111–120 of 357 posts
I love the idea of OpenBSD but have only had a couple of sad reintroductions over the years and never spent the time apparently required to "get it just right" before needing to get something else done. It feels like a base install leaves you in several hours of configuration debt, and I apparently don't have the concentration span to dig my way out to somewhere interesting and not just half way back to productive on…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we need to take a step back and see the big picture. There are 10-year olds computers sitting unused; as a whole, it can fill a percentage of usages. If it does then the people using them don't need to buy another one, new or refurbished. If they don't need to buy, other people can't sell as easily. If they can't sell as easily, they might use it longer, and not need/want to buy another one, old or refurbishe…
I believe many of us are aware of the bigger picture outlined by you, but you keep ignoring the point that the previous 10-year old computers burn much more electricity. And as I already said, the newer more efficient machines have been built already so we might as well use them and help the planet by using less watts. The process you describe is yet to happen e.g. the computers I have I don't want to replace unless…
Again, I'm not saying what you're doing is bad, if everyone could fulfill their digital needs and wants out of second hand, that'd be awesome. I only wanted to point out that using less electricity isn't automatically better.
If you are happy not surfing most of the Web, any computer is good enough. It's usually browsers and web pages that brings these older PCs down.
Presumably the result of Google making Chromium more and more like a whole OS (and everyone else following along). Is it ridiculous to give a browser such fine-grained access to your computer? If we were actually designing web standards for usability (instead of for maximising attention) our browsers would look al= lot more like Web 1.0 and nothing like Web 3.0!
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It does not. Slow hardware _can_ give you a certain amount of _motivation_ for speeding up your software, but this is by no means a given (if software running slowly on your own computer automatically made you optimize it, there would not be software that is really slow even on fast hardware, and there clearly is). If you care about making software fast, you invest time in the measurements-ideas-measurements loop, wh…
>if software running slowly on your own computer automatically made you optimize it I recently changed 1 byte in Chrome.dll and decreased the lag for copying large images by a factor of 2-3. (The UI freezes for 5-10 seconds. Turns out it's re-encoding a 2MB JPG into a 20MB PNG for the clipboard, at compression level 6 no less!) I put up with it for years thinking there was nothing I could do, but one day I decided to…
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> It still makes sense to use a decade-old computer. I don't really think it does, at least not some of them. A lot of those older machines are just running really, really high idle power draw. Ex: Pentium 4/5, Core 2 Duo, Athlon64, etc. Running from 40 to 100 watts idle. For comparison, a new RPI will go as low as ~1-3 watt idle, tops out at ~5-7 watts under full load, and will generally have better performance char…
A decade ago was 2013, the pentium 4 is at least 13 years old now, but entered production 23 years ago. There's still a lot of utility to be had from a 10 year old machine. My daily driver laptop os a lenovo t420 which came out in 2011. Sure it can't play games but it'll do fine with youtube, programming, etc. My server box is also a 2012 era machine, it's a 3770k build. It's perfectly fine for what I use it for. Yea…
But comparing spending 40 bucks on craigslist or ebay for an old pentium/core 2 duo, vs getting an rpi... You're probably better off with the Pi (assuming you can source it, which is not a given atm).
I don't even buy most of mine used, I just get hand-me-downs from friends/family because they want to get rid of the machine and ask me to wipe the drive in exchange for the hardware, but even at an upfront cost of free, a machine using 100 watts over a year is 80 bucks in my region, and my power is right around the US average.
Plus power in my region is tiered, so the first 650kwh per month are cheap, the next 350 are avg, and the rest are expensive. So adding machines at this point is actually closer to ~$130 a year at 100 watts idle (paying for t3 rates).
Personally, it's just not worth it to me to take a freebie that runs me $100+ in costs a year. Not even accounting for the knock-on costs, like the extra AC needed because 100 watts is a small heater.
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So sure - lots of older machines do just fine (the end of the core 2 duo line is quite reasonable, and most laptops are actually fine) but it's really probably worth measuring the power draw.
The five year cost of operating that rpi is ~$30, the five year cost of operating a 100 watt machine are ~$450. And I can run a LOT more low power machines and stay in my t1/t2 pricing for power.
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I believe many of us are aware of the bigger picture outlined by you, but you keep ignoring the point that the previous 10-year old computers burn much more electricity. And as I already said, the newer more efficient machines have been built already so we might as well use them and help the planet by using less watts. The process you describe is yet to happen e.g. the computers I have I don't want to replace unless…
Oh I'm well aware that newer machines use less electricity and that's good; it's just not necessarily true that, looking at the entire lifecycle, it is better for the planet compared to taking your older computer out of the closet. Again, I'm not saying what you're doing is bad, if everyone could fulfill their digital needs and wants out of second hand, that'd be awesome. I only wanted to point out that using less el…
It's a balancing act between what we need to get our jobs done, what are our ergonomic preferences -- I have the so-called "lap desk" (basically two parallelepiped-shaped pillows and a well-designed plate with USB extensions to put on top of them) where I like to work on the couch or the bed -- and what is kinda sorta good for the planet.
I can't hyper-optimize only for the planet. I am doing my best but obviously everyone else has to help a little bit as well.
Thanks for entertaining this discussion, it was interesting.
I try to use w3m a lot for that stuff. Many sites still have a cheeseburger menu made out of a tree of lists up the top of the page, and require CSS indentation or borders to render discussions nicely. Are there terminal browsers that support these features better?
The problem with arguments like these is to me two-fold: 1. Physical space. Most of the older tech takes too much space. I don't live in a mansion and I have no dedicated rooms just for big bulky computers. 2. Power consumption, heat, noise. I would love to be less consumerist and use stuff from 15 years ago and stop feeding greedy corporations but... the old stuff consumes 90 to 200 watts, heats up easily and notice…
>the old stuff consumes 90 to 200 watts, heats up easily and noticeably Which is great when it's -30 outside, like today. :)
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It does not. Slow hardware _can_ give you a certain amount of _motivation_ for speeding up your software, but this is by no means a given (if software running slowly on your own computer automatically made you optimize it, there would not be software that is really slow even on fast hardware, and there clearly is). If you care about making software fast, you invest time in the measurements-ideas-measurements loop, wh…
>if software running slowly on your own computer automatically made you optimize it I recently changed 1 byte in Chrome.dll and decreased the lag for copying large images by a factor of 2-3. (The UI freezes for 5-10 seconds. Turns out it's re-encoding a 2MB JPG into a 20MB PNG for the clipboard, at compression level 6 no less!) I put up with it for years thinking there was nothing I could do, but one day I decided to…
https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:ui/...
An improvement would be to replace EncodeBGRASkBitmap with FastEncodeBGRASkBitmap so that it uses the fastest zlib level instead of the default (6). This is what the Linux X11 (ozone) implementation uses. This would be an easy fix to upstream if someone wants to do it.