding it at a good height for cutting, how much to worry/not about sharpening the axe, whether an axe is the right tool for this job or maybe a 6lb maul works better on this kind of wood, etc. etc.
The water thing I personally experienced - after a Hurricane, my uncle pulled out his old pitcher pump and screwed it onto the wellhead - easy access drinking water. Literally thousands of nearby homes had no clue how to do that, even if they had a pitcher pump, which they didn't. Most of them, given a pump and a clue of what it's for, still wouldn't have known where to find their well head, and when they did find it, would have had to obtain extra plumbing bits to get it hooked up. If they had bothered to do a little bit of post-catastrophe prep, they wouldn't have had to wait for the National Guard to arrive with water for them to drink. Of course, half these idiots didn't realize that they had 40 gallons of clean water in their heater tank, either... and with no electricity, getting word around to them about that was basically impossible.
And that's kind of my point. In theory: you swing the axe, the log splits... if you haven't done that in two decades, you might be shocked at how little wood you can actually split with an axe - maybe you need a wedge and sledge, or better: hydraulic assistance. Then there's the whole: are you actually mentally fit to wield an axe for a couple hours of heavy labor? Most people get stupid when they're exhausted, and if you're stupid when you swing that axe with all your might, things might get ugly.
Chopping your own wood is a valuable skill - as is accessing safe drinking water when the electricity cuts out. Not saying that people should live this way daily, but keeping the skills available is actually a good thing. If you haven't chopped wood in 20 years, then suddenly need to do so, you might find that there's more to it than finding and swinging an axe.
Around here it's not the quality of the road surface that triggers construction projects, it's growth in traffic volume - growth triggers major road projects every 10-15 years in most Florida cities. Basic road surfacing tends to last quite a bit longer than that, most places, unless they didn't do a decent job with the road bed.
RFID is superfluous, the automatic plate readers work quite well... of course, some places that employ these readers think that they should collect a dollar a minute from you for using their road:
Let's do it (basic income), but simultaneously eliminate SNAP, SSI (not social security that you pay into, you get SSI even if you never worked), and all the other need based, government administrated programs. If we just gave SSI level income to everyone, (and took it back in taxes when you get above poverty level - whatever that means), literally billions of administrative costs could be saved - and those bureaucrats could live on: cha ching, basic income, until they learn a real skill, if they're able to do anything other than say "no."
So, your reasoning is--don't try to fix things, better the devil you know?
No, do try to fix things, but often better the devil you know than simple unknown chaos.
I'd be in favor of basic income, sufficient per-capita to afford rent and food in the boonies, and abolish all the special crawl up your business requirements of disability and need based government assistance. Every citizen starts with a monthly check they can use for whatever needs, vices, etc. they choose. Money earned on top of that is tax free to a point somewhere above poverty, whatever that is, and then taxed at a flat percentage of anything beyond that, with various tax reduction incentives available to keep the lawmakers busy trading pork.
Where it really needs to change is the structure that allows corporations to shelter billions offshore legally tax free, and the various tax reduction incentives should not balloon up to a point where Warren Buffet pays a lower percentage of his income in taxes than his secretary does. So, we just need the lawmakers to shift the tax burden off of the majority of their electorate and put it on the rich and powerful. Easy peasy, should have that knocked out by June of 2017, what else can the incoming group of lawmakers do for us after that?
No, but it takes power away from the cunts who abuse it.
And lets new cunts abuse it in new, unpredictable, ways. Part of the beauty of "the establishment" is that they have established predicted patterns of behavior - it's not the best imaginable scenario, but it's certainly easy to imagine worse ones.
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Ubuntu's default desktop, you know the one everyone hates, yeah, that one, does a reasonable job of scaling for 4K out of the box, no fiddling required, since 14.04.
As for 4K monitors - work supplied me with a notebook with a 4K built-in screen, then when they said "get whatever you want for your desktop monitor...." In a way, I shot myself in the foot there, 1920x1080 is all the resolution my eyes "need" though 4K does look nicer, in those situations where it's useable at all. Oh, and I didn't really splurge that much, my 4K 30" (I think, maybe 28, been awhile now) was in the $700 range. My co-workers who were "being frugal" and getting 2 1080p monitors and a special stand to hold them were spending more.
