Posted on 09/02/2013 12:13:08 PM PDT by LibWhacker
My own personal computer was 8 years old before I "replaced" it. It still did everything I needed it to do, but not all the things I wanted it to do, primarily because the motherboard was limited to 4gb of memory. Built new computer myself, 8 cores, 32gb of memory and it's a beast. It now does everything I want it to, but is also at the same time being supplanted by the various tablets I have (Apple and Droid.)
Truth is, for most folks, using their smartphone or a tablet is now "good enough" for what they want to do. The "heavy lifting" of content creation may sill require a laptop or desktop (whatever the personal preference...) but even those days are becoming numbered with 7-8" tablets starting to fill those voids.
I now typically only touch my desktop PC when I need to do something more than check email, casual browsing, or watching a movie on my tablet/smart TV. My desktop is now pretty much limited to content creation and my amateur radio stuff -- and even that's starting to move to tablets. I can turn on, remote control, talk/listen and turn off my ham radio rig via my tablet. Granted, my ham radio righ has to be connected to (you guessed it) my desktop PC in order to make that happen.
I did that 30 years ago on an old System 34
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I did that 35+ years ago on a much older IBM 3031-AP running CMS (predecessor to “VM”) with “PROFS” as the mail client (predecessor to “outlook”).
I once thought of solar driftdriver, and thought so much that I added some relevant courses to my college curriculum. I had one professor who was an ideologue, named John Holdren, and one great professor, Marshall Merriam, who was a professor of materials science. Holdren provided facts but reached conclusions inconsistent with his facts. Merriam, who actually supervised research, an activity Holdren never participated in, had me do a research paper, which results I have never forgotten. I had only to drive by the two expensive new building in San Jose with the glitzy façade and Solyndra on its signs, and after learning their stated objective, and knowing the cost of silicon manufacture, know certainly that it was a boondoggle.
The sun's energy flux density, with no losses from water vapor (the largest sink for solar energy), at the equator, is slightly less than 1 KW/square meter. If you live in Arizona, on clear and low humidity days during the optimal summer months, you might see 600 watts/avg for six hours, requiring tracking collectors. Taking optimistic estimates for conversion efficiency, solar flux density limits electricity derived from the sun to about 10 watts/square meter over 14 hours, whether solar-thermal-electric or photoelectric, and I'm assuming your batteries and DC/AC conversion are lossless - they aren't. One square meter will almost keep your CFD light-bulb lit for twenty four hours. Keep that 10 watts/square meter around, and figure if you don't live in Arizona or New Mexico or parts of Utah, that it will be much less, and non-existent during cloudy winter days. The Southern States have, as many of us have experienced, lots of water vapor - good for your complexion but not your collectors. Use the back of an envelope to figure how big a field of heliostats (mirrors) needs to be to replace a typical 2000 Megawatt nuclear plant.
Solar energy has its applications, such as heating swimming pools and preheating water - low quality but legitimate applications. It has high value applications like telephones in the desert. But solar flux density hopefully won't change much for a few million years, and limits it application to high quality dense energy applications to fleecing the naive, in Holdren’s case, because he believed that the world has too many stupid people who have toys and a life style they don't really need. “From each according to his ability and to each according to his needs.”
It is startling to see how many people with accolades, or at least, degrees, are certain that our earth has about five times the number of inhabitants it can support. That is certainly the belief of Holdren’s mentor, Paul Ehrlich, with whom Holdren wrote a textbook almost as silly, if it weren't frightening, as Ehrlich's ridiculously wrong “Population Bomb.”
For any trying to make sense of my numbers, I typed “14 hours” bet meant “24 hours.” in my reply to driftdriver, who is “thinking solar.”
I too will be going to Linux here soon. I just wish a Linux distributor would make an OS specifically for a desktop computer.
Let's face it, everything Linux makes is for server operations and is not specifically geared towards the desktop. Linux has a golden opportunity to gain a huge portion of the computing market, why don't someone take it?
You don't have to. "Cloud Architecture" enables you to do that if you want to, but you can create a "cloud" that only exists on your local system.
“Windows 10 might be controlled using eyesight”
Right. And I also heard that Windows 11 will be controlled with farts.
“The return of the dumb terminal....everything old is new again.”
Yep. This has been tried at least five times in the last 17 years. Each time it has a new name, but the failure is the same no matter what the name. Funny thing though, the name of the neutered client never involved the words “terminal” or “dumb”. Guess marketing was WAY to smart to allow that to slip by.
