Recent Comments

I'm most nostalgic for my old C64, and that thing had you at the READY prompt in about a second, I think. Obviously, "LOAD game ,8,1" would take up to 20 minutes if you were unlucky, but man, back in 1985 those were 20 delicious minutes of anticipation. Good times. My greatest hit was a BASIC program that would help you create a dungeons and dragons character, a choice of project that probably solidified my soul into nerddom forever.

What I'd like to see in my life time is the return of cartridges.

Isn't that basically what USB thumb drives are? A little stick you can carry around and plug into a terminal. You can even store a whole OS on one and boot right from USB if you want to take your whole PC with you. The limit seems to be drive size (I have a 128 GB drive, which is pretty nice) rather than heat.

Not sarcasm - just, the only pic available as a choice by the little routine that selects some pictures and lets you choose :(

I went thru the C=64/Amiga500/PC route as a teenager. I really liked the C=64 and the Amiga, but they were simple toys compared to even the 286s.

I did like many things about those computers: direct access to video memory, light pens, sprite animations etc, but they lacked seriously in the language/environment department. For example, there was no operating system to call if you wanted to do sound, you had to "poke" some value somewhere, kind of like a modern device driver. The BASIC language was also shitty. After hacking on it for a while, you eventually ran into problems like lack of composite types, pointers, subroutines etc. Anything serious had to be written in assembly and that wasn't the paradise the article mentions.

Amiga-500 was much better, with the Pascal compiler and whatnot. I did have a lot of fun times with that also but there was nothing special about it, really.

What I really miss from that era are the cartridges. You popped one in, and the game/whatever loaded immediately. There were even cartrigdes which extended the computer's functionality but I never got one of those.

Modern computers can boot very fast. My current system boots under 10 seconds, thanks to the SSD in it. What I'd like to see in my life time is the return of cartridges. If we could solve the heat problem, I think we have enough technology to pack a lot of power and space into a cartridge-size box. We could then carry that around to hotels, meetings etc.

If the story pic is sarcasm then I Like It

"But I do miss getting a working machine less than 1 second after turning on the on switch."

That's totally not how I remember it. I had an Atari 130XE, On top of getting the system booted, which was long enough for me to use the washroom and get a snack, I started my first program in BASIC when I was 7 and it took me over a year to finish. All it was was an elephant standing on a ball with some beeping noises. The ball moved back and forth a bit and every ten seconds or so a speech balloon would appear and the elephant would go "Cha-Cha-Cha". I think most of it, but not all, came from one of those monthly programing magazines. I showed it to my Dad and he dashed all my dreams of becoming a poet, something about wasting talent and I was going to work with computers... Wish I'd become a poet. I like computers, but to be honest they, or the people that use them anyway, drain the life right out of me.

I don't feel ancient now

Because someone took the time to submit it to the pipe, and I found it interesting. If you'd like to see other types of articles, you know where the submit button is. Meanwhile, if you don't like the project, feel free not to fund it.

I'm pretty sure that typically when I sleep, the majority of electric car owners does, too. Their cars may be charging, but as soon as you connected them for charging, you don't have to do anything; they charge up on their own.

A time varying chart of kWh can make sense (although not in this specific case). For example, if you want to know how much energy is stored in a battery at each time, a kWh/time graph is perfect.

Why in the world is this "article" here?

I don't know a lot about power grids, but I presume this is a good thing for them

Well, I do know the fundamentals of power grids, and I'll tell you the "And?".

The normal household chart shows a very grid-friendly usage. It is quite even over time. The one peak and one valley are both comparatively mild and gradual.

The electric car household chart shows an extremely grid-hostile usage. If it's a few isolated households; no big deal; it is probably even a good thing. But if you get a lot of households with this same pattern, the gigantic abrupt peak at 11 pm will put an extremely heavy demand on electric energy peaking, and on the neighborhood grid wiring. Probably heavy investments will have to be made.

To the extent this peak might offset a heavy daytime peak in industrial use, this might be a partially good thing, but the article does not address this or give any related data in this connection. In any case, the ideal would be not to fight one peak with another, opposite peak. The ideal would be to minimize peaks in general.

