Francis Chichester sailed around the world under solar power in 1966.
Yep, and his account of it is worth reading. But circumnavigating the world was hardly new even then. He was simply the first (and fastest) to do so single-handed via the clipper route.
Captain Joshua Slocum's earlier single-handed circumnavigation wasn't non-stop, but his account of it ( Sailing Alone Around The World, 1900) is truly inspirational.
Seems to me that 8.5 tonnes of batteries would take more energy to drag across the water than it was worth. Meanwhile, of course, people have been using sails for centuries to get around the globe.
There are good reasons to use the lowest tech required to do the job. Sure, they be trying to make some sort of point, but I'm sure there are more useful ways to do that.
Don't get me wrong, I think the requirement for unremovable Secure Boot on WRT is stupid and anti-consumer, but your post was nonetheless redundent to mine.
However, as I mentioned in another post, there have been numerous cases where people have been unable to boot this Samsung device from USB (at least according to a page full of Google results), despite having disabled UEFI, so one might argue that your post was redundant to mine.:P
To conform to the UEFI spec there must be a way to disable secureboot. Its really not a big deal.
It shouldn't be, but I read in several places that Samsung has done something to make it difficult (or impossible) to boot from USB even with UEFI supposedly disabled.
I'm looking for an upgrade for my Windows laptop and this could fit the bill if the price is not bonkers
Give it a month, and this model will be superseded by something else. Samsung moves fast.
I quite like the look of the machine, but to be any use to me, it has to run Linux. From what I've read, though, it looks like I would be SOL with getting around the UEFI lockout. (I've read that Ubuntu is working on some sort of certification, but that is probably my last choice of preferred distros.) So at this stage it looks like Samsung will be missing out on at least one sale.
I know I'm disinclined to have a Samsung phone after the dismal showing they did with the Galaxy Nexus
As a matter of interest, what do you consider a dismal showing? I have a GNex, (rooted, running stock 4.2.2) and have on the whole been pretty happy with it, despite the fact that it was dropped by my telco only 6 weeks after I took out the contract. The only serious failing as far as I'm concerned is the lack of provision for more SD storage.
I wasn't saying it was anyone's "fault" as such, more that the former Common Unix Printing System isn't really common any more, as its implementation has fragmented since Apple bought the code (and also, incidentally, hired its author - though one might have been a condition of the other). I agree that it should have been a simple matter for Fuji/Xerox to distribute a driver to work on Linux boxes, particularly since I was able to kludge the Mac version with just a few hours spent on research.
The point is, for a printer to work on a Mac, it pretty much has to work with CUPS. It's just that now Apple owns CUPS, it isn't as transparent as it used to be. In this case, the PPD was bundled up in the Fuji/Xerox package for Mac, and it didn't work out of the box when just copied to/etc/cups/ppd on my Slackware machine.
True, but I was more referring to the fact that in a world where our code was input via 80-col cards with a 10-button punch machine, we either said it in upper-case or we didn't say it at all.
Not surprised. Form mirrors function. A short function, in any language, written to the same specs by several competent programmers, should all be just about the same. 20 lines of assembler == 2 to 5 lines of C code...:-)
True. Except that a modern assembler will accept lower-case as well as upper-case.:P
Yeah. The only thing the old core-memory processors were not so good at was dealing with excessive heat. My first computer was a Burroughs B3700 a lot like this but with a teletype master console (which Burroughs called a SPO, for Supervisor Printer Operator).
If the airconditioning broke down in the machine room, we had about 15 minutes to shut everything down before the temperature hit 50 degrees C. [OT: Why, oh why, can/. *STILL* not manage such simple things as html entities?]
The company I worked for got rid of that machine in 1978 (in favour of a Honeywell DPS7), but I remember reading in some computing magazine in 1988 that NASA (IIRC) had ordered several of these machines. I can't find any reference to it now, so that might have been shitcanned. It wasn't very long after that, in any case, that Burroughs merged with Sperry (another of my earlier platforms) to form Unisys.
This is why you shouldn't work on free software that requires you to hand over your copyright. This includes GNU software as well.
Even where code remains GPL, you have to be a bit careful about selling code. A case in point was Michael Sweet's selling the source for CUPS to Apple. Sure it's still GPL, but the exceptions to link against Apple software have (in some cases) set the clock back for users of Linux and other Unices.
I had always thought CUPS stood for Common Unix Printing System. I was wrong. Apparently it doesn't stand for anything any more.
There was a time when if any printer you bought worked from a Mac, you would be able to use it on any other Unix box, and vice versa. I found out the hard way a few years back when I bought a Fuji/Xerox laser printer that that assumption is no longer the case. After fruitless searches through forums, I ended up having to manually edit the PPD file to get the damn thing working.
Back in the olden days you used to pay your ISP for email. Now you don't, so you'll get what you pay for.
Agreed. In fact, I still use my ISP's POP3 address from the mid-'90s as my primary email address. Originally this was in the interests of continuity so I didn't have to notify family and friends of a change of address. But it's a good service, with no ads, and I don't have to worry about them tracking my every move, so for the small annual fee, it's worth it.
