You can get a 1080 projector and a 9 foot screen for a pretty reasonable price if you have room for a setup like that. I recently found a pretty nice sound bar made by a company I've never heard of before (Nakamichi.) If you don't mind about doubling the price of your setup, you can replace the 1080 projector with a 4K and have a theatre-quality home theatre. And setting things up like that seems to avoid all the smart TV fuckery. You need some space and good comfy chairs though.
Sure, my first job was on a SCO Xenix box running on a 286. We installed an Intel Aboveboard on it for another megabyte of RAM. I got the card and a loose handful of RAM chips and was told to get to it. Good times!
IIRC I got my first PC in '91 or '92. Prior to that I had some somewhat more esoteric machines. The system had 4 MB of RAM and a small (40 or 80 MB I think) hard drive. I initially installed OS/2 on it, and slackware a little later on. Couldn't run X11 on it, though -- it had a VGA card but the system just couldn't handle the load of graphics. It was a few years later when I finally upgraded to a system powerful enough to run X, and by then early Gnome, KDE and Enlightenment projects were getting underway. Although I don't remember the exact timeline, around the turn of the millenium or so Loki games was porting some popular games to Linux, you could kind of run Ultima Online either via a native client or early Wine, and people were actually started to get interested in Linux.
SCO was a complete UNIX for a PC, yes, but if you wanted all the stuff that makes UNIX UNIX, you had to spring for a fair bit of additional stuff. IIRC a C compiler and TCP/IP were both neighborhood of $1500, and I think I recall that they wanted $600 or something for nroff/troff. My first job was cheap so I ended up doing a software project for them with shell scripts and foxbase. I did get UUCP up and running on the machine for a while though.
And Sun and Oracle would not have built a smart phone in any event. Sun wouldn't have done it because everyone with any vision left the company when it went all ISO-Processy after they hit it big. The only people who were left by the time they went bankrupt were useless twatwaffles who would sit in their cubes all day boasting about how they were ISO blackbelts and were going to some important convention next month. And Oracle wouldn't have built one because the bottom line on consumer devices doesn't have enough digits in it to justify risking an R&D project. If they wanted to get into the smartphone market now, they could build a thing on top of Linux just like Google did, and that thing would have a pretty low bar of entry on the suckage to be better than the iPhone and Android interfaces today, but they won't. And if they did, the interface would be ass, just like every other thing Oracle makes.
It's not like we haven't seen this exact scenario play out before. SCO was in the same boat back when Linux came out. People started asking why they should drop 4 or 5 digits on SCO licenses when there was that awesome free software over there that did exactly the same thing, only better because the GUI didn't suck (IIRC SCO was some variant of CDE or something that looked like it, and the early gnome/kde/enlightenment projects all put it to shame.) So right now companies are asking, in ever increasing numbers, why they should deploy an Oracle database when they could just drop Postgres or MariaDB in, and the vast majority of those companies can absolutely get away with doing that. And in the same history-repeating-itself fashion, Oracle seems to be pinning their future hopes on copyright lawsuits. Now they have much more money than SCO did back in the day, so maybe they can afford a better lawyer. Or at the very least they probably won't die off as quickly as SCO did. Although every once in a while Zombie SCO rises from the dead and reminds us that it's still here, so maybe not.
In any event, if they had any actually good ideas, they'd just STFU and go build something cool, but they won't, because they are not cool and they never have been. At least Sun was cool for a while back in the '80's. Not Jurassic Park cool, but pretty cool nonetheless.
I have a vive in my house. Built a gaming right just for it. Also have a racing cockpit with a force feedback steering wheel and pedals. It's great with Project Cars and light enough that we can slide it back out of the way if we want to play one of the room-scale VR titles we have. It was much less expensive than a Ferrari, but makes for a unique gaming experience that amazes everyone who visits the house.
There still aren't a lot of worthwhile VR titles, but it does offer an amazingly unique experience. Currently the biggest complaints we have with the headset is the limited field of view and the wires connecting to the headset. We're keeping an eye out for a headset that's more comfortable, has a wider field of view and ideally also has wireless. Of the three, we're not holding our breath on wireless, but we are definitely planning to upgrade as soon as we find a headset we really like. I like a lot of what I see with the Vive Focus but might try to see it in action before we decide if we're going to buy one.
