Weren't workstations of the 80s and 90s just powerful microcomputers?
CPU with memory protection (e.g. 68010 plus MMU), SCSI disks, high resolution (about a megapixel), several megabytes of memory, advanced OS : Unix-like, Windows NT or something else.

By that measure, any good low end desktop computer is a workstation. By 2001, that had Windows XP and Ultra DMA IDE modes ; a decade or less later we had SATA with NCQ (no need for SCSI), support for dual monitor and SMP as standard (dual and quad core).

There is a nice improvement going from AHCI to NVMe protocol, though. I/O gets lower latency, less CPU intensive, less "blocking".

That may seem "philosophical" still. At a first approximation latency is halved. The tech will be a good thing to have once the drives get plentiful and cheap.

I mean these are so ridiculously powerful cards that if one buy one, that may be because you wanted to run some demanding and advanced game. There are at least a handful available now for linux desktops. But if you use an open source driver, and it manages to run the game without crashing or debilitating bugs, the driver will likely bottleneck you so much you get like 10% or 20% of the performance.
Way to waste a computer upgrade, both GPU and CPU - you do need to upgrade the latter to play advanced and recent games, too.

The slowest of these cards does over 2 teraflops, there's no way you can remotely use that level of performance and features in games with an open source driver anyway.

If you're living near artillery roads you should be worried by massive howitzers and other dangerous pieces of hardware.

Or if you want to get evil, asm.js
Then write a javascript interpreter in C# ..

I don't have a FirefoxOS device to experience it, but they say they added that feature in an 1.x version. I remember thinking that crap, I thought it's the smartphone for normal people and should be a less intrusive smartphone : if you want to check mail go to the mail app. But you do have legitimate notifications on a phone : SMS and missed calls.

So.. is the web notification feature somewhat old already?
Found this on push notification, says it's supported by no desktop browser
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
And just "notifications", whatever they are : purportedly supported by Chrome 22 and Firefox 22, but I don't know what they are about
https://developer.mozilla.org/...

We've always had "web apps" : the CUPS configuration interface, the web mail I was using in 2001, slash fucking dot.
Well, there was a web before those things. But it looks good when done in moderation (or in some cases, a "web 1.0" application is good). For now we don't seem to have a solution : we get the good, the bad and the garbage unless we go to the trouble of filtering everything. Perhaps something like "javascript can't use more than 640K on a page" would have worked.

I remember slashdot before it used javascript to load comments : expanding a reply meant loading a new web page, either in another tab or in the current tab and do a back/forward dance (reloading the original page if you hit back). That was a pain in the ass and I opened many tabs just to read one slashdot story (more tabs for TFA or links given in comments)

Internet Explorer looks interesting, but it's currently lacking a linux version!

With LLVM using an intermediate representation of code (LLVM IR) and CLR another : MSIL, now called CIL, does that mean it goes C# -> LLVM bytecode -> .NET bytecode?, does the JIT does both steps at once, why doesn't that mean every single language with a LLVM target can now run on the CoreCLR?, was LLVM modified, was what's in my first question horribly wrong?

Note that 90% of energy is wasted in datacenters for autoplaying videos, tracking, web 2.0, "we recommend you these stories", inefficient implementations etc.
Client devices could do with a single MIPS core and an unlit monochrome LCD, servers could run tight code written in C or whatever instead of PHP etc., and serve actual content rather than padding all pages with background noise and 3000x2000 background pictures.

Regarding FM radio at least : there are strong non-technical issues. Local stations (small ones, non profit etc.) would have to go to a middle man for multiplexing, if only digital radio is allowed. If they survive, they might only afford low bandwith : if a musical radio station has to sound like 64K MP3, kiss it good bye.
Then there's the issue of being locked into some codec. MP2 radios have to be junked if you upgrade to AAC, and AAC is not that good anyway : it would be better to throw that stuff out and start again with Opus codec.

Also : not only 20-year-old or 50-year-old radio receivers can be used, but those I own are very recent (a few years old) including that on my cell phone and they only support FM radio (the other pretends to support AM and only receives one station, barely)
So when analog is turned off.. every one loses the ability to receive radio. At best, if there's line-in on your radio (what I call my "radio" has unused shit like a CD player, old ipod dock) you can connect a separate, digital radio to it.

That's right but then I believe that falls in the "license, not royalties" distinction.

You can theoretically play only music not affiliated to the SACEM I guess but good luck with that.

Mein Kampf goes out of copyright in 16 days, I believe.

Linux runs horrible crap in Xaw, xlib, lesstif etc.