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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the ups-and-downs dept.

The PC market may have stabilized and could see its recent declines reverse:

The PC market is forecast to return to growth next year according to Gartner, as buyers come to the end of their evaluation periods for Windows 10.

Worldwide PC shipments are expected to hit 267 million units in 2018, a 1.9 per cent increase on 2017, when shipments are forecast to reach 262 million. By 2019, shipments are pegged to hit 272 million units.

This year's PC sales are however expected to fall yet again for the sixth consecutive year, with shipments dropping three per cent when compared with 2016.

[...] Elsewhere, smartphone shipments will also continue to grow at a healthy rate, the market watcher claims. Shipments are expected to grow 5 per cent year on year to nearly 1.6 billion units in 2017. Gartner claims that the market is experiencing a shift away from low-cost "utility" phones, towards higher-priced "basic" and "premium" smartphone devices.

PC components are becoming slightly more expensive at the same time.

Also at EE Times.


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  • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:25PM (22 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:25PM (#535854) Journal

    Why the fuck does an operating system have an evaluation period?

    It's not optional to have an OS on your system. If you're getting a shitty pack-in OS, like windows, why would you want to try it as if it's going to make a huge difference in your life?

    Why does every piece of tech news depress me and make me wonder when our industry will die and go away forever, instead of excite me?

    • (Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:34PM (4 children)

      by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:34PM (#535857)

      Our industry is basically constant chaos. So much changes just to change. Have to either keep up with it or be okay with being "legacy". The money is good though if you can stay on top of it.

      Win 10 eval was crap. If you didn't like win10 it's not like you could roll back and keep your old OS forever. Windows users will all move forward or join a botnet (or possibly both, unfortunately).

      --
      SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:47PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:47PM (#535861)

        on your purchased but not-so-fully owned (or: soon to be pwn3d) computer system thanks to clipper chip on steroids (Intel ME, TrustZone, AMD PSP (rebadged TrustZone, although pre-PSP was LM32, or Xtensa for your AMD GPUs (Look up 'UVD Xtensa HD2400') and possibly others...)

        A lack of privacy would be fine if light was shined in every crevice and nook of *EVERYONE'S* lives, but since it isn't, and there are the haves and the have nots, our digital devices *MUST HAVE* comprehensive security, ideally unbreakable without physical access, in order to ensure personal liberty remains.

        Sadly most of the populace is perfectly happy in chains, so long as they have their reality TV, or their kids, or their church, or just those people they hate that they occasionally get to make derisive comments at, burn crosses on their front laws, or murder.

        Do I seem cynical much?

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:01PM

          by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:01PM (#535868)

          No, I think you seem far too optimistic about the current state of society.

        • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:02PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:02PM (#535869)

          You left out a closing parenthesis.

          • (Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Friday July 07 2017, @06:03AM

            by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday July 07 2017, @06:03AM (#536021) Journal

            You left out a closing parenthesis.

            You must be a LISP programmer. :-)

            --
            The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:04PM (12 children)

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:04PM (#535871)

      Why does every piece of tech news depress me and make me wonder when our industry will die and go away forever, instead of excite me?

      I remember feeling excited about the future of the tech industry and new technological developments (particularly in software), back in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

      Not any more. With very few exceptions, software is getting worse and worse, most of all the user interfaces and design. There's really nothing pleasurable about using modern software at all.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Wootery on Friday July 07 2017, @08:47AM (7 children)

        by Wootery (2341) on Friday July 07 2017, @08:47AM (#536046)

        And the bloat. Oh, the bloat.

        Want to write a small desktop application? Well, the first thing we'll do is pull in an entire Chromium-based browser...

        A rant you may enjoy (welll, I liked it at least): Electron Considered Harmful. [github.io] See also the Hacker News discussion. [ycombinator.com]

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 07 2017, @04:08PM (6 children)

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday July 07 2017, @04:08PM (#536157)

          Those are design decisions... if the designers choose to bloat with Chromium in a simple desktop app... that seems like a really good case for shared libraries and an integrated suite of desktop apps ala KDE.

          Whatever happened to KDE? it had such potential for greatness.

          --
          🌻🌻 [google.com]
          • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday July 07 2017, @04:52PM (5 children)

            by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday July 07 2017, @04:52PM (#536173)

            that seems like a really good case for shared libraries and an integrated suite of desktop apps ala KDE.