Dell's I9 laptop is fast, has an amazing video card, great monitor, great keyboard and plenty of ports on it. I can get it pre-loaded with Linux, 64 GB of RAM and a 2 TB SSD. I'm trying to think of a downside, can't really. I've never been a huge fan of Dell but if you look at their selection of machines past the Dell "My First Laptop" your employer issued you, some of their hardware is actually pretty good. Maybe having an Apple Logo on a laptop somehow makes it impossible to deliver a package like that, but I can definitely get everything I ask for in a Laptop.
That's right! Definitely not a reaper probe sent to investigate a budding space-faring civilization! And certainly no one with the technology to build an interstellar spacecraft would solve the problems of how long it takes to get anywhere in an interstellar spacecraft! Nothing to see here, move along!
Bah! You guys need to get on the LaTeX train! It's kind of a turd, but they've been polishing that turd for nearly as long as I've been alive, and it does make a beautiful document.
Seems like Google's gone off the deep end lately. Their search results have gone to shit, to the point where I'm getting more relevant results with bing or duckduckgo, they're pissing off all the YouTube content creators, they seem to be focusing on making the Android Platform useless and annoying and they're shutting down Google Plus after jamming it down our throats just a couple years ago. If I didn't know any better, I'd say they're trying to drive their customers away. And they're alienating a large chunk of their workforce with their projects supporting the military and authoritarian regimes. Should someone explain to them that "Make everyone hate you," really isn't a good business plan? Because the internet is starting to realize that Google is a disease, and it's really hard to come back from that point.
I used to run this on my home phone back in the day. I the Asterisk Open Source PBX system installed on my computer and a PSTN-to-SIP gateway plugged into my phone line. This allowed me to present a simple voice menu that none of the automated/cold callers ever seemed to make it through. For all a smartphone's "Smarts", I don't seem to be able to replicate this on one of them. Maybe I should just build a Raspberry Pi "phone" that only connects to wifi and uses that connection to monitor a VOIP line with Asterisk. I'm not sure the world's ready for a phone that's just a phone and doesn't try to track you or intrude on you with advertising every second of the day. Oh wait, that's what our old timey wired phones were.
Xeons tend to be more cores and slower, although the I9 is kind of blurring those distinctions. When I was shopping around for my gaming rig, I think the most cores I could find in an I7 were 6. You can get more cores on a xeon, but at a lower clock speed. As the clock speed and cores go up, the price also does, on what appears to be an exponential curve. So when I was speccing out my video processing machine at work, I ended up going with a dual-10-core-processor model with a clock speed kind of in the middle of the road. I think the per-processor price on those was neighborhood of 2 grand each, and the next step up was close to 5.
I'm currently considering replacing my desktop at home again, and I'm leaning toward getting a threadripper this time. The top end Intel is marginally faster (~10-15%) but the thread ripper is significantly less expensive. I do a lot of multi-threaded programming, so the idea of having a ton of cores to play with is enticing.
Whoopsie. And I think we were planning on eating all the insects once we ran out of higher mammals. Guess we'll just have to move directly to the soylent green phase.
I started out with cassette tapes on a TI 99/4A around 1983. A few years later, the Apple 2's (An assortment of//s, ][s and IIs as I recall) in my high school's computer lab had 5.25" disks. Somewhere along the way I also used reel-to-reel magtapes and 8" floppies. In my first real job, the 286 they'd just purchased for some client work had whopping 80MB drive in it, about the size of two large bricks and weighing about as much.
If I'd told my first boss that three decades later, we could store a terabyte on something the size of my pinky nail, he'd have laughed at me and accused me of making up the word "Terabyte."
"It is the Government's utmost responsibility to insure the continued functioning of the Government. In the event the Government is ever allowed to shut down, Shenanigans shall be declared, both houses of congress and the executive office shall be immediately disbanded and the current incumbents barred from participating in the federal government for life. New elections shall be held immediately. A fund shall be allocated and held in reserve for these elections."
Dell Precision, pre-load with Ubuntu. Reformat the Ubuntu that comes with it off it the moment it arrives and install... more Ubuntu. Probably. Or Xbuntu. Replace wayland with X11.org.
Specs, I7 or I9, 16 or 32 GB of RAM (You can do 64, but that's probably overkill,) maybe bump up the video card and spring for the 4K screen. With a young'un's eyesight, you could fit a dozen terminal sessions side by side. You can put up to a 2TB SSD in that if you're so inclined. The machine kind off puts the Fischer Price "My First Computer" Dell laptops I've received from employers to shame. It's also made me reconsider a grudge I've been carrying against Dell since the '90's, and my family usually carries grudges like that for multiple generations.
