ZOTAC NEN, while not entry level at €900, was quite capable at that time with an i5 CPU and GTX 960 and good luck putting such hardware into a box the size of Mac mini, just thicker. I have it and two years later it still handles well any Linux-compatible game I throw at it. It's quiet and unobtrusive.
Having SteamOS preinstalled, preconfigured and tested on a capable, quiet and tiny system was definitely worth its price. BTW, I have a self-built desktop PC with dual booting, a RAID and whatnot, so it's not that I couldn't build an ITX SteamOS PC - but it would still be like four times bigger volume than ZOTAC.
However, I agree that the niche of tiny gaming PCs is tiny, it's fully occupied by ZOTAC and with the price tag it's definitely not "console replacement".
The fix could be quite easy: let's remove all particle filters from plants with high emission. Grey skies will be back, less light week reach the surface.
What is either a coincidence or perhaps a trend, both CDPROJEKT RED and Flying Wild Hog are Polish companies.
Piracy used to be rampant in Poland, partially because people were too poor to spend $60 on a game, but partially because some games were never published in Poland and thus unavailable legally. Publishers of localised versions were using most outrageous DRM solutions - as a result many games I bought 10-15 years ago are unplayable today.
Guys running game companies in Poland today suffered these issues when they were kids, which might explain their stance.
You seem to confuse SteamOS with Steam runtime. Steam runtime is, as you noted, a common set of libraries, while SteamOS I'd a distribution, so it unifies everything, from the kernel, through libraries, a compositor, to the unified user interface. Yes, just having a standard set of libraries is not enough, this is why Valve removed Tux icon or the whole Linux platform support concept from their store: they just cannot guarantee that a game will work on any weird Linux setup out there. Even Ubuntu (ie the only officially supported distribution) proved to be a moving target.
You're right about MMOs, but there are AAA games on Linux, e.g. Alien Isolation, Shadow of Mordor, Witcher 2. What is more important, quality of ports increases steadily.
I've recently reached the point I can live without Windows-only games as I have enough to play on Linux.
And how is car production different from today software solutions? Microsoft or myriad of open source developers create an OS, Oracle or someone provides a database, someone else an integration toolkit, somebody else designs a schema and a frontend and finally a hosting/SaaS vendor puts it all together and configures the whole package.
I am sure there are quite a few modelling enthusiasts among slashdotters, but there are many forums dedicated to model railroading, with subforums focusing on automation and landscaping/structures, complete with video tutorials of cool tricks (some of them really simple).
If you have a chance to kickstart your collection, I would definitely suggest investing any saved money in DCC equipment - it makes many things simple which would be a chore otherwise.
My advice though is similar to the one I would give to someone getting into programming, electronics or any other hobby: don't overengineer, start simple, but with options to expand, be ready to discard everything you created initially and to start again from scratch. Maybe start with some flat but elaborate layout to practice control of points and trains? Or quite the opposite, start with a simple loop, maybe with a siding or a passing loop, but surround it with interesting terrain? Trying to get your first layout to have both complicated track layout and elaborate landscape features may result in a disappointment. You obviously have some fundamental questions to answer too (shunting or mainline? A standalone diorama or a module? etc.)
I'd say: yes, if you look under the hood. How many of us started with editing save files using hex editor?
Modding, creating bots and cheating (all three often overlap) are a great first step. You learn how games are structured, you learn some scripting (Lua, Python, etc. depending on games), even some AI programming for bots.
In a world of unprincipled people (such as people who sacrifice freedom for safety), I guess principled people would sound "crazy" to those people.
Freedom is not one thing, the intentionally vague use of it just hurts your argument. RMS gives up a certain amount of freedoms for safety too so your argument is invalid anyway.
RMS is a todays hermit. He thinks that conveniences of modern life are enslaving him, so he learned to live without them and sees it as liberation. What he does is not different than refusal to use money (seen as Mammon), or many rules by which Amish or orthodox Jews live.
You can endlessly polish your elegant solutions for decades (see Hurd) while the rest of the world happily uses "technologies that are just barely able to solve the problem".