            Yeah, that's the whole idea of shared libraries and an integrated suite of desktop apps: consistency, sharing memory, etc.

            Whatever happened to KDE? it had such potential for greatness.

            AFAICT, three big things:

            1) Thanks to GNOME stealing its fire, it just never got that much traction. There was a giant fuss raised about the licensing of the Qt libraries it relied on (leading to Miguel de Icaza and co. creating Gnome), and by the time they finally relicensed Qt to GPL it was too late as Gnome had too much mindshare. For some odd reason, most of the distros also jumped on the Gnome bandwagon, and continue to do so today as seen with Ubuntu switching to Gnome3. It doesn't help that Gtk+ is a miserable set of libraries for other developers to use as the Gnome team constantly changes APIs and deprecates things, plus it's all in C which is pretty lousy for writing desktop apps.

            2) The KDE team lost focus and went after too many crazy ideas like with the Nepomuk and Strigi search/indexing systems which absolutely killed performance, and their "Activities" feature, all of which almost no one really cared about or used. So instead of making a stable, reliable DE and quashing bugs, they pursued "advanced" features of dubious usefulness.

            3) The whole KDE4.0 debacle: they released KDE4 too early with tons of bugs and missing features, the distros that used KDE adopted it wholesale without having a fallback for KDE3, users got royally pissed because KDE4.0 was such a disaster to use and so broken, so tons of them abandoned KDE for other DEs (namely Gnome, though Gnome did a lot of the same stuff too).

            It'd be really interesting if you could go back in time to 1997 or whenever, meet with the Qt people and show them all these events to come, convince them to license Qt as LGPL, and avoid Gnome even being created. Would Linux on the desktop be any farther ahead in 2017?

            • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 07 2017, @07:30PM (4 children)

              by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday July 07 2017, @07:30PM (#536235)

              Qt has had so much unrealized potential, my big disappointment was that Nokia never built (real, mass marketed) phones with it.

              It's not perfection, and maybe it's not even the best thing out there (depending on your perspective), but it was the first really good cross-platform toolset I ever saw. That was one of the amusing things about KDE being based on Qt: KDEWin.

              --
              🌻🌻 [google.com]
              • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday July 07 2017, @08:01PM (3 children)

                by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday July 07 2017, @08:01PM (#536248)

                AFAICT, it really is the best thing out there, for what it does. All the alternatives have giant negatives:
                1. Gtk+ - C-based, controlled by Gnome devs, very unstable, generally low quality
                2. .NET/C# - Microsoft-run, not FOSS, not really meant to be cross-platform in a meaningful way, slower performance than C++
                2a. Mono - Not 100% compatible with #2, never really adopted by Linux distros that much
                3. Java - Slow performance, doesn't really succeed in being "write once, run anywhere" as claimed, never looks like native applications
                4. Boost - Doesn't provide cross-platform UI toolset, much narrower scope than Qt. Also rather ugly.
                5. Python - Terrible performance compared to C++, really horrible at multi-threading which is pretty critical for UI code, library management is ridiculous

                • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 07 2017, @09:35PM

                  by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday July 07 2017, @09:35PM (#536275)

                  Yep, I don't claim to know everything about everything, but your list mirrors my experience. The only time I've seen other toolsets decisively "win" a selection process is when the developers have previous experience with them and the scope of the project is limited to a specific OS. Or, I've also seen a case of "management loves Python, so we're doing it in Python because the last project got so moribund before it reached requirements coverage that we really learned a lot and will do better this time...." I actually saw a group go in for three tries with Python, each time making a bigger more tangled unextendable unmaintainable mess than the previous. That's something I've been pleasantly surprised with by Qt, even when you make implementation mistakes (a mainwindow.ui with 1000+ widgets in it, for instance), it's pretty easy to refactor and correct.

                  --
                  🌻🌻 [google.com]
                • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:09PM (1 child)

                  by Wootery (2341) on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:09PM (#538085)

                  Modern Java and Java FX aren't too bad, are they?

                  About Boost: parts of it may be ugly/bloated [catnapgames.com]/whatever, but for some things it's great. It's not a complete multi-platform GUI development environment, but it's not intended to be.

