I used to maintain a few FreeBSD ports...Not nearly the scope of maintaining a full distro, but my experience was similar. One thing they didn't get into that was a big problem for me was feeling like I was responsible for the problems created by terrible OSS projects' awful RE practices...Yes, I'm looking at you, OpenArena. When the majority of the work is dealing with people that run terrible projects in order to figure out what's needed to build their terrible software cause they can't be bothered to put that information anywhere themselves---or even have an idea about it when you ask them---that's a problem that really doesn't have a good solution, yet the people packaging/porting software for individual distributions have to deal with.
See https://slashdot.org/comments.... for back-story of why I'm targeting OpenArena specifically, but know that a *lot* of smaller OSS projects run the same way.
Beige-black round-logo Model M on my Mac at work and a Corsair K70 with MX Browns at home. I'd probably have a Model M at home as well, but the noise would bother my wife.
I'm a Fed, but not for the State Department. It's nice to know that their e-mail fiascos are news-worthy, but my Service being unable to provide reliable e-mail access---even after farming it out to Microsoft---reliably is just par for the course. Add in our software-distribution system being down for weeks, and...Yeah, it's definitely incompetence. Government "efficiency" at its finest.
Well, we're currently under the thumb of Microsoft BPOS, routed through two very poorly-ran Juniper Pulse VPN concentrators that are in a constant state of flux, and apparently the people making the decisions don't have any idea what "testing" is...No, I'm not sure it could be that much worse in this case.
As a Federal employee, the department I work for can't even run e-mail and VPN reliably, yet they mandate use of those services. At this point just about any real direction would be an improvement.
Project Fi is working very well for my wife and me. Bills are lower than they've ever been since we got smartphones, plus the coverage is outstanding around here.
My commute from home to work is 3.6 miles one-way. Takes a few minutes by car...Almost an hour by bus. I can walk it faster. No, I wouldn't spend almost two hours of my day on a bus, vs. ten minutes in a car. I've got better things to do.
Can they mandate that all of the services their departments offer for employees for work play nice with the latest version of Java within X number of days after a new Java release? Can they mandate that their training stuff not use Flash, Silverlight, or some other non-standard garbage that causes issues for non-Windows users? Dumping Oracle Forms for a bunch of their purchasing systems would be swell, too. Switching VPN providers three times in two years, as well as a revolving door of AV clients is also kind of a drag, as is having several pieces of tech ram-rodded down our throats in emergency fashion, but never used again...The digital signature pad comes to mind.
The problem with stuff like systemd is the creeping changes it's going to force on other stuff like FreeBSD down the road. Now you've got this monolithic init setup that also rolls in device abstraction and lots of other fun stuff that were traditionally not the domain of an init system. Eventually application authors may start depending on those functions as they are supplied by systemd, and at that point this all becomes a FreeBSD problem, too. Usually the Linux guys can keep their kids in their own pool, and by extension keep the pee out of ours, but this systemd fiasco may be a real problem down the road.
This. I don't understand why this quest to find the most polite way to kill someone isn't over already. Controlled-atmosphere asphyxiation is the way to go. Every year, people accidentally die in low-oxygen environments where the oxygen level is offset by nitrogen, helium, or some other (usually inert) gas. Safe, easy, pretty low skill level for the people conducting the execution and wouldn't require much more than a full-face mask and a tank of gas, which you could probably pick up at the local welding supply joint.
If there was somehow a clemency offer that Snowden accepted, he could still never return to the US. He'd get disappeared as soon as possible once he got back to US soil.
Well, everyone does things differently. I used hat pegs for the mug racks; the "flare" at the end holds the mugs on better. Those pegs didn't hold well in a vise...So printing an insert worked really well and made drilling pilot holes for the screws that passed through the slats of the racks trivial. See http://www.puresimplicity.net/~hemi/Pics/Misc/mug-rack/prototype-04.jpg if you want to see what I'm talking about...That was the first one I built, before I printed the vise insert.
Drill templates...Mine seem to be durable enough for it. In fact, I've printed off a few that the local high-school shop classes have been using for a few semesters now with no breakage.
Eh, mine has practical uses, at least for me. I use it mostly to facilitate other projects...Need an odd-shaped vise insert? Just design and print! I did that with mug-rack pegs. Need a re-usable layout template for drilling holes? Just design and print! I did that for the rear shackle mounts when I wanted to design casters to carry the back of the car when there was no suspension mounted.
There's lots of uses for them...But yeah, a lot of it is printing out parts for other printers---my RepRap's plastic bits came from my friend's printer---or toys and such. If you're not a handy person...Then yes, you'll probably just print toys with it.:)
You know what's holding 3D printing back? As someone that's fighting with one, I've got a few thoughts.
I'm building a Prusa Mendel, with hardware mostly donated by a friend that also has a Prusa Mendel. It *should* be straightforward. It's not. At all. My friend and I got the frame built, but I brought everything else home to finish on my own.