You could do this for industry by running it 24x7 using shifts, which would be far more plant-efficient anyway.

And you could do it for electrioc car households by having two batteries that are swapped daily. The charging of the swapped-out battery would be regulated by a smart charger to deliver constant current over the 24 hour period, the value of the current being calculated to exactly reach full charge at the end of the 24 hour period.

Yes, I am aware that the customary lithium ion charging strategy is to have a constant current phase, followed by a shorter constant-voltage phase during which the current falls toward zero. So it wouldn't be quite as idealized as I described, but you could come a whole lot closer to ideal than that chart shows now.

That chart seems to have been prepared by someone with poor technical knowledge. kWh is an integration of power drain over time, not a direct measure of power drain over time A time-varying chart of kWh is an absurdity. I strongly suspect the vertical axis is mislabeled. It should be kW, not kWh.

Comprehension of concepts matters.

"reknowned"?
Please have a spell checker running.

Can I be the one to remind him a tablet is still a computer, just like my smart phone, desktop and game console? Good management and upkeep is what most of these people/companies need, not swapping hardware for a new problem.

Or I could play Roller Coaster Tycoon. Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems like the most blatant copy I've seen yet.

If I had an electric car, I'd want it charging only at night. Much cheaper that way, at least here in the UK. Is there anything here we didn't already know?

I don't know a lot about power grids, but I presume this is a good thing for them (and presumably environmentally) too; less of a 'daytime spike' in generation this way.

PC != Windows.

Although I kinda agree with you, the statement "PC == Windows" still has a pretty good 90% accuracy. Besides, it is unfortunately very representative of the way many people (especially management) look at PCs in enterprises: Windows boxes (and often worse: Windows boxes without admin privileges).

At work, we, Linux or OSX users (not to talk about the BSD ones), are still the outliers, the weird guys with limited support, if any, from the IT department.

I'd rather upload a file than enter a passwordorupload a file and put in a password

My question is unrelated to the topic.

I feel stupid asking this, but how do we assign points in this kind of poll ? Do every item need to be filled with numbers ? What values should we pick ?

Yeah, me too. I bought a Nexus 7 as an experiment/trial and wound up liking it more than I'd expected. Add a bluetooth keyboard and it does a lot of what I need to do. For serious console work though I go back to my desktop, with a real keyboard, trackball, better apps, etc. For $199 in 2012 it was basically a no brainer.

We use keepass.

http://keepass.info/

On the contrary, Android has done quite well. A lot of people do buy apple products just because they think it's cool, hip, the best, or that there is no other choice (even though the educated know there are good alternatives). I've been very happy with my Android tablet. It doesn't do everything, but I still find it useful, and it's not an apple product.

Tails is a live operating system, that you can start on almost any computer from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card. It aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity

People cried, the tablet is the new PC, and PCs are dead. I said Baloney. The only reason PC sales dipped and tablet sales spiked was because it was the hot new toy, everyone wanted one, and for some stupid reason everyone thought they could do just as much with a tablet as they could a desktop/laptop. And there is a lot you can do with a tablet, but it will not replace the desktop. I am not going to write and edit large documents on any sort of tablet. I will not do most of my gaming on a tablet. I will not administer numerous Linux and Windows boxes/VMs on a tablet. I'm not going to develop or compile code on a tablet. You can make it as powerful as you like, but the interface isn't sufficient, and like many have pointed out above, the battery life would suck, or more accurately, be sucked.

Y'know, i just went back and had another look at the site and was again impressed by the quality of the articles. I went through the whole NAS section and was stunned by how useful and informative it was. (The comments, on the other hand, were ridiculous. I'd assumed better quality article would lead to more technical and thoughtful discussion. Instead it was pretty lame).

Specifically, many EV owners in the western region (upwards of 60%, according to one California study) - and all the EV owners considered in our analysis - have signed up with their utility to get highly discounted electricity between midnight and 7am, in exchange for a daytime price hike. The sudden surge on the right side of the graph above suggests the behavioral effectiveness of this framework: when EV owners enroll in a time-of-use rate plan, they operate in alignment with it.

Also:

2) EV owners are much more likely than their peers to own solar panels.