                  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:52PM

                    by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:52PM (#538117)

                    Modern Java is still Java: verbose. No thanks. And it doesn't look native, at least not that I've seen. That makes it a deal-breaker.

                    Boost is useless: as you said, it's not a GUI development environment, so it's just as useful for creating GUI applications as any random non-GUI library. The whole subject here is what can you use to make GUI applications, which Qt is excellent for? Something which doesn't do GUI development doesn't compete with Qt.

      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 07 2017, @04:06PM (3 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday July 07 2017, @04:06PM (#536156)

        Nobody is forcing you to use the new stuff.

        For instance: you can still play Zork, if you want.

        --
        🌻🌻 [google.com]
        • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:19PM (2 children)

          by Wootery (2341) on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:19PM (#538098)

          What a completely pointless non-response.

          Not only is your sentiment wrong on the face of it (there isn't always old software around to do the job of new software), it's also completely missing the point.

          If we were discussing unwelcome developments in modern cars, would you waste our time with Yeah? Well no-one's forcing you to use a car?

          • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:48PM

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:48PM (#538115)

            To continue the bad car analogy: nobody is forcing you to drive around with in dash navigation, airbags or fuel injection, either. You might want to pay the price of those modernizations to reap their benefits, but you can also buy, maintain and use older cars without these things.

            I had an ASUS net-top for years, ran great on Windows XP when we bought it, as XP was "upgraded" through the years it turned to a useless pile of wait. Re-install XP from the discs that shipped with the system and it's back like it was when new, unable to run some software that requires the OS updates, but still able to do whatever it did "back in the good old days" just the same as it did back then.

            If the new software bloat bothers you that much, running old systems is still possible. In Linux land, you can even run most of the old software on modern OSs and hardware. Generally speaking, the new bloaty software comes with just (barely) enough good to make it preferable to the older, leaner stuff, but that's not always the case.

            --
            🌻🌻 [google.com]
          • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:51PM

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:51PM (#538116)

            there isn't always old software around to do the job of new software

            Valid. If you want to browse the web with 25 year old software, you're gonna have a bad day.

            But, if you're complaining about bloat and inefficiency in things that didn't exist before the bloat and inefficiency became ubiquitous, that's a big wish for something that never has existed, and never will if nobody cares enough to make it.

            --
            🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:52PM (2 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:52PM (#535896)

      Except in cases of specific need, I don't use Windows anymore.

      There are still a few applications where it is "required" - but since a licensed copy of Windows boosts the cost of the average PC that I buy by 15-20%, it's really not something I include without a specific need.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday July 07 2017, @01:44AM (1 child)

        by frojack (1554) on Friday July 07 2017, @01:44AM (#535965) Journal

        15-20%,

        Boosts costs, and reduces performance.
        First windows takes their 20% of your bandwidth.
        Then the bloatware installed by the manufacturer takes 50% of your processing power.
        Then anti-virus takes another 20%.

        Its just astounding how much shit we put up with.

        Picked up a mid tier laptop the other week because the owner bought a new one.
        The old one didn't survive the journey from Windows 8 to Windows 10. (A journey that took 6 hours - then died). So he dutifully ran down a bought a new one, with windows 10 preloaded.

        You should see his old one (my new one now) run LXDE. Astoundingly fast.

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 07 2017, @04:13PM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday July 07 2017, @04:13PM (#536158)

          Yeah, I'm liking LXDE / XCFE more and more these days... they used to be a little on the weak side for me, but I think they're approaching a sweet spot of functionality now.

          --
          🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Thursday July 06 2017, @11:02PM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 06 2017, @11:02PM (#535924) Journal

      Why does every piece of tech news depress me and make me wonder when our industry will die and go away forever, instead of excite me?

      Elementary my dear. Read this:

      "You are old," [wikipedia.org] said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
      That your eye was as steady as ever;
      Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—
      What made you so awfully clever?"

      "I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
      Said his father; "don't give yourself airs!
      Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
      Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!"

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:07PM (3 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:07PM (#535873)

    It had been a while since I got a chance to repeat my law of "forecasting with 3 significant digits is BS".
    Thanks Gartner, you never fail me. You've gone out of your way to predict a 1.9% increase too, because 2% would be so mundane... Shouldn't that be 1.92% instead?

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:58PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:58PM (#535899)

      Anybody could swag 2%, 1.9% implies that they used data and computation to get their prediction.

