Except that with modern TVs you would almost always want different display settings and profiles for watching movie content vs game content. Having it combined into a single input to the TV makes it impossible to tweak the TV for best picture modes for both. Most TVs have the best picture quality with more complicated calibration settings and PQ algorithms, all of which add enough video lag to be detrimental to playing a video game.

I would have found the second HDMI port to be much more useful as a second output, actually.

So... the camera will be disabled in Airplane mode then?

So will we all be forced to be a new computer every two-three years when the new version of the OS is not compatible with older hardware? That is my biggest complaint against iOS. I have several Apple devices that I would have continued using, except for certain key apps that I want to use that: 1) stop working unless I update to the latest version of the app, 2) the latest version of the app requires upgrading iOS, and 3) the version of iOS required is not supported on that iOS device ==> device now becomes junk (in as little as 3 years).

I have computers that are still functional that are 10 years old, some which cannot run Windows, but perfectly fine still running older versions of Linux, and still get patches. And when its time to upgrade my main computer, I usually upgrade the guts of it (mainboard/CPU/RAM) and keep the rest. Laptops are rather hard to upgrade anymore (soldered RAM, CPUs, inaccessible hard drives), but I wouldn't like the idea of having to re-purchase something like a Carbon X1 every three years because MS doesn't want to support anything older than a few years old or the new version doesn't have drivers for that legacy/unsupported "stuff".

I agree. There was a time when workstation meant a computer used for technical/business stuff, and a PC was a "toy". And during those times workstations were Sun, HP, DEC, etc. I remember using HP-UX machines with "unheard" amounts of RAM (128MB), while a typical PC was still playing games with Expanded vs Extended memory in DOS, typically 4 or 8MB maximum RAM. Linux was not a thing yet. PC's could run Windows 3, but "real" work which needed a Unix workstation meant, Sun, HP, IBM or DEC.

The Sparc/UltraSparc was a very good processor (and so was PA-RISC and the DEC Alpha) and supported 64-bit long before x86 did, but eventually the evolution of the larger x86 PC market grew to where x86 CPUs caught up to, and then outperformed the workstations of old, and made custom RISC processor development costly and irrelevant.

As all the RISC CPUs migrated to IA-64, and then got beat by x86-64, there was also the movement away from the different Unices (HP-UX, Solaris, VMS, etc.) to Linux. It was the combination of x86-64 performance and cost improvements coupled with the explosion of Linux on PC hardware that made the old Workstation model obsolete (SPARC/Solaris, PA-RISC/HP-UX --> x86_64/Linux).

I often include code snippets or shell text in my emails, which I can format as Fixed Space (only one fixed space font, thanks Google), but there is no way I can tell in the web interface of GMail to insert tabs into email text to column align data. (Tab being used to navigate, not enter text).

How hard is to make TAB work like normal tab when inside a text entry box, or just be able to assign some other key sequence to tab (ctl+tab) or something and leave tab for what it was intended to do?

I have heard the old ALT+NUM_KEY pad works to insert a tab character, but that's a hack and useless for me anyway, since I primarily use a tenkeyless keyboard.

If there is a way, someone please enlighten me. Whenever I want to send a technical email, I compose it first in VIM and then I have to use copy/paste in Gmail. How they can't fix this oversight after years of being requested in the forums is beyond me.

Regarding number 3, I have always wondering why, after all these years, Microsoft still has the window close button right next to Maximize, and worse, why Eject is still right next to Format.

Actually, my son has lately been more interested in playing the original Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros on my dragged-it-out-of-the-closet-and-it-still-works-after-30-years NES console than his WiiU. I even have the itch to go back and play Metroid all over again.

The late-80s, early-90s was the pinnacle of gaming. Not just a console / hardware issue, or PCs, the games themselves, the studios, they were were just much better then. I very much miss Westwood Studios, Origin and Sierra On-Line. Offline play, especially adventure games, are just dead now. Game development has just gotten so stagnant and repetitive. Most games out there are rehashes/repeats, next sequel in a bad series (EA Sports). Miss the King's Quests, LSL, Wing Commander, Command and Conquer days... (yeah, when "online multiplayer" meant you had a $200 external 28.8 modem - heh).

There are lots of reasons for not doing so. Lack of support for SHA-2 is one of them. Given the myriads of different OSes and platforms I have run filechecks on, MD5 is always available, and usually SHA-1. Only on recent Linux machines do I have sha256sum and sha512sum, but that doesn't do me much good if someone is using an old Solaris machine and only has access to MD5.