Much of KDE also runs in Windows (KDEwin), not sure if that applies to Konqueror. There were a couple of KDE tools I used to use in my Windows desktops, but since I went away from Kubuntu, my KDEwin use has also faded.
Good thing they're working on KDE5, then.
I don't know that maintaining a web browser in the face of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera and the rest makes any sense?
Also, a standalone mail client? I haven't used one of those in nearly 5 years now. So, do I care that it hasn't updated? Do its users want it to become more like Outlook? I think probably not.
My gripe with KDE the last time I tried to use it was lack of font scaling support for 4K screens... I assume that KDE5 is addressing that, but how well? Next time I set up a desktop I might try it, but for now I'm happy enough with what comes "out of the box" with Ubuntu, and was unhappy enough with the last Kubuntu I tried that I've left KDE to go grow up some.
I hope it does continue to improve, I used to really prefer KDE to Gnome.
2005 I had an engineer ask me about "switching to Linux" - I explained that all the usual apps are available, except Autocad, but they're open source versions with slight variations in capability. He commented back "so, I'd have to learn new names for Word, Photoshop, and all that?" "Yep, that's how it's done." "Well, I guess that's more learning curve than I'm really ready for."
Learning ANYTHING different is more learning curve than most people are ready for. They have to use Windows on at least some of their work tasks, so they just don't want to bother with having things work differently in other situations.
It's not that Linux is better, or worse, it's different, that's enough to kill it.
Microsoft isn't special this way, Apple did the same thing to the original iPad, within 3 years of release it was worthless, thanks to software "upgrades."
My atom based netbook wouldn't even run XP tolerably well.
They're not super speedy, but they were competitive with decent systems from a year or two before they came out - when outfitted with XP SP2... as SP2 got "security patches" over the years, they devolved into useless delay machines. If you re-install XP from the discs that came with the (disc-player-less) systems, they'll be restored to their 2006 performance levels.
My wife's new notebook lost Miracast capability with the 8/12/16 Windows Security update. Miracast worked fine out of the box for several months, suddenly stopped for no apparent reason, checked update logs, 8/12/16 was the latest, unapplied it, Miracast is back. Windows 10 Home - no (easy) options to suppress automatic updates. Hurray for progress. They killed the Atom based Netbook / Nettop generation of PCs with updates to XP, too.
MCI made major inroads into AT&T's business, building line of sight microwave towers all over the place - lasted for about 20 years before the tech was obsoleted, by fiber I think.
Problem with data rates like this LOS, is the loss from raindrops, birds, etc. If the signal spreads and multipaths too much, the data rate will have to drop.
All good points - it's not just finding something that looks like an axe and starting chopping... that list of tree-felling equipment is rather long and not easy to come by during times of short supplies.
I thought I was pretty good at felling trees with my chainsaws & rope, the first 10 or so that I took down were all "easy lies" they wanted to fall where I wanted them to fall. The last big one I took down was leaning toward the house (had already dropped a major chunk of canopy during a storm and put a hole in the roof) - I roped it off and went to work chopping, when it let go, it went not where I was pulling it to, but straight sideways - landed between a bench and a big clay pot, less than 6 inches clearance on either side, zero damage... all is well that ends well, but that was a rather humbling experience after so many trees falling exactly where I wanted them to.
I guess the points are:
1. did you duplicate this bowling ball / axe demonstration for yourself?
2. do you even know where to lay hands on an axe to try with?
3. have you extended this demonstration to use on wood?
4. wood that you can collect yourself (not purchased at a store?)
when you try any of these things, you'll usually find that DIY doesn't work the first try like it does on YouTube.
It's not completely developed yet, but Tox is usable, video and text. It's not bulletproof security, but can't be worse than Skype.
These fools were sitting on a high water table, maybe 15' of head required to get it out, the wells themselves may go down to 200', but it's the final lift that counts. We have a well that's 170' deep, but all we have to do is open the valve and it flows - about 11 months of the year. We've got shallow pumps for the other month.
Depends on how much "to shit" you are preparing for. Hurricanes happen, and that can result in anywhere from a couple of days to a few months of "camping in your own home" afterwards. I doubt we'll all be hunting Pokemon one day and playing Mad Max in real life the next, it's probably going to be a bunch of little shocks that bring civilization down, bit by bit. And, the less civilization we've got, the longer it will take to recover from disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, floods, guys at the electrical sub-station screwing up and blowing the grid, etc.