Also:

EV rate plan subscribers - with their huge night-time charging spike, bigger and fancier homes, and elevated grid electric consumption in the morning and evening - are a distinctive sort of energy user.
And it appears that there are many more of them on the way.

Agreed - the guy has the right touch of managerial, customer-oriented, trends-spotting, and so on. He has a tech degree and I wonder if he won't be going into some sort of visionary/guidance type post where he helps management prioritize and refine. Sounds like fun, anyway.

Meanwhile, though I wish Anandtech the best, i can't imagine they'll be able to keep it up.

As a longtime reader of Anandtech, I hope that Anand leaving doesn't spell the end of such a nice tech news site.

I've always considered Anandtech to be the best site for computer hardware and in-depth reviews. The difference between Anandtech and, for example, Tom's Hardware, is just uncompareable.

People are really tried of slow and bad working Windows. They associate PC with this problem. People bought pads because they got something that seem to be faster and easier to work with... Then they realized what I always been saying:
With very few exceptions, a pad is useless as you want to produce text also. Already writing this comment on Pipedot would be terrible with a pad. We need keyboards. I see two options in the future; better OS for tradtional ultalight noteboks or hybrides where the keyboard is sold together with the pad and easily removable those few times you just want to hold the pad in one hand.

I have seen a rise in interest for Linux the latest time. Tomorrow I will install Linux for an old lady that got tired of Windows. She called me and asked me if I could install Linux for her.

It depends on what politics articles it is... I do not care about debates trying to argue one candidate is better than the other. That there are better sources for and I do not see this kind of sites to be meant as place of debating politics. However, after an election it is good to know what the new president means from privacy, freedom and world safety. I surely would want to read some comments if USA, Russia or China or any other super power would get a new president. And that is not happening so often, so it would at most be one article a year.

When something happens that has potential to grow bigger in a war, I surely want some insight information from maybe eye-witnesses to know how far the conflict could reach in worse case scenary. For example if Russia would decide to fully invade whole Ukraine it would be a conflict that could in worst case drag in a big part of Europe.

That thing seems to rely on a central server. No deal.

Also, most of my accounts on web sites - this one included - is worth almost nothing. I *might* pay a dollar to not lose it; but for two, I'd rather make a new one.
Of course there are some that are important. But using a strong password for only a few sites is not a problem.

For me, the system keychain (OS X/iOS) is good enough.

As for replacing passwords with something else: I haven't seen a convincing replacement yet and I can't think of one myself either.

One problem is, that passwords work for a huge variety of use cases.
Example: A random web page wants me to sign in for no apparent reason. I can just make up a new password and use a temporary email address. I wouldn't want to use any authentication method - like a smart card or something - that was tied to my identity.

Oh, and I want to add, if your desktop machine is prone to failure, easily breaks, is a magnet for viruses and malware and after just a bit of use is susceptible to constant freezes and crashes - you are doing it wrong!

A tablet I mean. Well, at least everyone who wanted one anyway.

My iPad 2 is still fine for everything I want to do with it. I don't need a new one. But I might actually buy one in A4 size when the time comes to replace the old one.

And of course, I need a desktop computer. A tablet can't replace that. (No, not even some surface thingie.)

Let me also make it clear that with "PC", in the above comment, I meant desktop computer. :-)

It's nice to have a computer by a desk, with a proper monitor and proper input devices, and to be able to quickly add and switch hardware such as disks.

Tablets and PCs aren't even comparable in many cases since they often have very different uses. That said, I really like my Nexus 7, but it can never replace a PC. The only thing that can replace a PC in most areas is a laptop.

It was always obvious that tablets were a fad device. Apple only sold so many of them because Apple isn't selling electronic devices, they're selling religion. And people buying iPads weren't buying them because they were tablets, they were buying them out of a sense of religious duty. Everybody else, however, had no need for them. That's why no other vendor has had success selling tablets. They're a device that nobody really wants.

Don't forget homeopathy!