I've witnessed two accidents involving bikes and cars. Both times I'd lay fault on the guy on the bike and neither one of them was fortunately seriously injured, but it did kill the hell out of their bikes and ruin both their day and the guy in the car's day. I've also seen a motorcycle run of the road by a car that tried to side-swipe it. Given how inattentive drivers are now to even other cars, riding a bike out on the roads seems a wee bit too dangerous to me.
Oh, I'm pro-nuclear too, despite a fairly hippy upbringing. We understand all this a lot better than we did in the 1950's, but there's still a lot of '60's-era hysteria around it all. There should definitely be penalties for managing the plants as incompetently as these seem to have been. Establishing an understanding that there's more at stake for the companies in charge of them than profit if something goes wrong is a good precedent to set, I think.
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You can get a 1080 projector and a 9 foot screen for a pretty reasonable price if you have room for a setup like that. I recently found a pretty nice sound bar made by a company I've never heard of before (Nakamichi.) If you don't mind about doubling the price of your setup, you can replace the 1080 projector with a 4K and have a theatre-quality home theatre. And setting things up like that seems to avoid all the smart TV fuckery. You need some space and good comfy chairs though.
IIRC I got my first PC in '91 or '92. Prior to that I had some somewhat more esoteric machines. The system had 4 MB of RAM and a small (40 or 80 MB I think) hard drive. I initially installed OS/2 on it, and slackware a little later on. Couldn't run X11 on it, though -- it had a VGA card but the system just couldn't handle the load of graphics. It was a few years later when I finally upgraded to a system powerful enough to run X, and by then early Gnome, KDE and Enlightenment projects were getting underway. Although I don't remember the exact timeline, around the turn of the millenium or so Loki games was porting some popular games to Linux, you could kind of run Ultima Online either via a native client or early Wine, and people were actually started to get interested in Linux.
SCO was a complete UNIX for a PC, yes, but if you wanted all the stuff that makes UNIX UNIX, you had to spring for a fair bit of additional stuff. IIRC a C compiler and TCP/IP were both neighborhood of $1500, and I think I recall that they wanted $600 or something for nroff/troff. My first job was cheap so I ended up doing a software project for them with shell scripts and foxbase. I did get UUCP up and running on the machine for a while though.
It's not like we haven't seen this exact scenario play out before. SCO was in the same boat back when Linux came out. People started asking why they should drop 4 or 5 digits on SCO licenses when there was that awesome free software over there that did exactly the same thing, only better because the GUI didn't suck (IIRC SCO was some variant of CDE or something that looked like it, and the early gnome/kde/enlightenment projects all put it to shame.) So right now companies are asking, in ever increasing numbers, why they should deploy an Oracle database when they could just drop Postgres or MariaDB in, and the vast majority of those companies can absolutely get away with doing that. And in the same history-repeating-itself fashion, Oracle seems to be pinning their future hopes on copyright lawsuits. Now they have much more money than SCO did back in the day, so maybe they can afford a better lawyer. Or at the very least they probably won't die off as quickly as SCO did. Although every once in a while Zombie SCO rises from the dead and reminds us that it's still here, so maybe not.
In any event, if they had any actually good ideas, they'd just STFU and go build something cool, but they won't, because they are not cool and they never have been. At least Sun was cool for a while back in the '80's. Not Jurassic Park cool, but pretty cool nonetheless.
There still aren't a lot of worthwhile VR titles, but it does offer an amazingly unique experience. Currently the biggest complaints we have with the headset is the limited field of view and the wires connecting to the headset. We're keeping an eye out for a headset that's more comfortable, has a wider field of view and ideally also has wireless. Of the three, we're not holding our breath on wireless, but we are definitely planning to upgrade as soon as we find a headset we really like. I like a lot of what I see with the Vive Focus but might try to see it in action before we decide if we're going to buy one.
Dell's I9 laptop is fast, has an amazing video card, great monitor, great keyboard and plenty of ports on it. I can get it pre-loaded with Linux, 64 GB of RAM and a 2 TB SSD. I'm trying to think of a downside, can't really. I've never been a huge fan of Dell but if you look at their selection of machines past the Dell "My First Laptop" your employer issued you, some of their hardware is actually pretty good. Maybe having an Apple Logo on a laptop somehow makes it impossible to deliver a package like that, but I can definitely get everything I ask for in a Laptop.
Sure, just like the previous backup that the Civilization of Atlantis left there, which we haven't even begun to look for yet.