      1.92% would be gilding the lilly, measuring a brick with a micrometer, or the crystal ball getting delusions of competence in forecasting.

      Forecasting next quarter might happen with some precision, forecasting 4 quarters in the future would be ignoring the fact that their signal is completely buried in noise.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday July 07 2017, @01:49AM (1 child)

      by frojack (1554) on Friday July 07 2017, @01:49AM (#535969) Journal

      Gartner will study it. And it will find what ever you want, to any number of digits.
      JD Powers will give you an award, as leader in your special little class of one.

      With just a few thousand, you too can be special.
      You too can have a Participation Trophy.

      How is it that soccer moms gained control of sales and marketing?

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday July 07 2017, @04:15PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Friday July 07 2017, @04:15PM (#536159)

        > How is it that soccer moms gained control of sales and marketing?

        Gotta think like your target audience?

  • (Score: 2) by gawdonblue on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:12PM (2 children)

    by gawdonblue (412) on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:12PM (#535876)

    Well if Gartner says it then there's a small chance that it might be true.

    Gartner are good at putting out headlines aimed at management drones and pulling "magic" evaluations out of their proverbial for the gullible IT buyer. Sadly, both types are successfully targeted where I work.

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:31PM (21 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:31PM (#535887) Journal

    What we are seeing is the migration from desktop PCs to computerphones for people that don't really need PCs because they are in essence a IT consumer not participant. So it was inevitable but will also stabilize at a new fraction of computer terminals. But increased prices don't seem right?

    Now a computerphone with a REAL keyboard..

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:54PM (14 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:54PM (#535897)

      Price per unit performance is continuing to fall - what's increasing is the bottom end, unless you can make a leap and do your desktop on a Raspberry Pi - which is actually practical for lots of things.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday July 06 2017, @10:02PM (5 children)

        by kaszz (4211) on Thursday July 06 2017, @10:02PM (#535901) Journal

        I wonder how doable desktop on a Raspberry Pi is for day-to-day business?
        Would u--tube work?

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 07 2017, @04:24AM (4 children)

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday July 07 2017, @04:24AM (#535999)

          On the Pi3 with Raspbian, I've done YouTube. It's not stellar performance, but it's doable.

          If you don't need video, it's pretty damn awesome, kind of like having a 1997 PC, but with quad cores and better software.

          --
          🌻🌻 [google.com]
          • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday July 08 2017, @03:24AM (3 children)

            by kaszz (4211) on Saturday July 08 2017, @03:24AM (#536389) Journal

            Would Pi3 handle 480p which seems good enough for most purposes and then locally scaled up? if not what is "not stellar performance" in practice? play-pause-repeat..?

            • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday July 08 2017, @12:29PM (2 children)

              by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday July 08 2017, @12:29PM (#536507)

              It does 480p, but not much more. Other operations seem to be a bit sluggish while trying to do 480p, or the 480p gets stuttery when doing _anything_ else simultaneously. Also depends on quality of your net connection, other network traffic trying to squeeze through their byzantine ethernet connection, how compressed that 480p stream is, etc.

              --
              🌻🌻 [google.com]
              • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday July 08 2017, @01:27PM (1 child)

                by kaszz (4211) on Saturday July 08 2017, @01:27PM (#536519) Journal

                Is it the network pipeline that is of too low capacity? or is it the processor performance?
                No video decompression acceleration? I recall it being capable of mpeg4 hardware encode and decode. Maybe a remote computer recoding to mpeg4 would be useful..

                • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday July 08 2017, @04:22PM

                  by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday July 08 2017, @04:22PM (#536562)

                  The Pi Ethernet hardware setup is widely criticized... via USB, 100Mb, inefficient drivers, etc.

                  I imagine it's a lack of hardware decode that's making the processor sweat, yes, it can do it, but can it do it on a Chrome rendered YouTube page?

                  --
                  🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday July 07 2017, @12:13AM (7 children)

        by jmorris (4844) on Friday July 07 2017, @12:13AM (#535938)

        Nope. 1GB of memory is no longer enough to run a phone, forget a desktop with a bloated desktop browser. The 100GB Ethernet delivered over an unreliable Ethernet to USB chip (known problem Pi apparently has no intention of fixing) is also lame. There are other small ARM computer boards one could use but every one of them limit you to an unaccelerated 2D framebuffer and perhaps a binary blob to provide accelerated video decode... at the price of limiting the range of kernel and xorg binaries you can install.

