NovaPenguin

This could be a good location, at least personally I think so. My time on here is maybe 15-20 minutes a time. Usually once or twice a week although the last week has been a bit more frequent. ;)

Something that I always admired about Apple (at least in the past) was that they were willing to make old stuff obsolete even when it was wildly successful. iPhone killing iPod is a great example of this.

That and just having a software base that was different from everyone else. It was funny, back when MS announced the change, here I was, a big Free/Libre software guy defending Microsofts proprietary browser with a journalist from Business Insider! Never did figure out if they did anything with that.

Always reminded that Nokia had one of the largest R&D budgets for mobile technology and got blind sided by iPhone and subsequent smart phones. Doesn't matter how ahead of the curve on paper you are if you cannot implement it into something that people want.

"Real Artists Ship" - Steve Jobs

I hadn't realized this was something that was happening. My Oppo A53 (?) still has FM radio via head phones. Same with the Nokia 2710 flip.

Being someone that usually lives in the low end, I have never had a phone without FM.

There are some hacky ways of getting a little distance on modern OS's, like using terminal based browsers. I'm thinking Links/Elinks but that will only get you so far and so long as the security certificates are available.

I cut my initial programming teeth on an 8Mhz (Maybe?) 8086 with 512KB RAM. Had the luxury of a 20MB HDD. At the time it felt like an ocean of storage. Nowadays it can be transferred around the world in less than a second.

I guess nowadays it is a choice, back then it was all we had! :D

But good to know that we can still 'Hyper-mile' our OS.

I did not know that! There was about a 6-7 year gap between 1997-2004 where I didn't really do much with Mac's. But your timeline seems spot on, it was 10.3 when they introduced Expose into the system. A great demonstration of the GPU functionality in action.

Yeah, that is unfortunately a big part of it. Via NoScript I generally run the web very lean but there is only so much one can do.

Oh yeah, I consider them some of the peak of case design. As much as it is cool to run these as a G5, keeping the case is a neat homage to what they were.

"How much computing power do I really need on a day to day basis?"

I guess this is a kind of Computational Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Basic needs can be covered by the vast majority of computer hardware. But once you get to large scale web browsing and gaming - more complex hardware is required.

The difference between a hermit living content in a cave and a billionaire in a 42 bed room mansion. Both could be happy but it really depends on their perspective.

It is kind of neat just how little power some of these older systems used. A big part was it was cheaper to make processors that used non-ceramic caps on them - but it limited the amount of power they could use due to thermal dissipation limits.

A good example in a similar fashion is the Super Nintendo. The power supply is rated to 7.85 Watts but it only uses roughly half of that when running. I believe the Neo Geo used 5 Watts peak. And these aren't physically tiny machines like a Raspberry Pi.

It is an interesting question. Apple hyper-optimized the OS for PPC when it was still relevant. Even modern PPC OS's with a good 20 years of additional compiler optimizations don't run those things anywhere near as well.

These are always handy to have around. The first day with one is like the first day with a label maker. You test everything!

Some figures from around my house.

Lenovo Tkinkpad T400 - 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo Laptop idles at about 10 Watts and peaks at just over 30 watts.

Lenovo Thinkpad T420 - 2nd Gen i5 is about the same.

Lenovo Mini 10 - 1.66Ghz Atom doesn't seem to know how to idle its power regardless of OS. Runs at a constant 10.5 Watts - 15 watts if using a Hard Drive installed instead of SSD.

Core 2 Duo Mac Mini - 8 watts idle - 24 watts peak.

Sony Bluray player - 0.5 Watts idle. 5 Watts during Bluray. 3 Watts during DVD.

Desktop PC - 2nd Gen i7 + Geforce 1650. Idle 61 Watts - Peak in game 95-101 Watts.

Sony AM/FM Radio - 0.5 Watts. That one was actually really neat to know just how lower power it takes to run.

My White Whale... the Dual 2Ghz PowerMac G5 I bought for $50. Sure it took months until I finally figured out how to get the OS to install properly. Having to delve into the patch work of information on Open Firmware and even then I am not entirely sure how I did it.

And in the end I was left with a machine that ran well over 300 watts to do what a Raspberry Pi4 can easy do in well under 5 watts. I should have known, I was there when the 1st Intel Mac Mini came along running as fast as these things on launch - I knew they were a slouch even then. I should have known better.

Eventually something went wrong with the power supply and I ended up scrapping everything but the case which now has my PC mounted in it.

This is why I argue that one of the best things that the Free/Libre software developer community can start doing is optimizing for lower spec machines. Microsoft and Apple are either too closely nit or drectly provide hardware to be prolonging the liftime of hardware they sell. In optimizing open OS's it can prolong the life time of hardware by a significant margin and it means that lower in come folks are not left in the dark. I don't just mean in well off countries, but if you are in the lower classes of the global south - there is no other option.