I managed to get the mechanical end sorted out fairly well, to the point where I need the entire printer to run right to get the rest of it dialed in. I managed to get the software side sorted pretty easily, too. The electronics, however, are proving to be a major pain.
The machine has a few problems that I can not seem to sort out. The hot end temps vary wildly, in about a thirty-degree Celsius range...However, it's all built "right." At this point I'm going to build a second heatcore and replace the thermistor attached to the nozzle with a new one (that I had to order from somewhere else) in hopes that something is wrong with either of these two items.
I am proficient with electronics assembly and repair, to the point where I build my own pedals to use with my bass, repair my own bass gear, repair other folks' pedals and gear, etc. I do computer software troubleshooting and programming for work, so I'm fairly proficient with that. I'm also a hard-core gearhead; I've been playing with mechanical things from guns to cars to motorcycles to machine tools and just about everything in between for as long as I can remember...But I'm having a hell of a time sorting out a *basic* 3D printer. I've spent the past three weeks of weeknights and weekends working on the thing and, honestly, I'm about ready to throw the whole pile in the trash and forget the whole thing.
It doesn't help that no one local to me has any more experience with building these things than I do, and all the people that have pre-built 3D printers are also hating them right now...My old employer has a MakerBox Replicator 2X that they can not get to run right. It seems like the vendors themselves don't really know what's going on, either...The vendor I got the hot end parts kit from seems to supply wire that I would consider wholly inadequate for moving 12V@5A around, but apparently it works.
The guy that supplied the parts for me to build my Prusa Mendel purchased a Rostock kit for no small amount of money...And is having all kinds of trouble getting it working right, too.
What's holding back 3D printing? The fact that even people with higher-than-average technical proficiency in all the areas required to make a 3D printer run well are having problems with their 3D printers indicates that they are in no way ready for mainstream use.
It's not really any particular project...There's tons of them out there. There are some areas that are lacking, though...QA, RE and documentation practices suck. The major projects tend to be better at them, but most of the smaller projects are pretty terrible at all three.
I gave up maintainership of the port on 25 Nov 2010. Hopefully things have improved, cause they were running that project into the ground. I don't interact with the current port maintainer, so I can't say if things have improved or not from a "FreeBSD port maintainer point of view."
OpenArena is fun and may be an excellent project to play, but the OpenArena people themselves are terrible to work with.
I used to maintain the FreeBSD port for OpenArena. Used to. Why used to? Cause they were the *worst* group of open-source software people I've ever dealt with. When another open-source OS asks you what it takes to get your app built and running, the correct answer is *not* "just download the Linux version and use that." Asking FreeBSD users to use the Linux binaries when there is source available is tantamount to telling Linux users to use the Windows version when there's source available.
I had done all the work necessary to update the OpenArena port to the latest version at the time, and then played "follow the patchlevels cause their dev practices suck" for several more versions. I edited their wiki, writing out directions for getting the game running from source on FreeBSD, which was pretty easy to do...Which they promptly deleted and said, "just use the Linux version."
When I was working on the port I asked them repeatedly what the build deps were and such...They didn't know. They generally just banged on it and installed stuff until OA built and ran. Never once did they actually document what it took to build the game. They were truly representative of the kids-table level of QA/RE that seems to be commonplace in the small-project OSS development community at large. How many times did they make a major release, followed quickly by several patches to fix minor oversights that resulted in major problems and could have been avoided with checklist of "what to check before we release?"
Here's a dirty little secret for ya: they talk about making source changes to the engine but none of them matter. The FreeBSD port---now maintained by someone else, thankfully---runs on the ioquake3 engine and just uses the OA pak files and the like.
In short, they may have some decent modelers/map-makers/artists working with them, but their software-dev guys are terrible to work with. I wouldn't use OA as a benchmark for anything.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to maintain a few FreeBSD ports...Not nearly the scope of maintaining a full distro, but my experience was similar. One thing they didn't get into that was a big problem for me was feeling like I was responsible for the problems created by terrible OSS projects' awful RE practices...Yes, I'm looking at you, OpenArena. When the majority of the work is dealing with people that run terrible projects in order to figure out what's needed to build their terrible software cause they can't be bothered to put that information anywhere themselves---or even have an idea about it when you ask them---that's a problem that really doesn't have a good solution, yet the people packaging/porting software for individual distributions have to deal with.
See https://slashdot.org/comments.... for back-story of why I'm targeting OpenArena specifically, but know that a *lot* of smaller OSS projects run the same way.
Beige-black round-logo Model M on my Mac at work and a Corsair K70 with MX Browns at home. I'd probably have a Model M at home as well, but the noise would bother my wife.