Under communist rule maximum detention time was 24 hours, 48 in some countries. It was mainly a tool for harassing opposition. Thousands of people were being repeatedly detained, without any charges. Some were held for 24 hours, then released only to be captured 2-5 minutes later and detained for another 24 hours, rinse and repeat.
It only works for a few minutes, as the flashlight heats up to match your body temperature, and wouldn't work at all where ambient temps are remotely similar to body temperature. She also got only a tiny amount of power and light out of it, which could be provided for weeks or months by a watch battery without the expensive peltier in the mix.
Slightly more interesting than vinegar and water mixed together in a model volcano, but the real question is whether she learned something valuable in all of this.
Others already commented, but the fact is that a flashlight is rarely used for more than 15 minutes and temperatures in whole Europe and most of North America (especially Canada) are almost all the time and everywhere significantly below body temperature, especially when/where a flashlight is needed (e.g. at night or in a basement).
I agree about batteries, but they have a very bad habit of running out of juice just when they are most needed. And it is difficult to look for a replacement battery in darkness;) This thing is zero-maintenance, so a perfect emergency source of light, not a whole-night-march-through-woods source of light.
Yet another influential person, for whom, like for the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Internet is "Neuland", Terra Incognita, a "Here Be Dragons" place, foreign and scary.
"It wasn't long ago that asteroid mining was only found in the pages of science fiction. Now [...] a Kick Starter campaign aimed at raising public awareness about asteroid mining..."
A Kickstarter campaign to raise money to raise awareness still seems like a few steps from mining asteroids...
Also their business model seems somewhat speculative. One of the main ideas seems to be that they can get around the return-it-to-earth problem by not returning it to earth. What good will the mining do then, you ask? Well, they'll just sell the resources to the Mars colony:
Space habitats, space stations are going to need hundreds of thousands or millions of liters of water, but there are some asteroids 75 meters across that are water rich. Just one has enough hydrogen and oxygen to fuel every Space Shuttle that’s ever been launched. It’s useful for fuel, its useful for supporting life and it’s full-blown radiation shielding for all those people talking about going to Mars. So, that is a resource that is of near-term interest.
Yes, it is speculative as any new and breakthrough business plan. It is very risky, very dependent on progress in other areas (like the trip to Mars and establishing a colony there), but it is potentially very lucrative.
And yes, it moved from the sci-fi pages to the realm of business plans and strategies. Far-fetched and speculative, but still business plans with financial backing, even if for the first step now.
The Weyland-Yutani Corporation will not be created in a day, you know.
I will add to all other uninformed responses with mine:
Aren't they endlessly into the singularity, but never actually reach it? I mean, they speed up almost to the speed of light (hence x-ray bursts), so time slows down for them more and more.
The snippet in the sig is sufficient, because Western civilisation forgot about this heritage. The EU documents do not even mention Christian ethics as the foundation of Europe. Which is kind of WTF, because e.g. "Give the emperor what belongs to the emperor, give God what belongs to God, and give me what is mine" is the foundation of religion-state separation. Did it always work properly? No, but we are talking about basics here, not practicalities.
But I agree that the whole citation is much more, it is an atheist admitting that it is possible and beneficial to reconcile science and religion - very strong declaration, very strong.
Sorry to dissappoint you, but in all totalitarian states (Nazi Germany, Soviet Union and its sattelite communist states etc.) majority didn't care. I remember the '80s in communist Poland, during the Martial Law period. Most people no longer cared. Independent TV broadcasts, which were overlayed on the official TV channel, were despised, as they "deprived people of their sitcoms". Most people just wanted to be left alone. "We have basic food and TV, why bother?" Underground dissidents were considered "troublemakers". And it was shortly after the Solidarity movement, which involved like 25% of the population.
Bread and circuses are more important to masses than freedom. Change is always driven by the few who care.
With glass, all I have to do is say something like, "OK Glass, record video" (or whatever the actual command is).
Well, I would call someone wearing smartglasses and saying "OK Glass, record video" at least as conspicuous as someone taking a smartphone out of a pocket and recording. Wait a decade or so when it will be possible to communicate with wearable computers without speaking.
