This is where I have hopes for Firefox OS, but still the very early phones are left out (first ZTE Open). The Open C might fare better, but you'll have to count on yourself to flash the thing (jumping through the requisite handful of hoops) to get updates early or to install later versions of the OS, presumably.
Anyway, the system is simple since it's only linux, the firefox browser and some glue. So no fear of running out of space for the base install and the system can only get faster or stay as fast with time (well browsers only get faster, it's the web content out there that sucks) Probably a good idea to wait for Firefox OS 2.x versions.. As for the security updates problem on Android, I deal with it by not owning a smartphone at all and recommend not using a smartphone, except perhaps as an offline media player. Or at least there should be a website somewhere where which can track which phones are supported, when they get updates, which are EOL and which are EOL but with no word from the manufacturer.
For one thing Geforce 6/7 receive driver updates till 2017, though they're limited to critical bugs and migration to new Xorg and kernel versions. Which is not that bad. That's about 11 to 13 years support. Only problem with that is those particular cards lack OpenGL features needed to run Valve games (except for the Quake 1 based one) whereas they'd work perfectly under Windows and Direct3D. Geforce 8 and 200 series have entered legacy support too, but still works. When they're not supported you still have the open source driver. Not made by nvidia, but it works. Better than be stuck in VESA at least..
Steam is better used as a single purpose application. It's a launcher and updater for Counter Strike.
I heard that CS : GO is a crap version with restrictive modes and some console-like bullshit implement to catter to 12-year-old kids who learned to play on CoD and such, plus it's probably too demanding for most linux desktops. So stick to CS 1.6 which is actually worth playing.
Humble Bundle is weird : their stuff is time limited in when you can actually buy them. When the bundle trickles down to Slashdot and then to me finally deciding to look it up, it's ended.
Quick look at GOG Linux section : half what I'm seeing is DOS games. Not native ports:). DOS games can be very demanding (still has to run 640x480 3D games as fast as a 16-year-old PC, maybe a recent 3.x GHz Intel CPU achieves that) Steam is half decent because you can somehow trust the game to work at all. Though even then you can run into the issue of graphics card too old, unsupported. Mine supports all of DirectX 9c but not all of OpenGL 2.x ; I switched to the open source driver too which doesn't make things better. And really it's a pain to buy a game and have it not working, even though it was a few euros. It's a DRM dystopia lol. But games that don't care about the DRM can be run from the Steam directory, which I've done from command line a handful or less times.
It's also a pain to buy a game, run it once and never play it again. We had it better in the 90s, with paper magazines to know about the games and their worth, demos and shareware to try them out.
Use a radioisotope thermal generator then? The power may be not that much, but they are simple, relatively low tech and the power is always-on for years. Such generators were precisely built and operated to provide permanent power for years or decades without maintenance and in inacessible places. Might still be too heavy, and they're hardly more appetizing than nuclear waste.
You sure would want to collect the generator safely after you're done with it, and even then I would be worried about people trying to shoot it down. PS : I have just hovered over your link and it is about RTGs. I missed them from your post because I believe they're not reactors.
Not really. We aren't seeing US/EU making drafts and sending 500,000 troops to Iraq and Syria. Not sure if that'd work anyway, but these wars are half-assed. Either make war or don't make it? The US refused to make this choice in 2003, and destroyed Iraq with criminal incompetence (not enough occupations troops. + disband the iraqi army and fire a ton of civil servants, yeah right..)
Current uptime on my desktop : "up 2 days, 4:42". I would make it sleep (S3 mode) but when woken up my graphics card fan revs at 100%, is very loud and linux can't control the fan speed. But I could chat with the open source driver team on IRC about it. I don't remember if the proprietary driver can control the fan speed (it does, on Windows). Had to modify the graphics card BIOS to make it quiet during normal operation ; it is 100% loud at power on for a couple seconds, then becomes quiet before the PC thinks about loading an OS.
Re:Single purpose machines don't need linux
on
Outlining Thin Linux
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· Score: 1
To micro-manage such things Gentoo and its USE flags can be an option. Though, the time and kilowatt-hours needed to compile all of KDE probably make it not worth it (if you actually can compile a CUPS-less desktop environment).
