I thought it was just a running gag for the MS Browser Engine story but it seems to have infected the rest of the site!

Yes, the current generation Silvermont Atoms are (I believe) all 64bit.

(You might still find prev-gen Saltwells in tablets and phones)

Intel won't kill off x86 entirely - they have their Quark project for Internet of Things.

The problem I was referring to is some Pentiums are Haswell based (core), while others are Silvermont based(atom).

Similarly, there exist both Core and Atom Celerons.

Please dump the Pentium and Celeron brands, which are relics from a bygone era.

Just call your brands either Core or Atom and be done with it.

Obfuscation doesn't help the consumer.

Just on the DC thing, I've been wondering how long those hybrid solar/AC external batteries hold a charge. Not the 5v micro-USB ones for phones but the $150 ones that have 12-19v DC out and 30000mAh capacity.

If the battery half life was decent, one could conceivably use that bushwalking - strap it onto one's rucksack by day. One could conceivably power a NUC and an LED screen.

Though hey there are tablets for such things but it'd be an interesting thought experiment.

you raise a good point but the NUC isn't a *desktop*. It's a small x86-64 box, not much bigger than a vhs cassette, that screws into the back of a monitor.

This is designed for large corporates with lots of cubicle monkeys for whom performance of those Core 2 Duos from 7 years ago was sufficient but they want to save a heap of money on electricity bills. These will be popular when adopting Windows 10. XP --> 10, HDD --> SSD and with better integrated graphics. Did I mention the energy savings?

Relax, you can still buy a performance smashing i7 residing in an enormous watercooled tower if you wish.

For about a third of the price of your shuttle, I bought the fanless Atom NUC. It's no workhorse but good for basic computing such as slashdot commenting! When I have some free time I'll load openelec and android-x86 on it.

It'd be perfect if Intel added a few extra cores - for 75% more I could have bought the dual core Celeron Brix (also fanless).

I'll definitely look at trading up to the forthcoming Braswell Brix or NUC. The Atom should have reasonable resale value and in the next 6 months I will have saved $AU40 on my power bills!

But yeah I'd be a big fan (pun intended) of a Shuttle at work in preference to a noisy beige tower or a laptop.

videoconferencing is an essential business tool of the 21st century for remote workers and virtual communities. It's been submitted to the w3c as webRTC.

In any case, there used to be a Java applet client for FICS, someone has probably written an HTML5 chess client without requiring extensive web specifications to be implemented by each browser.

Single Core 1.46Ghz, 8GB of RAM (complete overkill). 64bit Linux, iceweasel process has NEVER used more than 1.5GB. 3 tabs open currently sitting at 341.3MB

Are you just trolling or is there some mysterious combination of extensions and addons that requires an 8 core box?

Well either you accept the direction the web is moving or you don't. Firefox 3.6, the last of the traditional firefox releases, was 5 years ago... The genie won't be put back in the bottle.

If you want to do videoconferencing, install Skype. Or pick an open source solution, there are plenty.

Which fails the grandma test, since its another piece of technology that grandson has to support and maintain on her computer.

In any case, you're suggesting a browser plugin as an alternative and in the same breath talk about reducing the attack service... Mozilla are proactively reducing reliance on browser plugins, e.g. (1) by supporting HTML5 to create an alternative to Java applets, (2) Developing pdf.js to substitute for Acrobat Reader, (3) Supporting video formats formerly requiring flash (4) Developing shumway for other legacy content. All use the same sandboxing model which reduces the attack service from what plugins provided.

Now you talk about firefox stability with multiple tabs, which are slowly perhaps glacially being addressed by servo and electrolysis. Surely that's a limitation of the implementation that a flaw of videoconferencing?

[Perhaps I should apply for a job at Mozilla; I do spend a good deal of time defending it on here! :) ]

The 'Hello' service may or may not be firefox-only but the technology behind it is in the HTML5 spec. So any compliant HTML5 implementor can trivially support it.

that is, only if the 3 other browser implementors don't stymie efforts by tieing people to their own service. Which should not surprise you that the companies that develop IE, Chrome and Safari each control Skype, Hangouts and FaceTime respectively and have a vested interest in fragmentation.

I'm running the Aurora build (v38) and no. That could be just debian testing, of course. :) But *I think* I have all the relevant codecs installed.

MSE & H.264 is in red on https://www.youtube.com/html5

I might wait for a kernel and xorg update - intel has native VP8 support for their Bay Trail Atom chips. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...

You say bloat, I say functionality.

Let's see there's skype (that requires installing a closed source binary from the evil empire), FaceTime (that only works on Apple hardware), Hangouts (that requires a Google account, and yes there are still people on the planet...) Other technologies exist but those are the most Grandma-friendly.

Videoconferencing from any device on the planet without installing any special software is bloat?