Problem is that nothing can replace FB. Want to listen to music on Spotify? Need a FB account.
I don't have a Facebook profile, and I haven't used spotify, but out of curiosity I just checked that. All it actually requires is an email address.
I really don't see why cross-site authentication is so necessary. In fact, given that so many of Facebook's policies and activities are directly contrary to the user's interests, using Facebook for such authentication is foolish in the extreme.
Maybe that could be a step in the right direction. Rather than insisting on this broken trading model, perhaps people need to take a step back and think of the process again as investment.
I use the word with all of its seemingly old-fashioned freight implying commitment on both sides of the transaction. The investor is committing his funds as an investment in the future prosperity of a company, and that company undertakes to reward that investment with a suitable dividend, perhaps in addition to other perquisites. The current situation where the focus is entirely on trying to game buying and selling rewards no-one except stockbrokers, some of whom might otherwise have to go and find honest work.
do you really read slashdot at -1 all the time so that you can see all the spam and trolling?
In my case, yes, since I often prefer to post rather than moderate, even though I seem to quite frequently have mod points. Besides which, quoting previously downmodded posts under my UID is a perfectly valid way of bringing them back into the open.
A simpler process might be to adopt a policy where score values less than -1 are deleted completely.
And maybe, additionally, a policy where repeat offenders under the same UID or IP are banned for an appropriate quarantine period.
I can understand the egalitarianism of the original Slashdot rules, but times have moved on. There are just too many bad guys, and since we aren't allowed to just kill them, other means have to be implemented.
You're missing the point. Telstra and Optus have got away with selling patchy, over-subscribed and under-performing services in Tasmania for years. They obviously consider it non-viable given the population base, despite their widely advertised claims. I experience this at first hand, since although I only live 30 minutes drive from what passes for a major town here, I can't get any kind of wired broadband to my home, and the closest cell tower I can access is 35km away.
If an interloper can come along and provide a better service (at any cost, but free is even better) then those telcos will get a well-deserved kick in the pants.
Slashdot Mirror
You beat me to that. :)
[written on my steam-powered laptop]
Francis Chichester sailed around the world under solar power in 1966.
Yep, and his account of it is worth reading. But circumnavigating the world was hardly new even then. He was simply the first (and fastest) to do so single-handed via the clipper route.
Captain Joshua Slocum's earlier single-handed circumnavigation wasn't non-stop, but his account of it ( Sailing Alone Around The World, 1900) is truly inspirational.
Seems to me that 8.5 tonnes of batteries would take more energy to drag across the water than it was worth. Meanwhile, of course, people have been using sails for centuries to get around the globe.
There are good reasons to use the lowest tech required to do the job. Sure, they be trying to make some sort of point, but I'm sure there are more useful ways to do that.
Don't get me wrong, I think the requirement for unremovable Secure Boot on WRT is stupid and anti-consumer, but your post was nonetheless redundent to mine.
However, as I mentioned in another post, there have been numerous cases where people have been unable to boot this Samsung device from USB (at least according to a page full of Google results), despite having disabled UEFI, so one might argue that your post was redundant to mine. :P
To conform to the UEFI spec there must be a way to disable secureboot. Its really not a big deal.
It shouldn't be, but I read in several places that Samsung has done something to make it difficult (or impossible) to boot from USB even with UEFI supposedly disabled.
I'm looking for an upgrade for my Windows laptop and this could fit the bill if the price is not bonkers
Give it a month, and this model will be superseded by something else. Samsung moves fast.
I quite like the look of the machine, but to be any use to me, it has to run Linux. From what I've read, though, it looks like I would be SOL with getting around the UEFI lockout. (I've read that Ubuntu is working on some sort of certification, but that is probably my last choice of preferred distros.) So at this stage it looks like Samsung will be missing out on at least one sale.
I know I'm disinclined to have a Samsung phone after the dismal showing they did with the Galaxy Nexus
As a matter of interest, what do you consider a dismal showing? I have a GNex, (rooted, running stock 4.2.2) and have on the whole been pretty happy with it, despite the fact that it was dropped by my telco only 6 weeks after I took out the contract. The only serious failing as far as I'm concerned is the lack of provision for more SD storage.
I wasn't saying it was anyone's "fault" as such, more that the former Common Unix Printing System isn't really common any more, as its implementation has fragmented since Apple bought the code (and also, incidentally, hired its author - though one might have been a condition of the other). I agree that it should have been a simple matter for Fuji/Xerox to distribute a driver to work on Linux boxes, particularly since I was able to kludge the Mac version with just a few hours spent on research.
The point is, for a printer to work on a Mac, it pretty much has to work with CUPS. It's just that now Apple owns CUPS, it isn't as transparent as it used to be. In this case, the PPD was bundled up in the Fuji/Xerox package for Mac, and it didn't work out of the box when just copied to /etc/cups/ppd on my Slackware machine.
Ah, I hadn't noticed that, although I am running -current. But obviously slackpkg update wouldn't have picked up on the new name.