I don't know if CUPS is actually used for what I do.. but I do like printing support on a computer without a printer. I can print to a pdf or ps file, and then carry that file by USB drive or another method to a print shop or a place I can use a printer. So for your particular example, it may be valuable.
Reading this it feels like removing tab completion in the shell is something to sought after. It's for interactive use and needlessly weighs down thin and lean VM server installs. Make sure support for ncurses and ssh -X is eradicated, too.
It's a colloquial term to begin with. I found it fitting because the computer was now useless, perfectly working but with no way to get data in or out of it. Probably funny keyboard combinations with the "SysRq" key would have worked, had they been enabled. Poor Ubuntu 1x.xx didn't like a fork bomb either.
Yes I was thinking of that kill -1 variant that kills everything except init, as I didn't know of the other "kill -1" variant (and "kill -1 -1" maybe was a mistake from the OP?)
If you run a kill -9 -1 as a non-root user, it probably makes sense as a short hand to kill all that user's processes ; a bit like "rm -rf.*" or "chmod.*" might be safe when logged in as a user. Otherwise they're hilariously dangerous! Doing it as root is nonsensical and I tried it out of morbid curiosity. It's like tales of people using the "killall" command on Solaris.
To "Git-R-Done" is a really strange expression, never seen it and I don't lknow what the fuck it means. Did Joe Green failed to use git the repository software and be done? More to the point, I didn't know what the FWD.us website was. Then, throwing people under buses is not nice.
What the hell does it do that is actually of use? The one time I tried it on linux (but maybe it was a kill -9 -1) it bricked the system requiring a physical shutdown or reboot. There was such a lack of anything running anymore that ctrl-alt-del wasn't handled.
You might as well boot into DOS and type "ctty nul".
20-year-old kids and slightly older working minimum wage or slightly higher buy these kinds of cards, in some european countries at least. (where you get health insurance with any job and not paying for a car can be an option if you're not e.g. a construction worker)
At around 300 euros it's not a particularly ultra-expensive mass consumer product. it's nice that a 400W PSU and a cheapo vanilla tower will be adequate, plus the power bills are only increasing anyway. Many, many people don't follow the upgrade treadmill anymore, that's true. I'm personnally not that interested as games don't have much new to offer anyway and I would need to upgrade the motherboard and CPU, which I don't need/want to. (running linux on the hardware means very few games too!, and Wine is unsupported retro-gaming that works less than half the time)
Also with a "real OS" the PC would not be necessarily wasted as a mail-only device. Have vlc and xpdf at least (need to install alsa-base alsa-utils and alsamixergui too) so now the PC can at least play CD, DVD, video and music from USB without jack all a chance of infection. I like the deadbeef audio player too if people can be assed to use it and make playlists.
Yay for LXDE, and debian has similar qualities for being relatively simple, well known and understood. Comes with Firefox ESR by default (iceweasel) which is better suited as a less often updated browser than the regular one.. though the situation might be so dire you should maybe use lynx and dillo.
I don't use mail clients but I would think of trying claws-mail first (hell my main webmail, a very major and well known one always had doing that as a pay option I believe, though there are wrappers/plugins/scripts for mail clients to download the mail anyway)
Which is not that far from what the US does with its social programs. US would be a socialist country if not for the huge leech that is the healthcare industry and other vampires preying on the US people (prison-security complex, etc.)
Indeed, part of this is true. Disease is a significant problem. Neither are a nice place to live. Many try to move to Western nations. However, the average population density of the African continent is 95 people per square mile. For comparison, Europe has 186 people per square mile. Overpopulation can't explain why Africa is shittier than Europe. India has 954 people per square mile, but South Korea has 1288 people per square mile. Overpopulation can't explain why India is shittier than South Korea. While overpopulation may or may not be a huge problem in both areas, it's not hard to point to places with greater population [density] but much better conditions.
In particular, Africa is much bigger than we usually think. Mercator projection maps shrink it relatively to Europe and other northern lands, while a Gall-Peters map makes it quite huger than Europe or N. or S. America
Slashdot Mirror
This is where I have hopes for Firefox OS, but still the very early phones are left out (first ZTE Open). The Open C might fare better, but you'll have to count on yourself to flash the thing (jumping through the requisite handful of hoops) to get updates early or to install later versions of the OS, presumably.
