OldFartPhil
Define cheap. The least expensive laptop on Dell Refurbished currently is $180 and would easily run any desktop environment, including the heavyweights. Specs are here:
CPU
1x Intel Core i5-6300U (2-Core, 2.40 GHz)
Memory
8 GB (1x 8GB)
HDD
256 GB (1x 256 GB SSD)
Display
14" HD (1366 x 768)
If you’re thinking cheaper yet, you’ll want at least a dual core processor and 4GB of RAM. Just about any business laptop from the last 10 years or so would work, as long as you stay away from bottom of the barrel Celerons or AMD processors and <4GB of RAM. You can run Linux on a very low spec machine, but you’d want to use a lightweight DE and web browsing wouldn’t be a fun experience.
The New Yorker article said Cuban was approached to be a donor, but it doesn’t say whether he is actually a supporter. Apparently, the group is very close-lipped about where their money is coming from (what a surprise).
I don’t want to turn the thread into too much of a political discussion, but when one political party believes in democracy and one party is an existential threat to democracy, there’s no room for spoiler candidates.
Based on the posts in this thread, I see a lot of overlap between urban fantasy fans and science fiction fans. With the exception of Lord of the Rings, I’ve never cared much for high fantasy, but I’ve really enjoyed the urban fantasy series I’ve read. If anyone is interested, I’ve enjoyed…
- The Laundry Files by Charles Stross
- The City We Became and The World We Make by MK Jemisin
- The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher
- The Sandman Slim series by Richard Kadrey
- The Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch
- The Stranger Times series by C.K. McDonnell
That correction is going to be a mess. My company headquarters are in a medium-sized US city. We own (and used to occupy) two downtown office building, a mid-rise and a high-rise. Right now both buildings are mostly empty, with little prospect of them being occupied in the near future.
The murderbot stories get so much praise but I was never able to get into them. I binge read (well, actually binge listened) to the Rivers of London books a few months ago and thought they were first-rate.
I just finished the new Ann Leckie book, Translation State, which I liked very much. If you couldn’t get enough of the the Imperial Radch universe it’s a must read.
Boosting this advice. When I started using Linux as my daily driver (14 years ago), I got into the habit of taking notes on everything: troubleshooting solutions, bug fixes, how-tos, configurations, useful software, etc. It’s not the Arch Wiki, which is a treasure, but I can solve a lot of my own issues just by looking up what I’ve done before.
As someone who’s old enough to remember seeing 2001 on a huge screen when it was first released, it’s hard to express how monumentally spectacular the effects were. It brought the moon and space alive in a way that no movie had done before. The closest comparison I can make is with the first Jurassic Park movie, which was the first time movie audiences experienced living, breathing dinosaurs.
The whole psychedelic transit thing, hotel room/zoo and star baby was pretty obtuse for most audiences. You really needed to read the book to suss out what happened.
Steven King, at his best, is the greatest American novelist of his generation. His character building is unsurpassed and he can definitely turn a phrase. On the other hand, a lot of his books would have benefited from more aggressive editing and he doesn’t always stick his landings. That being said, he’s been a fixture in my library for decades.
I’m glad to see others recommend 11/22/63, which IMHO is the best “modern” King novel (and maybe his best ever). For less well known books, I read Duma Key recently and liked it a lot. I know it’s been mentioned before, The Talsiman is one of my all-time favorite books.
Does it help to encourage users to host their own media rather than upload it to a lemmy/kbin instance. Or is that a minor component of the cost?