Does anyone turn these old devices into a project and install cool software on it only to never use it again? I stop using multiple devices because having several iPads is as useful as having several phones. I install stuff to “give it a longer life” but without purpose I don’t actually use it.
I do suspect its much like Raspberry Pis where people buy them on the thought of doing something with but don't ever get around to it. Still very nice to have the option and if you do actually have a use, you can buy these devices very cheaply second hand. Much cheaper than a pi + touchscreen + battery would be.
A number of people in the Home Assistant community use cheap and/or older tablets as wall-mounted control panels. Android tablets are well-represented, including many Amazon Fire tablets, but there are iPads in the mix too.
What program do you have an issue with? Wine has been supporting a lot of non gaming software for a long time better than Windows itself. Proton has similarly been good for a long time, it has been big. The deck wasn’t some magical finished product it was built on the skelton of steam machines.
Oh Wine is still incredibly buggy, but I'm still a big supporter obviously. Even Microsoft and Adobe products work barely with exactly the right versions and winetricks with the occasional tinkering, interface bugs, crashes. These are bugs that haven't been fixed in many years. I think an interesting development target for them would just be to choose the top 25 productivity apps and make the last 3 or 4 versions work smoothly without requiring users to spend time troubleshooting the installation, activation, getting standard app functions to work, etc..
Valve has leverage with game developers who rely on Steam for distribution to work together to get games working in Proton, but the same relationship doesn't exist for other non-native apps and Wine. So the development really needs to happen on the wine side.
Games and basic UI elements work great, but there's still several WinAPIs unsupported. 2D drawing for example: Paint.net, the in my opinion best image editor in existence, is borked.
Does anyone else get confused by "apps" and "executables"? This one uses the term "Windows Apps" for ".exe" files, I wondered why anyone would want to run a Windows App https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/windows
I don't understand how its better than VM, it says run them like they're native, but its separate windows for single applications, I thought it would use something like WINE.
It should be called "A Windows VM for executables in Linux with native windowing" unless I didn't understand it.
The word "app" has changed in common usage. Most any program you ran on your computer was called an Application way back when, but now it's come to mean... whatever it's supposed to mean now. Whoever wrote the Github site is probably old like me and is using the old vocabulary.
Before Apple's App Store popularized a specific meaning of "app", "app" was shorthand for "application", which perfectly fits a .exe file and any number of executable files/formats.
I struggled with this a lot because of experience with Java applets which implied they were "small apps" which implied "app" meant something... and it did; it meant application, which meant program, which meant, I think, something along the lines of "mostly self contained system to accept user input, compute said input, and return a user-friendly result" to oversimplify.
For a long time I boycotted the term "app" once Apple et al. used it as their term for what I considered "programs" and now I'm just done with caring.
App = program = executable = distinct set of actions triggered by user or automated input = interface
Not really free game bundled with the OS (although the Oregon Trail was in some home PC bundles).
More like game that was tolerated or more likely encouraged to be played during school time. In my 4th-6th grade levels, we'd regularly (once or twice a month) go to computer lab, where we'd have an hour maybe? to fiddle around with the computers. Sometimes there was a specific program we were working on, sometimes it was free choice. In 2nd-6th grade we also had a computer or two in the classroom as one possible free choice activity (or in 2nd grade, I'd always be finishing my work early and asking for 'special permission to play with the computer'), but the software selection was all at least mildly educational. Oregon Trail and Number/Word Munchers were a staple. If nothing else, everyone in my class learned not to go on a trip with 5 people all named the same thing, because it's confusing when someone gets dysentery.
Technologies being subject you the same rules.
The reason I can buy drugs, play online poker, request a ransom or just send money to an unknown at the other end of the world with crypto but can't with a bank transfer isn't technical. The only reason is that banks have to comply to regulation while crypto doesn't.
There are a lot of regulatory burden when trying to make a financial service. KYC, anti money laundering, reporting, privacy, data storage etc. There is basically none (that is enforced anyway) with crypto. That's the only reason it got traction. The technology is terrible. It's hard to come up with something more inefficient, expensive and hard to use. The one and only reason it's used for anything is that it evades regulatory burden.
It's literally "let's burn a lot of coal to run our steam powered car because steam powered cars are not subject to traffic laws" kind of situation. Fix and enforce the law and the steam car disappears. The same will happen to cryptocurrency.
Software efficiency is traded for time efficiency, you see this less with hardware constraints like embedded systems programming. As hardware capabilities increase, efficiency is less necessary. I see a reversal of this with rust (ripgrep is amazing), web assembly, while making programming easy leads to poorly optimized software like electron wrappers.
Google isn’t dumb. They are an advertising company that creates hype with other experimental products (to increase stock prices) they fully intend to dismantle, and buys out functional tech companies.
They are using hype to increase their stock and axe them later to show a better earnings report further increasing stock prices.
They are intelligent and runs on innovative hype but at their heart they’re an advertising company.
That solves nothing, it only lines politician’s pockets. The cost of electricity is the deterrent currently, which is why you don’t see everyone mining. If you want to make electricity cost more, it’ll “solve” more than crypto mining, it’ll just make mostly poor people have a lower standard of life.
The best carbon fee proposals refund the money to taxpayers, equal amount per person. If you emit less CO2 than average, as most poor people do, then you come out ahead.
It doesn’t make much sense, how would money be guaranteed to come back after making its way to through the government and back? The cost of electricity already functions more efficiently; don’t take money out of peoples pockets so you don’t need to give it back.
A pigovian tax by insurance would work better, I definitely think environmental protection is needed but politicians will just use the money they get in nefarious ways.
How can you guarantee that people will get their tax refunds? Their social security payments? The carbon rebate is easier than that, since everybody gets the same amount. Don't even pass the money through the general fund, where it's accessible to politicians.
Collection can be simple too. Charge at major sources like coal mines and oil wells, and the fee gets rolled into the prices of everything downstream.
For anyone into photography, an unrelated topic is that Amazon prime offers unlimited photo storage, you can upload all your RAWs as long as you keep your subscription.
The next generation of cameras should move away from SD cards. I can’t wait until you can stick NVMe on one, it’s a shame they don’t even make any emmc SD cards. Even the iPhone has had that for half a decade now.
Digital cameras really suck, they’re all horrible proprietary hardware devices, basically expensive locked down computers with large sensors that attach to lens through proprietary mounts.
I’ve been at a friends with all the streaming subscriptions. The most used is HBO (been watching Silicon Valley and they got tons of movies), Amazon is second (terrible ads at the beginning, sells movies as well), then Disney+.