Anyway, the system is simple since it's only linux, the firefox browser and some glue. So no fear of running out of space for the base install and the system can only get faster or stay as fast with time (well browsers only get faster, it's the web content out there that sucks)
Probably a good idea to wait for Firefox OS 2.x versions..
As for the security updates problem on Android, I deal with it by not owning a smartphone at all and recommend not using a smartphone, except perhaps as an offline media player. Or at least there should be a website somewhere where which can track which phones are supported, when they get updates, which are EOL and which are EOL but with no word from the manufacturer.
For one thing Geforce 6/7 receive driver updates till 2017, though they're limited to critical bugs and migration to new Xorg and kernel versions. Which is not that bad. That's about 11 to 13 years support. Only problem with that is those particular cards lack OpenGL features needed to run Valve games (except for the Quake 1 based one) whereas they'd work perfectly under Windows and Direct3D.
Geforce 8 and 200 series have entered legacy support too, but still works.
When they're not supported you still have the open source driver. Not made by nvidia, but it works. Better than be stuck in VESA at least..
Steam is better used as a single purpose application. It's a launcher and updater for Counter Strike.
I heard that CS : GO is a crap version with restrictive modes and some console-like bullshit implement to catter to 12-year-old kids who learned to play on CoD and such, plus it's probably too demanding for most linux desktops. So stick to CS 1.6 which is actually worth playing.
Humble Bundle is weird : their stuff is time limited in when you can actually buy them. When the bundle trickles down to Slashdot and then to me finally deciding to look it up, it's ended.
Quick look at GOG Linux section : half what I'm seeing is DOS games. Not native ports :). DOS games can be very demanding (still has to run 640x480 3D games as fast as a 16-year-old PC, maybe a recent 3.x GHz Intel CPU achieves that)
Steam is half decent because you can somehow trust the game to work at all. Though even then you can run into the issue of graphics card too old, unsupported. Mine supports all of DirectX 9c but not all of OpenGL 2.x ; I switched to the open source driver too which doesn't make things better. And really it's a pain to buy a game and have it not working, even though it was a few euros. It's a DRM dystopia lol. But games that don't care about the DRM can be run from the Steam directory, which I've done from command line a handful or less times.
It's also a pain to buy a game, run it once and never play it again.
We had it better in the 90s, with paper magazines to know about the games and their worth, demos and shareware to try them out.
Use a radioisotope thermal generator then? The power may be not that much, but they are simple, relatively low tech and the power is always-on for years. Such generators were precisely built and operated to provide permanent power for years or decades without maintenance and in inacessible places. Might still be too heavy, and they're hardly more appetizing than nuclear waste.
You sure would want to collect the generator safely after you're done with it, and even then I would be worried about people trying to shoot it down.
PS : I have just hovered over your link and it is about RTGs. I missed them from your post because I believe they're not reactors.
At 150km or higher than that your little cubie satellite will fall off the sky.
It's UEFI now.
Year of the linux desktop, with Microsoft Windows in the server closet.
Not really. We aren't seeing US/EU making drafts and sending 500,000 troops to Iraq and Syria. Not sure if that'd work anyway, but these wars are half-assed. Either make war or don't make it? The US refused to make this choice in 2003, and destroyed Iraq with criminal incompetence (not enough occupations troops. + disband the iraqi army and fire a ton of civil servants, yeah right..)
Current uptime on my desktop : "up 2 days, 4:42".
I would make it sleep (S3 mode) but when woken up my graphics card fan revs at 100%, is very loud and linux can't control the fan speed. But I could chat with the open source driver team on IRC about it. I don't remember if the proprietary driver can control the fan speed (it does, on Windows). Had to modify the graphics card BIOS to make it quiet during normal operation ; it is 100% loud at power on for a couple seconds, then becomes quiet before the PC thinks about loading an OS.
MS-DOS for servers!
To micro-manage such things Gentoo and its USE flags can be an option. Though, the time and kilowatt-hours needed to compile all of KDE probably make it not worth it (if you actually can compile a CUPS-less desktop environment).