Also, I am not transferring files over the public Internet, so MD5/SHA1 is reasonably fine on a private internal only network. I would agree that files obtained over the public Internet should use SHA-256/512, but that doesn't make the older ones completely useless. I find SHA-1 the most useful for file checksums internally where I work, because then my checksums also match all the checksums used by Subversion.

I recall purchasing (actually it was my parents doing the purchasing) back in the day for a dedicated 80387 chip. Mainly so our computer could run Falcon 3.0 in High-Fidelity mode. heh.

From the OS point of view, module, vs core, vs HT, it doesn't matter. The OS will see each bulldozer or HT core as a "single" core. For some of our HPC machines ($20K), we turn HT off because those extra "cores" confuse the benchmarking/load balancer software because half the cores "aren't real". Also the HT cores share the cache, so effectively jobs run with reduced cache or increased misses (see numastat). Turbo Boost makes it even harder. Have to shop around for the CPUs with the most non-HT cores, which can maintain the highest mulitipliers under full load. Multi-threaded isn't always better if it means slowing each core down by 200-600MHz. So many other things like L1 cache, memory bandwidth, ALUs, etc. that has a bigger impact in the real world than FPU.

If you depend on FPU a lot, you probably know enough about computer architecture to also know what kind of CPU resources you need for your worksets. The vast masses don't really need FPU and it's the easiest thing to share due to size and lack of need for majority of today's type of computing.

My apologies, phantomfive, I meant to reply to the AC's original post, not yours.

The day when Slackware picks up systemd is probably when I throw in the towel and just switch to MacOSX or FreeBSD.

Seriously though, I would like to know what is unusable out of the box in Slackware? Granted, I appreciate it's not the most new-user friendly, but I wouldn't consider it unusable. In my opinion it is the best option for those that just want "plain ol' Linux", and know or want to learn the nuts and bolts about linux (it is easy to understand the entire boot process and read every line of the init scripts - it is not bloated). I also appreciate the simple package management system, combined with slackbuilds.org, which makes downloading/upgrading custom packages as simple as using tar and editing a single build script. Slackware also handles 32-bit and 64-bit very cleanly using AlienBob's stuff.

Having been a Linux user since 1994, I still prefer Slackware because I know how it works, how it boots, how to build packages, and it's the about the closest thing to vanilla kernel and vanilla packages as you can get and still have the advantages of a distro.

Perhaps Intel branded boards are that way, but I have a Jetway mini-ITX NAS/server system running a D525 Atom with 6 SATA ports, which is perfect for one SSD (OS/boot), one DVD/CD, and then 4 RAIDed spinning disks.

While I'd like to switch over to more LEDs, every LED bulb I have purchased so far has had manufacturer instructions that they should NOT be mounted in an enclosed fixture (such as a ceiling dome). So what are the millions of people supposed to do when these fixtures, which basically only allow incandescents, have no suitable replacements? Same applies for certain types of recessed lighting - CFLs and LEDs are not allowed in some fixtures.

I stopped buying CFLs because in the winter they take forever to reach brightness (horrible for a bathroom) and they are a bigger environmental mess to dispose of than incandescents. LEDs have potential, but I don't understand the reasoning for a complete ban when the new technology is not a suitable replacement in 100% of use scenarios.

Just to clarify, only the newly released iPhone 5S/5C actually has CDMA and GSM in the same physical phone. For iPhone 5 and older, there is both a CDMA model and a GSM model, but not in the same handset, so moving an iPhone from Verizon/Sprint to ATT/T-Mobile isn't physically possible even if it were unlocked.

Not true. The only iPhone which supports all US carriers' data networks with a single SKU is the new iPhone 5C/5S. For iPhone5, there is only one model that supports AWS (A1428) and that only became available in March 2013. The iPhone 4S and earlier models have no AWS support at all, and there are still a lot of iPhone 4/4S's around.

So the new iPhone 5C/5S US models will work on all carriers. (The A1453 is a superset of the A1533, so technically the "Sprint" version is slightly superior.) However, Canadians might be a little upset that the US models (A1453/A1533) do not support LTE band 4 and band 7 in the same handset, so that's not quite optimal for carriers such as Rogers which uses both.

I think it's a bit disingenious to say all GSM-network iPhones support AWS when in reality only some iPhones less than 6 months old actually do, and the version Apple finally got right (all US carriers in a single handset) is just NOW coming out.