TLUG Mailing List

On 4 July 2018 at 04:34, Curt Sampson wrote:

I usually have a number of vim sessions open; they don't use any
significant memory AFIK. (Maybe 20 MiB unshared memory for each
process.)

I asked for comparison to VS Code; you wrote it consumed about 500 MB. I didn't think vim will use that much.

> I don't do gaming. I only want a large monitor so I can have
> multiple editing windows comfortably visible on the screen without
> having to ruin my eyes any further. Also, I find it very helpful to
> have documentation open and visible at the same time, ideally on a
> second monitor.

Do you use a 4K monitor? I've found since I started using one I'm
happy with just one monitor now

No, I don't. I guess that would be an option. Although not in my budget right now.

(and appreciate the convenience of
dealing with layout on only one).

I use the second monitor only for reading documentation. I also use a different browser for reading docs. There is no layout to worry about then.

At this point I find FullHD (1920x1080) rather cramped and I wouldn't
want to do any serious work on less than a 2.5K monitor. 4K is large:
20% more screen real estate than a 2.5K monitor and a FullHD monitor
together (and twice a pair of FullHD monitors).

Well, one thing is sure, my wife would absolutely love such a large monitor for watching movies (or right now, the football world cup, even if unfortunately, Japan crashed out yesterday).

> In the worst case I could rededicate it to something else, like
> installing SIMH and running a VAX emulation with OpenVMS although I
> will probably do that on a Raspberry Pi instead.

Just for reference, a Pentium N4200 system is way, way beyond even a
Raspberry Pi 3 for both CPU and I/O. Even my Celeron N3550 is
considerably faster than my Pi 3.

I realise that, but a Pi is perfectly adequate to run OpenVMS on a VAX emulation via SIMH. It's probably faster than the original VAX 3xxx that the emulator emulates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1577ss-3qM

Besides, I will only be using this to compile and test my code on OpenVMS. Previously I did it on the deathrow cluster but unfortunately they have taken that down.

> At that small size, when you don't have to worry about the space it
> takes up, there is always something else you can do with it. In fact
> this is part of the attraction of these small fanless PCs.

Right. It's worth mentioning that the Livia Zs have two Gigabit
Ethernet ports as well, so they are also handy for routers and certain
server applications as well.

For that I prefer headless hardware though, for example PCEngines.ch.

> Indeed, at that price tag, I would probably consider the Aleutia R50 instead.

The R50 is a pretty sweet box, but it's _way_ more expensive than
anything we've been discussing so far and they are rather low-powered.
They're using mobile CPUs (the 'U' suffix) which simply don't compare
with desktop CPUs, such as the i3-8100 I mentioned. And the Liva Z
Plus with a better mobile i5 is less than half the price.

I seriously doubt the extra performance would make much of a difference for what I do.

System CPU PassMark System Price
Generic ITX i3-8100 8057 ¥70k
Liva Z Plus i5-7200U 4676 ¥74k (¥54k + drive/mem)
Aleutia R50 i5-6260U 4363 ¥160k
Aleutia R50 i3-6100U 3610 ¥117k

The R50 can take up to 32 GB, which means it would take a while until it becomes obsolete for lack of RAM so the expense would be spread out over many years. But none of this is in my budget right now anyway.

But thanks for the info.

Re: [tlug] fanless pcs