I don't know if CUPS is actually used for what I do.. but I do like printing support on a computer without a printer. I can print to a pdf or ps file, and then carry that file by USB drive or another method to a print shop or a place I can use a printer. So for your particular example, it may be valuable.
Reading this it feels like removing tab completion in the shell is something to sought after. It's for interactive use and needlessly weighs down thin and lean VM server installs.
Make sure support for ncurses and ssh -X is eradicated, too.
It's a colloquial term to begin with. I found it fitting because the computer was now useless, perfectly working but with no way to get data in or out of it. Probably funny keyboard combinations with the "SysRq" key would have worked, had they been enabled. Poor Ubuntu 1x.xx didn't like a fork bomb either.
Yes I was thinking of that kill -1 variant that kills everything except init, as I didn't know of the other "kill -1" variant (and "kill -1 -1" maybe was a mistake from the OP?)
If you run a kill -9 -1 as a non-root user, it probably makes sense as a short hand to kill all that user's processes ; a bit like "rm -rf .*" or "chmod .*" might be safe when logged in as a user. Otherwise they're hilariously dangerous!
Doing it as root is nonsensical and I tried it out of morbid curiosity. It's like tales of people using the "killall" command on Solaris.
To "Git-R-Done" is a really strange expression, never seen it and I don't lknow what the fuck it means. Did Joe Green failed to use git the repository software and be done?
More to the point, I didn't know what the FWD.us website was. Then, throwing people under buses is not nice.
What about a linux system with BIOS password, grub password, root password other than "root" or blank and encrypted file system? I guess that's evil.
What the hell does it do that is actually of use? The one time I tried it on linux (but maybe it was a kill -9 -1) it bricked the system requiring a physical shutdown or reboot. There was such a lack of anything running anymore that ctrl-alt-del wasn't handled.
You might as well boot into DOS and type "ctty nul".
Spending more time more often to manage and decide for the subset of music you want to listen to is boring.
20-year-old kids and slightly older working minimum wage or slightly higher buy these kinds of cards, in some european countries at least. (where you get health insurance with any job and not paying for a car can be an option if you're not e.g. a construction worker)
At around 300 euros it's not a particularly ultra-expensive mass consumer product. it's nice that a 400W PSU and a cheapo vanilla tower will be adequate, plus the power bills are only increasing anyway.
Many, many people don't follow the upgrade treadmill anymore, that's true. I'm personnally not that interested as games don't have much new to offer anyway and I would need to upgrade the motherboard and CPU, which I don't need/want to. (running linux on the hardware means very few games too!, and Wine is unsupported retro-gaming that works less than half the time)
After all those years I grew tired of 128 kbps MP3 for the music.
Also with a "real OS" the PC would not be necessarily wasted as a mail-only device. Have vlc and xpdf at least (need to install alsa-base alsa-utils and alsamixergui too) so now the PC can at least play CD, DVD, video and music from USB without jack all a chance of infection. I like the deadbeef audio player too if people can be assed to use it and make playlists.
Yay for LXDE, and debian has similar qualities for being relatively simple, well known and understood.
Comes with Firefox ESR by default (iceweasel) which is better suited as a less often updated browser than the regular one.. though the situation might be so dire you should maybe use lynx and dillo.
I don't use mail clients but I would think of trying claws-mail first (hell my main webmail, a very major and well known one always had doing that as a pay option I believe, though there are wrappers/plugins/scripts for mail clients to download the mail anyway)
Which is not that far from what the US does with its social programs. US would be a socialist country if not for the huge leech that is the healthcare industry and other vampires preying on the US people (prison-security complex, etc.)
Indeed, part of this is true. Disease is a significant problem. Neither are a nice place to live. Many try to move to Western nations. However, the average population density of the African continent is 95 people per square mile. For comparison, Europe has 186 people per square mile. Overpopulation can't explain why Africa is shittier than Europe. India has 954 people per square mile, but South Korea has 1288 people per square mile. Overpopulation can't explain why India is shittier than South Korea. While overpopulation may or may not be a huge problem in both areas, it's not hard to point to places with greater population [density] but much better conditions.
In particular, Africa is much bigger than we usually think. Mercator projection maps shrink it relatively to Europe and other northern lands, while a Gall-Peters map makes it quite huger than Europe or N. or S. America