You just described a private assisstant. People were entrusting their whole lives, including most intimate details, to selected individuals for ages. And these individuals could cheat on their employers, spread gossips or even blackmail them. This was a significant risk. And yet many people considered this risk smaller than benefits of being able to focus on things important to them, while the assisstant took care of all things mundane. Caveat: personal assistants of this type were extremely expensive. It was not a work assistant, answering phonecalls and arranging meetings 8 (maybe 10) hours a day. These were people living in the same house, sharing lives of their employers.
Fast forward to present and personal assistants become available to almost everyone. Risks are mainly the same: you have to share your life with someone, including intimate details maybe. Difference: instead of a human being you have a piece of software backed by a corporation. So instead of having an individual who could cheat on you, your data becomes a part of a database and you are fed taylored ads (best scenario) or your personal data is sold to the highest bidder and anything may happen (worst scenario). The best scenario does not differ much from having a trusty personal assistant, whom you have to pay, while the worst case scenario is still probably better than being blackmailed by a former assisstant.
Intelligence is still recognized comparatively, usually related to something like the capability to resolve difficult or ambiguous problems with similar or greater effect than humans, or can learn and react to dynamic environmental situations to similar effect as other living things.
The second part is an important milestone for me. Take the Big Dog - a marvel of robotics in itself. If it interacted with environment and its operator on a level that real dogs interact with environment and their masters, we would have a real breakthrough. An essential thing would be to make it learn new tricks, like a dog learns, instead of programming them in.
My point was that any attempt to build such a thing inevitably leads to dictatorship.
No, it doesn't.
I know it is cool to bash religion on/., and the Catholic Church in particular, but the pope, which grew up in a totalitarian country (John Paul II) stated 20 years ago:
As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.
It is possible if voters either agree on a set of totalitarian principles, or simply do not care. It seems that this is what is happening now in the US. I do not see mass protests against the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, War on Drugs, all computer-related discrimination and restrictions. It is also not popular enough among voters to build a new party, or to compell one of parties to change their stance.
As long as voters in the US either approve this new trend, or simply do not care, both parties will continue introducing further restrictive laws.
Slashdot Mirror
So, you're not happy with a closed binary drivers on Linux, but happy to use a completely closed computing device, i.e. a smart tv?
ZOTAC NEN, while not entry level at €900, was quite capable at that time with an i5 CPU and GTX 960 and good luck putting such hardware into a box the size of Mac mini, just thicker. I have it and two years later it still handles well any Linux-compatible game I throw at it. It's quiet and unobtrusive.
Having SteamOS preinstalled, preconfigured and tested on a capable, quiet and tiny system was definitely worth its price. BTW, I have a self-built desktop PC with dual booting, a RAID and whatnot, so it's not that I couldn't build an ITX SteamOS PC - but it would still be like four times bigger volume than ZOTAC.
However, I agree that the niche of tiny gaming PCs is tiny, it's fully occupied by ZOTAC and with the price tag it's definitely not "console replacement".
The fix could be quite easy: let's remove all particle filters from plants with high emission. Grey skies will be back, less light week reach the surface.
What is either a coincidence or perhaps a trend, both CDPROJEKT RED and Flying Wild Hog are Polish companies.
Piracy used to be rampant in Poland, partially because people were too poor to spend $60 on a game, but partially because some games were never published in Poland and thus unavailable legally. Publishers of localised versions were using most outrageous DRM solutions - as a result many games I bought 10-15 years ago are unplayable today.
Guys running game companies in Poland today suffered these issues when they were kids, which might explain their stance.
You seem to confuse SteamOS with Steam runtime. Steam runtime is, as you noted, a common set of libraries, while SteamOS I'd a distribution, so it unifies everything, from the kernel, through libraries, a compositor, to the unified user interface.
Yes, just having a standard set of libraries is not enough, this is why Valve removed Tux icon or the whole Linux platform support concept from their store: they just cannot guarantee that a game will work on any weird Linux setup out there. Even Ubuntu (ie the only officially supported distribution) proved to be a moving target.
Digital software distribution could be big, too. A game purchased on Steam can mean a couple hours of saturated broadband.
You're right about MMOs, but there are AAA games on Linux, e.g. Alien Isolation, Shadow of Mordor, Witcher 2. What is more important, quality of ports increases steadily.