Some say that the web is the killer app for tablets. Unfortunately, I find modern websites very hard to use on my own tablet. Even though I have a newer 4 core tablet with a couple gigs of RAM, the device still struggles with the JavaScript laden sites so common on today's web. Also, some JavaScript navigation widgets, such as the venerable drop-down menu, are just impossible to use on a touchscreen without a mouse.

Long story short, I'd much rather browse the web on a desktop than try to suffer through the slower tablet experience.

YubiKey link.

I've been contemplating adding YubiKey support to Pipedot. A YubiKey is a physical device, about the size of a USB thumb drive, that has one button on the top and acts like a USB keyboard. Unlike other "authenticators", when you want to sign in somewhere, instead of manually relaying a random code from a keyfob or smartphone, you simply press the button and the YubiKey generates and types a secure one-time code for you.

Would anyone else be interested in such a device? They would cost about $25 each and could be used on other sites that support them as well.

Larger footprint homes can consume more electricity than smaller homes!

Who'd 'a thunk it?

http://www.supergenpass.com/ and it's more secure cousin, SuperChromePass https://code.google.com/p/superchromepass/.

PCs aren't all like that quote says. However, PCs with the windows operating system installed on them certainly are. :)

Seriously, I see people and companies make that mistake all the time. PC != Windows.

All very good points. There's also the repairability factor: the company I work for regularly services its PCs (boring old Dell and HP boxes), replaces burned network cards and so on. If your ipad goes, you buy a new ipad. There's value in both approaches, but it's not mix-and-match. I think this guy wrote an article he hopes will get the market to respond with some new product that doesn't exist so he can go out and pat himself on the back for being a visionary. I don't see those super-tablets arriving any time soon now, and I'm not convinced this guy even understands the market at the moment.

Glad for the feedback. Maybe someone will post those political articles but I actually disliked that stuff on Slashdot and avoided those articles. When Slashdot got a "politics" tag I actually felt disappointed.

That said, the Submit button is at the top right. Let's see what the Pipe says, as every article has buttons to vote up and down. It may happen anyway!

So far, for websites I use pseudo-random password (generated using "$ openssl rand -base64 24") and I let the browser memorizes them (but I don't export it to my backups). So only my browser password to remember. The day they get erased or I change laptop, I guess I'll just click on the "Forgot your password ?" links wherever I need it. And websites I never visit ? oh well, I don't need them anyway (I'm pretty sure I've lost my slashdot credentials a long time ago and I have zero intention to get them back :-) )

As for ssh (or ssh-based) connexion, I use public/private key pairs with passphrases, I only have 3 different pair of keys so far, so only 3 different passphrases to remember

I would actually be interested in knowing which tool to use to manage all my passwords outside of the browser and still have them auto-complete when I log into a website.

I would be even more interested into some easy smartcard-like technology where I would use one of my USB stick with my GPG key on it to manage all of that. step 1: format USB key and fill it with some sort of GPG key, step 2: plug the USB key into laptop (+ maybe some 2-step verification ?) step 3: identified. step 4: the moment you unplug the USB key, you're offline.

But I know nothing about security or cryptography, so probably this is all highly insecure and/or dumb ...

PCs are expensive, prone to failure, easy to break and magnets for viruses and malware.

The claim that super tablets would improve on those aspects doesn't sound very realistic to me. If tablet hardware is equally powerful as PC hardware, but has to be lightweight and run on a battery, it will be more expensive. A stationary PC is also less likely to break than a portable tablet of equal build quality.

How prone a machine is to viruses and malware depends on a lot of factors, such as OS, obscurity of the platform, level of clue from both the admins and the users etc. None of those factors are related to the hardware: if a tablet OS is easier to secure and still flexible enough for the users to get their job done, why not install a tablet OS on PC hardware?

The only advantage of a super tablet over a laptop is the form factor: it is easier to carry around. That can be important in some companies. But it will cost extra, not less.

All kind of science news (computer science, astronomy, maths etc).

Also I wish to see normal news if they have a huge impact on the earth. Local election in some countries are not interesting, unless it is a country affecting most of the earth. War, that could have big consequences are OK. A volcano spewing out enough of ashes to block airtrafic for a big part of the world is ok, the same with nuclear accidents and other really big things. Local parties arguing inside of a country is not OK.