        There is a little board introduced on lilliputing today that would be wonderful, up to 4GB of RAM, EMMC for mass storage, USB3 port, HDMI capable of 2160p. But no accelerated video. Lame.

        Could somebody make one with an SoC with no onboard video and give it a PCIe link instead, then plugging in (or embedding) a low power Radeon for video? Speed isn't even too important since any GPU is going to beat the snot out of a unaccelerated framebuffer and/or software GL on an ARM. Who cares how fast something is on paper, or running Android, when the reality is the speed of every embedded GPU (excepting the Pi) under Linux is zero. So anything beats zero.

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 07 2017, @04:33AM (5 children)

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday July 07 2017, @04:33AM (#536002)

          So much of what I do with the Pis just doesn't care that Ethernet "sucks" - it doesn't even notice.

          However, for "real" stuff that includes video, etc. I move up to Intel NUCs... feels like overkill, is over 4x the price of a fullly functioning Pi, but they are the "next step up" for me.

          Still, I have 4 Pis running full-time at work, each doing their own project, each with a graphic desktop available via VNC on the network - no performance complaints for the simple stuff they are doing. They check code out of a git repo, build locally it in Qt Creator and run simple stuff without breaking a sweat.

          Then, for the same money, I have a single NUC that runs circles around the Pis, but it's severe overkill for little stuff.

          Then, for another cost multiple of 3 or 4, there's the i7 workstation in a "big box" - way more volume occupied, and just a little more speed.

          --
          🌻🌻 [google.com]
          • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday July 07 2017, @04:49AM (4 children)

            by jmorris (4844) on Friday July 07 2017, @04:49AM (#536005)

            Oh I don't doubt they are useful, but the question was whether they could be a desktop replacement. You are remote viewing simple apps over the network from a Pi, you aren't sitting in front of one connected to your primary display and it doesn't sound like you would consider that a good idea. But if the bottleneck could be broke, if something small and low power but with accelerated video and just 'enough' grunt to be viable could ever appear on the marketplace I really think it could be 'enough' computer for quite a few people. But I suspect Microsoft also sees this possibility, another potential netbook situation where the penguin could break out in a market sector where Windows can't compete and thus break the mandatory bundling game. Don't think they will be caught with their pants down a second time.

            • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 07 2017, @11:55AM (2 children)

              by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday July 07 2017, @11:55AM (#536077)

              There's big talk of "Win10 Embedded" but I don't really see it having any appeal, for all the same reasons a Pi isn't an appealing desktop. The things that Windows gives you access to that Linux doesn't just aren't very appealing in a low-powered ARM environment.

              Roll back to 1997 and the best equipment available on the market wasn't an appealing desktop today.

              I do use Chrome (lately, Chrome support in Raspbian has been off, on, off again and on again) in the Pi desktop, and it does perform better when direct connected instead of via VNC, but for my use cases VNC means no monitor keyboard or mouse required and that's more important, and besides, there's a huge 4K monitor and good keyboard and mouse connected to the big box, so why bother with one on the Pis?

              At home, I've toyed with the idea of giving the kids Pi desktops for their bedrooms, but we're in "screen time limit" parenting mode lately (no, 14 hours a day on YouTube is NOT healthy for neuro-social development), so the prototype sits here on my home desk uninstalled, but functional. $100 for a Pi in-case with power and storage is not my first choice for a desktop PC, a $400 NUC is, the size isn't too different - especially when you factor in another $200+ for monitor, keyboard, mouse, but the $100 Pi is a viable option to browse the web for information and education, do word processing, spreadsheets and programming, and learn Linux system operation/maintenance.

              What is "dead" to my world of choice is the FULL SIZE AT case PC, the cost in terms of space is just too high anywhere but my work desk, and even there it's only present because somebody else put it there.

              Oh, another fun form factor is the Intel i5 Compute Stick (not the Atom, might as well play in ARM land instead of dealing with the frustration of Atom wimpishness). I have one of those running Win10, it has a tiny little fan that works pretty hard during a 4 thread compile job, otherwise it's a pretty cool little thing with decently accelerated graphics. Might be fun in Linux too, just don't need another project at the moment.

