Posts by Snow Hill Island
11 posts • joined Wednesday 12th October 2011 10:09 GMT
Posted in Review: HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook
Are Chromebooks the new "No OS supplied" option?
Looks like a decent spec for a "general use" laptop, but I wouldn't want Chrome OS or Ubuntu on there myself. How difficult is it to completely wipe off Chrome OS and get any given Linux distro installed?
Are there any UEFI nasties, or can you boot a UEFI aware install disk via an external optical drive, and just wipe the disk and install the distro of your choice? (Probably Sabayon in my case)
Posted in Ten ancestors of the netbook
Too long lived... for the manufacturers
Bought an eee 4G at Christmas after it's first release. Had Xandros on it, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Puppy, then Gentoo. I'd still be using it now if I hadn't got someone else's eee 900 when they bought a newer Samsung netbook, but that eee 900 is my main computer for home use. At work I've got access to machines with 16 cores, zippy SSDs and 128GB memory, but I don't need that at home.
Saying that, I would have bought an OLPC XO instead of the eee, if you didn't have to have a US mailing address to use "buy one give one" at the time. I'd still buy one or maybe two now, if they were generally available to the public. C'mon OLPC, how about it?
Ben
Posted in Chinese e-cars to turn London cabs green
Re: Where will the power come from?
Hasn't Boris heard? Ofgem already thinks there's a risk of power shortages risk by 2015. So by 2020 there will be a risk of not being able to get a cab home and you'll have to walk home along the unlit streets. On the bright side, it won't be all that late, because the nightclubs will be dark and quiet. On an even brighter note, if the power's out, all the beer will come from a proper hand pump....
Posted in Jam today: Raspberry Pi Ram doubled
Pi and chips
Oh well, the price for getting a piece of the pi early means that you get a different filling with your pi and chips.
:-)
Thumbs up for the previous revision (putting mounting holes in the PCB...) Now I have even less reasons for not buying a second pi.
Do these things have a built in 3G or 4G connection?
If so, then $199 might make sense when bought with an expensive data contract...? (Not that I'll be buying one though...)
Posted in Review: Raspberry Pi
Waiting for Accelerated Xorg drivers
Well, I'm reserving judgement until:-
1. my Pi arrives
2. Accelerated Xorg drivers become available.
Posted in HUD's up! Ubuntu creates menu-free GUI
Ubuntu, now a synonym for Unnovation
Ubuntu used to mean "Brown", but thanks to our ever evolving language now means "Unnovation" (i.e. the art of coming up with new, original ideas which are no better than the current status quo.)
Posted in Boffins build bionic battery
So... It looses 50% of it's capacity in 150 charges....
Or at least, that's the case if it starts out at 10 X normal capacity, and ends up on 5X.
"...which would be one year or more of operation, the battery is still five times more effective than lithium-ion batteries on the market today," Kung claimed."
So how long before it drops to 1/10th of it's capacity then? Is it an exponential drop off in capacity, or linear with number of charge cycles?
I wouldn't hold my breath for an ASUS update.
As the owner of a first generation linux based eee-pc, I've managed to keep that up to date and still use it.... No thanks to Asus though.
First problems showed up in less than a year when the (out of date at launch) awful version of Xandros Linux couldn't be easily updated to provide a Flash plugin that worked, due to the use of old/incompatible system libraries.
At that point, I just gave up, wiped the SSD and stuck a better Linux distro on there:- Gentoo, believe it or not. Still got that installation on it now, and it's still up to date, although the regular re-compiles of Chromium to keep it up to date take a loooooong time.
Surely there's only one thespian who has all the passion required to do the Jobs properly...
Stephen Fry!