I've recently reached the point I can live without Windows-only games as I have enough to play on Linux.
And how is car production different from today software solutions? Microsoft or myriad of open source developers create an OS, Oracle or someone provides a database, someone else an integration toolkit, somebody else designs a schema and a frontend and finally a hosting/SaaS vendor puts it all together and configures the whole package.
I am sure there are quite a few modelling enthusiasts among slashdotters, but there are many forums dedicated to model railroading, with subforums focusing on automation and landscaping/structures, complete with video tutorials of cool tricks (some of them really simple).
If you have a chance to kickstart your collection, I would definitely suggest investing any saved money in DCC equipment - it makes many things simple which would be a chore otherwise.
My advice though is similar to the one I would give to someone getting into programming, electronics or any other hobby: don't overengineer, start simple, but with options to expand, be ready to discard everything you created initially and to start again from scratch. Maybe start with some flat but elaborate layout to practice control of points and trains? Or quite the opposite, start with a simple loop, maybe with a siding or a passing loop, but surround it with interesting terrain? Trying to get your first layout to have both complicated track layout and elaborate landscape features may result in a disappointment. You obviously have some fundamental questions to answer too (shunting or mainline? A standalone diorama or a module? etc.)
I'd say: yes, if you look under the hood. How many of us started with editing save files using hex editor?
Modding, creating bots and cheating (all three often overlap) are a great first step. You learn how games are structured, you learn some scripting (Lua, Python, etc. depending on games), even some AI programming for bots.
In a world of unprincipled people (such as people who sacrifice freedom for safety), I guess principled people would sound "crazy" to those people.
Freedom is not one thing, the intentionally vague use of it just hurts your argument. RMS gives up a certain amount of freedoms for safety too so your argument is invalid anyway.
RMS is a todays hermit. He thinks that conveniences of modern life are enslaving him, so he learned to live without them and sees it as liberation. What he does is not different than refusal to use money (seen as Mammon), or many rules by which Amish or orthodox Jews live.
Good enough is perfect.
You can endlessly polish your elegant solutions for decades (see Hurd) while the rest of the world happily uses "technologies that are just barely able to solve the problem".
Under communist rule maximum detention time was 24 hours, 48 in some countries. It was mainly a tool for harassing opposition. Thousands of people were being repeatedly detained, without any charges. Some were held for 24 hours, then released only to be captured 2-5 minutes later and detained for another 24 hours, rinse and repeat.
Sad to see the UK following such example.
Google Chrome shapes into a really nice OS, it just lacks a decent browser.
It only works for a few minutes, as the flashlight heats up to match your body temperature, and wouldn't work at all where ambient temps are remotely similar to body temperature. She also got only a tiny amount of power and light out of it, which could be provided for weeks or months by a watch battery without the expensive peltier in the mix.
Slightly more interesting than vinegar and water mixed together in a model volcano, but the real question is whether she learned something valuable in all of this.
Others already commented, but the fact is that a flashlight is rarely used for more than 15 minutes and temperatures in whole Europe and most of North America (especially Canada) are almost all the time and everywhere significantly below body temperature, especially when/where a flashlight is needed (e.g. at night or in a basement).
I agree about batteries, but they have a very bad habit of running out of juice just when they are most needed. And it is difficult to look for a replacement battery in darkness ;) This thing is zero-maintenance, so a perfect emergency source of light, not a whole-night-march-through-woods source of light.
Yet another influential person, for whom, like for the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Internet is "Neuland", Terra Incognita, a "Here Be Dragons" place, foreign and scary.
"It wasn't long ago that asteroid mining was only found in the pages of science fiction. Now [...] a Kick Starter campaign aimed at raising public awareness about asteroid mining..."
A Kickstarter campaign to raise money to raise awareness still seems like a few steps from mining asteroids...
Also their business model seems somewhat speculative. One of the main ideas seems to be that they can get around the return-it-to-earth problem by not returning it to earth. What good will the mining do then, you ask? Well, they'll just sell the resources to the Mars colony:
Yes, it is speculative as any new and breakthrough business plan. It is very risky, very dependent on progress in other areas (like the trip to Mars and establishing a colony there), but it is potentially very lucrative.