If the last time you swung an axe you were 35, and now you're doing it at age 55, without decent sleep the night before, slightly hungry, and pre-occupied with other things while you're trying to get the wood split... it becomes a very different thing. Compound that with the risk of injury being much higher due to lack of available medical care...
If you had just split a half-dozen logs last month, you'll know better your limits of exhaustion, technique to back up the log while holding it at a good height for cutting, how much to worry/not about sharpening the axe, whether an axe is the right tool for this job or maybe a 6lb maul works better on this kind of wood, etc. etc.
The water thing I personally experienced - after a Hurricane, my uncle pulled out his old pitcher pump and screwed it onto the wellhead - easy access drinking water. Literally thousands of nearby homes had no clue how to do that, even if they had a pitcher pump, which they didn't. Most of them, given a pump and a clue of what it's for, still wouldn't have known where to find their well head, and when they did find it, would have had to obtain extra plumbing bits to get it hooked up. If they had bothered to do a little bit of post-catastrophe prep, they wouldn't have had to wait for the National Guard to arrive with water for them to drink. Of course, half these idiots didn't realize that they had 40 gallons of clean water in their heater tank, either... and with no electricity, getting word around to them about that was basically impossible.
And that's kind of my point. In theory: you swing the axe, the log splits... if you haven't done that in two decades, you might be shocked at how little wood you can actually split with an axe - maybe you need a wedge and sledge, or better: hydraulic assistance. Then there's the whole: are you actually mentally fit to wield an axe for a couple hours of heavy labor? Most people get stupid when they're exhausted, and if you're stupid when you swing that axe with all your might, things might get ugly.
Chopping your own wood is a valuable skill - as is accessing safe drinking water when the electricity cuts out. Not saying that people should live this way daily, but keeping the skills available is actually a good thing. If you haven't chopped wood in 20 years, then suddenly need to do so, you might find that there's more to it than finding and swinging an axe.
Beep Boooooop.
Around here it's not the quality of the road surface that triggers construction projects, it's growth in traffic volume - growth triggers major road projects every 10-15 years in most Florida cities. Basic road surfacing tends to last quite a bit longer than that, most places, unless they didn't do a decent job with the road bed.
RFID is superfluous, the automatic plate readers work quite well... of course, some places that employ these readers think that they should collect a dollar a minute from you for using their road:
https://www.expresstoll.com/Pa...
Let's do it (basic income), but simultaneously eliminate SNAP, SSI (not social security that you pay into, you get SSI even if you never worked), and all the other need based, government administrated programs. If we just gave SSI level income to everyone, (and took it back in taxes when you get above poverty level - whatever that means), literally billions of administrative costs could be saved - and those bureaucrats could live on: cha ching, basic income, until they learn a real skill, if they're able to do anything other than say "no."
So, your reasoning is--don't try to fix things, better the devil you know?
No, do try to fix things, but often better the devil you know than simple unknown chaos.
I'd be in favor of basic income, sufficient per-capita to afford rent and food in the boonies, and abolish all the special crawl up your business requirements of disability and need based government assistance. Every citizen starts with a monthly check they can use for whatever needs, vices, etc. they choose. Money earned on top of that is tax free to a point somewhere above poverty, whatever that is, and then taxed at a flat percentage of anything beyond that, with various tax reduction incentives available to keep the lawmakers busy trading pork.
Where it really needs to change is the structure that allows corporations to shelter billions offshore legally tax free, and the various tax reduction incentives should not balloon up to a point where Warren Buffet pays a lower percentage of his income in taxes than his secretary does. So, we just need the lawmakers to shift the tax burden off of the majority of their electorate and put it on the rich and powerful. Easy peasy, should have that knocked out by June of 2017, what else can the incoming group of lawmakers do for us after that?
Redistributing wealth doesn't create resources.
No, but it takes power away from the cunts who abuse it.
And lets new cunts abuse it in new, unpredictable, ways. Part of the beauty of "the establishment" is that they have established predicted patterns of behavior - it's not the best imaginable scenario, but it's certainly easy to imagine worse ones.
Redistributing wealth doesn't create resources.
If we all got $1M USD tomorrow, the inflation would be... unprecedented.