Love Windows 7 . My 3 year old HP all in one got killed during a lightning storm a few weeks ago and I just bought a new Dell Inspiron tower . Thankfully Windows 7 models were still for sale and that is what I grabbed .
Yes Solar isn’t as economical as power from the grid. That really isn’t the point.
“Which one of the druggies came up with this “cloud” BS anyway? Cloud my @$$.”
Looks like Microsoft has finally succumbed to what I call the “Mickey Rooney” school of management: “Hey, kids, I know what to do! We’ll put on a show! We can use the old, abandoned barn in the woods! Any you can be in it! And you! And you! And we can raise money, and ....”
Besides, they’ve already screwed up the edition numbers anyway. Windows 9 should have been the cloud edition, because that way they could call it Windows Cloud 9.
“They can instead be wasted time.”
Indeed. You could read the latest Janet Dailey novel.
One thing I like to point out to anyone who thinks "cloud computing" is a good idea for anything but insanely trivial data, is that U.S. courts have consistently ruled that if you give your data to a third party, you have "no reasonable expectation of privacy".
After the revolution, and we are done killing all the politicians, lawyers and judges, we'll make using the phrase "reasonable expectation of privacy" a capital offence.
People think I'm joking. I'm not. About any of it.
Every company that places a high level of importance on computer security will avoid this.
And that would be nearly every company.
rant on
You would think so, but you'd be wrong. I've watched with great interest for years and an insane amount of resources are put into getting around the fact that microsoft software is a virus magnet at all levels. You can't even freaking send attachments in many places without jumping through extreme hoops, because the companies are still stupid enough to use an operating system that thinks making a file executable based on its name is a good idea. The company I work for provides a laptop for me. The resources consumed by this laptop running virus scanners, malware scanners, firewalls and other crap is insane. Add to that, some MSCE (Must Consult Someone Experienced) thinks it makes some kind of sense to kick off a full system-wide virus scan during the middle of the working day. And a backup of user data 8 times a day. (If I want to back something up, I'll put it on a network fileshare, thankyouverymuch) Then you've got all the required installation of patches, and related stuff, with far too many of those requiring a reboot. (It's freaking 2013, the only thing you should be rebooting for is kernel patches, and there are even ways around that on real operating systems, unlike MS-windows.
When you add it all up, the cumulative waste of user productivity is staggering. Add to that crap like "sharepoint" - where perfectly good data goes to die, and I sometimes wonder how anything gets done.
Yet all of this is just accepted as the way things are. ... Like it is somehow normal to have to reboot a computer every few days. WTF?
No, companies will drink the cool-aid, and jump right on board. I've seen decisions from multiple large corporations that are the primary reason I have no hair. "No, we can't use product X because it doesn't come with a multimillion dollar licensing fee to microsoft. It couldn't possibly be better, more robust, and more sustainable, if it's free."
rant off
No. VMS is its own beast. It was a rock solid OS by Digital Equipment Corp (DEC), back in the day. I never worked a whole lot with VMS, but from what I saw it was excellent in just about every way that mattered.
From wikipedia:
OpenVMS is a multi-user, multiprocessing virtual memory-based operating system (OS) designed for use in time sharing, batch processing, real-time (where process priorities can be set higher than OS kernel jobs), and transaction processing. It offers high system availability through clustering, or the ability to distribute the system over multiple physical machines. This allows the system to be "disaster-tolerant"[9] against disasters that may disable individual data-processing facilities. VMS also includes a process priority system that allows for real-time processes to run unhindered, while user processes get temporary priority "boosts" if necessary.[10][11][12]
There are actually a number of those. Ubuntu, and it's variants are primarily aimed at desktop users. For a newbie Linux user, I'd recommend Mint. (Mint is a, ubuntu-based distribution) YMMV. As a newbie, I'd stay away from Fedora, which is my primary desktop, mainly because it really is the bleeding edge sometimes, and that's somewhere you really don't want to be as a newbie.
No, a million, trillion times no.
GEOS was a fantastic operating system made for the Commodore 64 that did everything Windows was supposed to do in 8-bits with miniscule resources. It was/is a pretty cool OS.
The only way I will buy cloud based software is if my employer foots the bill, ie Adobe Creative Cloud. As far as using cloud based software for consumer use, no thanks I got enough bills.
A terminally dumb idea.
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