That's right! Definitely not a reaper probe sent to investigate a budding space-faring civilization! And certainly no one with the technology to build an interstellar spacecraft would solve the problems of how long it takes to get anywhere in an interstellar spacecraft! Nothing to see here, move along!
To be fair, western civilization does seem to be coughing up blood at the moment. I'm all for blaming the bees.
The shit Microsoft and IBM did seems a lot less bad than what Google's been up to recently. Perhaps it's time for a FTC inquiry?
Yeah, if they don't want tons of people pushing dislike buttons, perhaps they should consider posting more likable content.
Anti-vax rally sounds like a great place to pick up measles.
I see you have a used Gamestop to sell. I'm afraid I can only give you $1.50 in store credit for that.
Well time is weird stuff. How do you know you're perceiving it "correctly"? You're soaking in it.
Yeah, but you can always just install a tabbed window manager and just tab between your terminal sessions instead of clicking on them! :-P
Bah! You guys need to get on the LaTeX train! It's kind of a turd, but they've been polishing that turd for nearly as long as I've been alive, and it does make a beautiful document.
Seems like Google's gone off the deep end lately. Their search results have gone to shit, to the point where I'm getting more relevant results with bing or duckduckgo, they're pissing off all the YouTube content creators, they seem to be focusing on making the Android Platform useless and annoying and they're shutting down Google Plus after jamming it down our throats just a couple years ago. If I didn't know any better, I'd say they're trying to drive their customers away. And they're alienating a large chunk of their workforce with their projects supporting the military and authoritarian regimes. Should someone explain to them that "Make everyone hate you," really isn't a good business plan? Because the internet is starting to realize that Google is a disease, and it's really hard to come back from that point.
I used to run this on my home phone back in the day. I the Asterisk Open Source PBX system installed on my computer and a PSTN-to-SIP gateway plugged into my phone line. This allowed me to present a simple voice menu that none of the automated/cold callers ever seemed to make it through. For all a smartphone's "Smarts", I don't seem to be able to replicate this on one of them. Maybe I should just build a Raspberry Pi "phone" that only connects to wifi and uses that connection to monitor a VOIP line with Asterisk. I'm not sure the world's ready for a phone that's just a phone and doesn't try to track you or intrude on you with advertising every second of the day. Oh wait, that's what our old timey wired phones were.
I'm currently considering replacing my desktop at home again, and I'm leaning toward getting a threadripper this time. The top end Intel is marginally faster (~10-15%) but the thread ripper is significantly less expensive. I do a lot of multi-threaded programming, so the idea of having a ton of cores to play with is enticing.
Whoopsie. And I think we were planning on eating all the insects once we ran out of higher mammals. Guess we'll just have to move directly to the soylent green phase.
If I'd told my first boss that three decades later, we could store a terabyte on something the size of my pinky nail, he'd have laughed at me and accused me of making up the word "Terabyte."
"It is the Government's utmost responsibility to insure the continued functioning of the Government. In the event the Government is ever allowed to shut down, Shenanigans shall be declared, both houses of congress and the executive office shall be immediately disbanded and the current incumbents barred from participating in the federal government for life. New elections shall be held immediately. A fund shall be allocated and held in reserve for these elections."
Specs, I7 or I9, 16 or 32 GB of RAM (You can do 64, but that's probably overkill,) maybe bump up the video card and spring for the 4K screen. With a young'un's eyesight, you could fit a dozen terminal sessions side by side. You can put up to a 2TB SSD in that if you're so inclined. The machine kind off puts the Fischer Price "My First Computer" Dell laptops I've received from employers to shame. It's also made me reconsider a grudge I've been carrying against Dell since the '90's, and my family usually carries grudges like that for multiple generations.
I've witnessed two accidents involving bikes and cars. Both times I'd lay fault on the guy on the bike and neither one of them was fortunately seriously injured, but it did kill the hell out of their bikes and ruin both their day and the guy in the car's day. I've also seen a motorcycle run of the road by a car that tried to side-swipe it. Given how inattentive drivers are now to even other cars, riding a bike out on the roads seems a wee bit too dangerous to me.
Oh, I'm pro-nuclear too, despite a fairly hippy upbringing. We understand all this a lot better than we did in the 1950's, but there's still a lot of '60's-era hysteria around it all. There should definitely be penalties for managing the plants as incompetently as these seem to have been. Establishing an understanding that there's more at stake for the companies in charge of them than profit if something goes wrong is a good precedent to set, I think.
Except the guys who predicted the tsunami back in 2002, when they told you the place was vulnerable to a tsunami. Which they have a lot of in Japan.