And yes, it moved from the sci-fi pages to the realm of business plans and strategies. Far-fetched and speculative, but still business plans with financial backing, even if for the first step now.
The Weyland-Yutani Corporation will not be created in a day, you know.
I will add to all other uninformed responses with mine:
Aren't they endlessly into the singularity, but never actually reach it? I mean, they speed up almost to the speed of light (hence x-ray bursts), so time slows down for them more and more.
Excelent offtop :)
The snippet in the sig is sufficient, because Western civilisation forgot about this heritage. The EU documents do not even mention Christian ethics as the foundation of Europe. Which is kind of WTF, because e.g. "Give the emperor what belongs to the emperor, give God what belongs to God, and give me what is mine" is the foundation of religion-state separation. Did it always work properly? No, but we are talking about basics here, not practicalities.
But I agree that the whole citation is much more, it is an atheist admitting that it is possible and beneficial to reconcile science and religion - very strong declaration, very strong.
Sorry to dissappoint you, but in all totalitarian states (Nazi Germany, Soviet Union and its sattelite communist states etc.) majority didn't care. I remember the '80s in communist Poland, during the Martial Law period. Most people no longer cared. Independent TV broadcasts, which were overlayed on the official TV channel, were despised, as they "deprived people of their sitcoms". Most people just wanted to be left alone. "We have basic food and TV, why bother?" Underground dissidents were considered "troublemakers". And it was shortly after the Solidarity movement, which involved like 25% of the population.
Bread and circuses are more important to masses than freedom. Change is always driven by the few who care.
With glass, all I have to do is say something like, "OK Glass, record video" (or whatever the actual command is).
Well, I would call someone wearing smartglasses and saying "OK Glass, record video" at least as conspicuous as someone taking a smartphone out of a pocket and recording. Wait a decade or so when it will be possible to communicate with wearable computers without speaking.
You just described a private assisstant. People were entrusting their whole lives, including most intimate details, to selected individuals for ages. And these individuals could cheat on their employers, spread gossips or even blackmail them. This was a significant risk. And yet many people considered this risk smaller than benefits of being able to focus on things important to them, while the assisstant took care of all things mundane. Caveat: personal assistants of this type were extremely expensive. It was not a work assistant, answering phonecalls and arranging meetings 8 (maybe 10) hours a day. These were people living in the same house, sharing lives of their employers.
Fast forward to present and personal assistants become available to almost everyone. Risks are mainly the same: you have to share your life with someone, including intimate details maybe. Difference: instead of a human being you have a piece of software backed by a corporation. So instead of having an individual who could cheat on you, your data becomes a part of a database and you are fed taylored ads (best scenario) or your personal data is sold to the highest bidder and anything may happen (worst scenario). The best scenario does not differ much from having a trusty personal assistant, whom you have to pay, while the worst case scenario is still probably better than being blackmailed by a former assisstant.
So there is risk and there is benefit.
Intelligence is still recognized comparatively, usually related to something like the capability to resolve difficult or ambiguous problems with similar or greater effect than humans, or can learn and react to dynamic environmental situations to similar effect as other living things.
The second part is an important milestone for me. Take the Big Dog - a marvel of robotics in itself. If it interacted with environment and its operator on a level that real dogs interact with environment and their masters, we would have a real breakthrough. An essential thing would be to make it learn new tricks, like a dog learns, instead of programming them in.
My point was that any attempt to build such a thing inevitably leads to dictatorship.
No, it doesn't.
I know it is cool to bash religion on /., and the Catholic Church in particular, but the pope, which grew up in a totalitarian country (John Paul II) stated 20 years ago:
As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.
It is possible if voters either agree on a set of totalitarian principles, or simply do not care. It seems that this is what is happening now in the US. I do not see mass protests against the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, War on Drugs, all computer-related discrimination and restrictions. It is also not popular enough among voters to build a new party, or to compell one of parties to change their stance.
As long as voters in the US either approve this new trend, or simply do not care, both parties will continue introducing further restrictive laws.
X7A, on which Piston is based, costs 999$. Good luck gathering adoption at this price point.