              --
              🌻🌻 [google.com]
              • (Score: 2) by tibman on Friday July 07 2017, @05:49PM (1 child)

                by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 07 2017, @05:49PM (#536196)

                Mini-ITX can be a really fun build if you need a small (but powerful) PC. Great for lan parties.

                --
                SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
                • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 07 2017, @07:26PM

                  by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday July 07 2017, @07:26PM (#536232)

                  I've put together parts lists for MiniITX systems many times, but never actually pulled the trigger on one... always ended up with something prepackaged and smaller and more power efficient instead.

                  --
                  🌻🌻 [google.com]
            • (Score: 1) by toddestan on Saturday July 08 2017, @09:04PM

              by toddestan (4982) on Saturday July 08 2017, @09:04PM (#536635)

              I have a Pi3 and it's not really feasible for a desktop replacement if you want to do any web browsing. Install a modern browser like Firefox or Chromium and open a typical website and the poor thing just chokes on the weight of the all the scripts and other crap. Don't expect any but the simplest pages to open within a few seconds, with "complicated" sites taking a minute or two. You can pretty much forget about tabbed browsing. It may be a quad-core, but performance is well below a typical P4 system (which is sluggish but still usable). Fact is the ARM chip just isn't that powerful even compared to 15-20 year old x86 processors. Of course, power usage is a different matter.

              Of course, you can still use them as a desktop for things like LibreOffice, or fooling around in Python, VNC into a more powerful machine, or whatever. They have hardware video acceleration so they aren't totally useless for video playback. Or you can use them headless for controllers or whatnot too.

        • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday July 08 2017, @03:36AM

          by kaszz (4211) on Saturday July 08 2017, @03:36AM (#536391) Journal

          This Open Graphics Project [wikipedia.org] from 2006 is probably the path you may need to look into. Connect it to a decent CPU and you got a free MCU+GPU combination. And if you are designing a board, might as well fix 2x Ethernet PHYs to get some real networking performance.

          I have discovered one possible trick with the Raspberry-Pi 3. This model has wireless interfaces and it so happens that those have fast connections to the main CPU. So you can reconnect this data lane to a Ethernet PHY and get real performance. This will need some further investigation to make use of (protocol used between chips).

          Those ATI Radeon chips maybe can be desoldered and reused with a ARM chip on a spinned circuit board?

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 06 2017, @10:09PM (1 child)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday July 06 2017, @10:09PM (#535907) Journal
      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
      • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday July 06 2017, @11:08PM

        by kaszz (4211) on Thursday July 06 2017, @11:08PM (#535926) Journal

        I meant a pull-out keyboard or keyboard+screen folded. These touch screen keyboards.. well they suck. And should the GUI fail, you have no input means.

    • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday July 07 2017, @12:16AM (1 child)

      by jmorris (4844) on Friday July 07 2017, @12:16AM (#535939)

      Um, I can't even find a LAPTOP with a "real" keyboard, what ya talking about?

      • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday July 07 2017, @06:18AM

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday July 07 2017, @06:18AM (#536027) Journal

        If it doesn't have a real keyboard, it's obviously not a laptop.

        My laptop has a terribly bad keyboard, but it is a real keyboard: I mechanically press on it to close electric contacts. It doesn't react on touch, it reacts on force.

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday July 07 2017, @05:20PM (1 child)

      by Pino P (4721) on Friday July 07 2017, @05:20PM (#536187) Journal

      What we are seeing is the migration from desktop PCs to computerphones for people that don't really need PCs because they are in essence a IT consumer not participant.

      A sharp dichotomy between "consumer" hardware and "participant" hardware leads to sticker shock when someone decides to make the transition from being a consumer to being a participant. Some people cope with the price tag by reluctantly remaining on the "consumer" side of the digital divide. In one of the chat rooms I moderate, I see a lot of messages to the effect "I can't do that on mobile. I wish I had a PC, but I can't afford one."

      • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday July 08 2017, @03:48AM

        by kaszz (4211) on Saturday July 08 2017, @03:48AM (#536396) Journal

        Afford?

        Even a 20 US$ x86 PC will do most things people need. It's DIRT cheap these days.

        And those (smart) computerphones can be converted to some level of PC using USB devices and Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) connection. Simultaneous use of MHL and USB is likely to not work but there are USB graphics adapters.

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