True, but I was more referring to the fact that in a world where our code was input via 80-col cards with a 10-button punch machine, we either said it in upper-case or we didn't say it at all.
Not surprised. Form mirrors function. A short function, in any language, written to the same specs by several competent programmers, should all be just about the same. 20 lines of assembler == 2 to 5 lines of C code... :-)
True. Except that a modern assembler will accept lower-case as well as upper-case. :P
Some of us simply lost our passwords for older accounts and could never be bothered taking the trouble to track them down.
Yeah. The only thing the old core-memory processors were not so good at was dealing with excessive heat. My first computer was a Burroughs B3700 a lot like this but with a teletype master console (which Burroughs called a SPO, for Supervisor Printer Operator).
/. *STILL* not manage such simple things as html entities?]
If the airconditioning broke down in the machine room, we had about 15 minutes to shut everything down before the temperature hit 50 degrees C. [OT: Why, oh why, can
The company I worked for got rid of that machine in 1978 (in favour of a Honeywell DPS7), but I remember reading in some computing magazine in 1988 that NASA (IIRC) had ordered several of these machines. I can't find any reference to it now, so that might have been shitcanned. It wasn't very long after that, in any case, that Burroughs merged with Sperry (another of my earlier platforms) to form Unisys.
This is why you shouldn't work on free software that requires you to hand over your copyright. This includes GNU software as well.
Even where code remains GPL, you have to be a bit careful about selling code. A case in point was Michael Sweet's selling the source for CUPS to Apple. Sure it's still GPL, but the exceptions to link against Apple software have (in some cases) set the clock back for users of Linux and other Unices.
I had always thought CUPS stood for Common Unix Printing System. I was wrong. Apparently it doesn't stand for anything any more. There was a time when if any printer you bought worked from a Mac, you would be able to use it on any other Unix box, and vice versa. I found out the hard way a few years back when I bought a Fuji/Xerox laser printer that that assumption is no longer the case. After fruitless searches through forums, I ended up having to manually edit the PPD file to get the damn thing working.
Slackware 14.0 ships with MySQL 5.5.29. Not that I ever use MySQL, so FWIW...
You are a case of a flamer flaming flamers. :)
No, he's just wrong. The kid is 11, not 14. :)
Back in the olden days you used to pay your ISP for email. Now you don't, so you'll get what you pay for.
Agreed. In fact, I still use my ISP's POP3 address from the mid-'90s as my primary email address. Originally this was in the interests of continuity so I didn't have to notify family and friends of a change of address. But it's a good service, with no ads, and I don't have to worry about them tracking my every move, so for the small annual fee, it's worth it.
Problem is that nothing can replace FB. Want to listen to music on Spotify? Need a FB account.
I don't have a Facebook profile, and I haven't used spotify, but out of curiosity I just checked that. All it actually requires is an email address.
I really don't see why cross-site authentication is so necessary. In fact, given that so many of Facebook's policies and activities are directly contrary to the user's interests, using Facebook for such authentication is foolish in the extreme.
Maybe that could be a step in the right direction. Rather than insisting on this broken trading model, perhaps people need to take a step back and think of the process again as investment.
I use the word with all of its seemingly old-fashioned freight implying commitment on both sides of the transaction. The investor is committing his funds as an investment in the future prosperity of a company, and that company undertakes to reward that investment with a suitable dividend, perhaps in addition to other perquisites. The current situation where the focus is entirely on trying to game buying and selling rewards no-one except stockbrokers, some of whom might otherwise have to go and find honest work.
...telcos here are not so happy about its popularity but luckily there is little that they can do about it.
Exactly. I don't really see how they think they can prevent people using Skype or Whatsapp.
Tricky. What's the NBN status there?
I would gladly help with the digging if the NBN was likely to come anywhere near me, but unfortunately it isn't.
...you may consider P2P long range WiFi [wikipedia.org]. It's not that [whirlpool.net.au] unusual.
Now there's a thought..
do you really read slashdot at -1 all the time so that you can see all the spam and trolling?
In my case, yes, since I often prefer to post rather than moderate, even though I seem to quite frequently have mod points. Besides which, quoting previously downmodded posts under my UID is a perfectly valid way of bringing them back into the open.
A simpler process might be to adopt a policy where score values less than -1 are deleted completely.
And maybe, additionally, a policy where repeat offenders under the same UID or IP are banned for an appropriate quarantine period.
I can understand the egalitarianism of the original Slashdot rules, but times have moved on. There are just too many bad guys, and since we aren't allowed to just kill them, other means have to be implemented.
You're missing the point. Telstra and Optus have got away with selling patchy, over-subscribed and under-performing services in Tasmania for years. They obviously consider it non-viable given the population base, despite their widely advertised claims. I experience this at first hand, since although I only live 30 minutes drive from what passes for a major town here, I can't get any kind of wired broadband to my home, and the closest cell tower I can access is 35km away.
If an interloper can come along and provide a better service (at any cost, but free is even better) then those telcos will get a well-deserved kick in the pants.