These was (is? - Not sure) a version of Firefox for PowerPC MaxOSX - TenFour Browser - that brought forward modern features/support of Firefox to Macs that were long past their prime. They mentioned that their favorite story in time of development was "One of my favourite reports was from a missionary in Myanmar using a beat-up G4 mini over a dialup modem; I hope he is safe during the present unrest. "

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfox...

This is what can happen when things are optimized for the people, not the business. This is part of why I still use a Core 2 Duo as my daily runner, if it ain't broke don't fix it.

I think I first saw it running on a Geforce with 64MB of RAM. Even then it was smooth as butter.

Now that I think about it, Mac OSX was doing GPU compositing back in 2000/2001 and those machine usually only had about 16MB of VRAM. I remember it running fairly well on a 2005 MacMini G4 with 32MB of VRAM.

My go to on this was I remember running Debian on a Pentium 166 with 32MB of RAM back in 98/99. It would boot to the desktop only using 6MB. It wasn't flash but it could handle the basics. Heck Windows XP would boot to Desktop using a little under 70MB.

But this isn't just Windows, currently I am on Kubuntu 22.04 and it is using about 1.5GB to get to the Desktop! Yes it is very smooth and flash but it seems like a bit much to do this.

This is why I am interesting in projects like Haiku and Serenity OS, they may bring some sanity back into these things.

It seems like this is something that happens in every high school. Our School was a Quake 1 map however.

I completely forgot about the open USB/SD card stuff even though I use it all the time. Yeah that is pretty cool.

I am more projecting onto a potential of things like Linux Phones. Once they get the stability issues resolved, they have the potential to be something wonderful.

While I post occasionally here, in terms of long term writing projects it is fascinating seeing how my own works have progressed over the decades.

I must have initially written about 10 incomplete (80,000 word+) books - only to get into the last 20% of it and get that moment of "nobody would really want to read this!" I think some of them have survived the deletion process.

Then it moved into smaller form, 1,000 word posts once a month on a blog I ran for about 3 years. Even that felt like a little too much.

The one I have been working on for the last few years, unpublished, I describe as a thousandth of a shadow of the Tao Te Ching. Little sayings and expressions that can be communicated in under 20 seconds. They aren't original ideas just ones that I think will be useful to others. So far I have 86 of them.

I guess it comes down to a saying in Buddhism, "a thousand words mean nothing compared to a single word that can bring peace." It also comes down to a case of, in distilling down to core concepts that aren't spelled out in detail, it allows the reader to flex their own mental muscles. It also reduces the attack surface area to some degree.

I know of a few folks now that believe that if you cannot impart the core aspects of something, particularly in terms of politics and philosophy, in less than a half dozen paragraphs - you need to keep working on it. Essentially, if you cannot communicate it clearly, is your thinking clear?

One of these sayings on my list is, 'Don't count the words - make the words count.'.

Teams is one of those things that feels like we should have solved this like 10 years ago.

Same thing with online payment systems - how is it that we didn't have that stuff completely solved like 20 years ago?

I mean I know the answer deep down but seriously - Some folks did solve it, a lot did not or don't want to. Can't keep a job on a complete software package.

It is true. If it wasn't for the side loading of Apps and app stores on Android - I would give it a hard miss!

Frank Zappa said that when he first heard Bob Dylans "The times they are a changin" on the radio, Frank believed that he didn't need to get into the music industry because the change in the world was already on its way. Frank quickly figured out that this was not how it was going to go down and that Dylan was very quickly absorbed into the main stream.

Credit to Frank, he managed to walk the fine line of being in pop culture but never fully embraced by it.

Bingo. I am not saying "Hey look at me, I am counter culture!" I am just being me. But usually, I am online only about once or twice a week nowadays and even then it is only for about 10-20 minutes at a time.

I suspect like folks going back to dumb phones, magazine subscriptions - the embrace of the analog world again to some degree. This is where the rejection of the mainstream will probably hit the road.

It is funny seeing Laying flat/Tang Ping in action. People for decades have said "the revolution is coming!". It always has their own specific flavor or manner of mass action - typically in the form of something big and bombastic.

And yet the one protest that looks to have a chance of actually making any significant change is the once that starves the very systems itself. Doing less instead of more actively works. It is a fascinating thing to see in action.

I think it is just a part of slightly yearning for the heady days of youth.

A few times I have come across younger people who are sort of upset that they missed the earlier years of computing. I mean I get it, but they are so lucky to be inheriting a world of computing that is much more rock solid than anything we used to have. No configuring autoexe.bat /config.sys or the joys of Win95 just stopping for... some reason.

Also if I want to relive the early days of Linux, PinePhone has got me covered. ;)

In a way it has stripped out a little of the fun of it, but that is a very VERY minor thing by comparison to systems that now just work!

As for Desktop environments, it is very rare that I have had any game breaking events on these for a very long time. The foundations are mature and hardened nowadays.

I have had the occasional issue on a elderly T400 Thinkpad when transferring large files on Mate and Enlightenment DE but I get the feeling that is potentially a hardware issue.

Walking or cycling in that part of WA, especially in the summer sounds like a death sentence.