I'm a Fed, but not for the State Department. It's nice to know that their e-mail fiascos are news-worthy, but my Service being unable to provide reliable e-mail access---even after farming it out to Microsoft---reliably is just par for the course. Add in our software-distribution system being down for weeks, and...Yeah, it's definitely incompetence. Government "efficiency" at its finest.
Well, we're currently under the thumb of Microsoft BPOS, routed through two very poorly-ran Juniper Pulse VPN concentrators that are in a constant state of flux, and apparently the people making the decisions don't have any idea what "testing" is...No, I'm not sure it could be that much worse in this case.
As a Federal employee, the department I work for can't even run e-mail and VPN reliably, yet they mandate use of those services. At this point just about any real direction would be an improvement.
Project Fi is working very well for my wife and me. Bills are lower than they've ever been since we got smartphones, plus the coverage is outstanding around here.
My commute from home to work is 3.6 miles one-way. Takes a few minutes by car...Almost an hour by bus. I can walk it faster. No, I wouldn't spend almost two hours of my day on a bus, vs. ten minutes in a car. I've got better things to do.
Can they mandate that all of the services their departments offer for employees for work play nice with the latest version of Java within X number of days after a new Java release? Can they mandate that their training stuff not use Flash, Silverlight, or some other non-standard garbage that causes issues for non-Windows users? Dumping Oracle Forms for a bunch of their purchasing systems would be swell, too. Switching VPN providers three times in two years, as well as a revolving door of AV clients is also kind of a drag, as is having several pieces of tech ram-rodded down our throats in emergency fashion, but never used again...The digital signature pad comes to mind.
Cheers,
One very annoyed Federal "IT Specialist"
What makes Scientology all that much worse than any other religion? Let's just kill the tax-exempt status for all of them and be done with it.
I purchased a case along with my ODROID-C1. Cost like $5. It's a flimsy, cheap case...I'll print something better down the road.
The problem with stuff like systemd is the creeping changes it's going to force on other stuff like FreeBSD down the road. Now you've got this monolithic init setup that also rolls in device abstraction and lots of other fun stuff that were traditionally not the domain of an init system. Eventually application authors may start depending on those functions as they are supplied by systemd, and at that point this all becomes a FreeBSD problem, too. Usually the Linux guys can keep their kids in their own pool, and by extension keep the pee out of ours, but this systemd fiasco may be a real problem down the road.
This. I don't understand why this quest to find the most polite way to kill someone isn't over already. Controlled-atmosphere asphyxiation is the way to go. Every year, people accidentally die in low-oxygen environments where the oxygen level is offset by nitrogen, helium, or some other (usually inert) gas. Safe, easy, pretty low skill level for the people conducting the execution and wouldn't require much more than a full-face mask and a tank of gas, which you could probably pick up at the local welding supply joint.
I tend to think the problems that cause low graduation rates are most likely social or at home...Throwing money at schools won't fix those problems.
If there was somehow a clemency offer that Snowden accepted, he could still never return to the US. He'd get disappeared as soon as possible once he got back to US soil.
Well, everyone does things differently. I used hat pegs for the mug racks; the "flare" at the end holds the mugs on better. Those pegs didn't hold well in a vise...So printing an insert worked really well and made drilling pilot holes for the screws that passed through the slats of the racks trivial. See http://www.puresimplicity.net/~hemi/Pics/Misc/mug-rack/prototype-04.jpg if you want to see what I'm talking about...That was the first one I built, before I printed the vise insert.
Drill templates...Mine seem to be durable enough for it. In fact, I've printed off a few that the local high-school shop classes have been using for a few semesters now with no breakage.
Maybe this guy's printer wasn't set up right.
Eh, mine has practical uses, at least for me. I use it mostly to facilitate other projects...Need an odd-shaped vise insert? Just design and print! I did that with mug-rack pegs. Need a re-usable layout template for drilling holes? Just design and print! I did that for the rear shackle mounts when I wanted to design casters to carry the back of the car when there was no suspension mounted.
There's lots of uses for them...But yeah, a lot of it is printing out parts for other printers---my RepRap's plastic bits came from my friend's printer---or toys and such. If you're not a handy person...Then yes, you'll probably just print toys with it. :)
Also, a 3D printer. Easier start-up than a mill or router, lots of guides out there and if you're frugal you can do it for a few hundred bucks.
You know what's holding 3D printing back? As someone that's fighting with one, I've got a few thoughts.
I'm building a Prusa Mendel, with hardware mostly donated by a friend that also has a Prusa Mendel. It *should* be straightforward. It's not. At all. My friend and I got the frame built, but I brought everything else home to finish on my own.
I managed to get the mechanical end sorted out fairly well, to the point where I need the entire printer to run right to get the rest of it dialed in. I managed to get the software side sorted pretty easily, too. The electronics, however, are proving to be a major pain.
The machine has a few problems that I can not seem to sort out. The hot end temps vary wildly, in about a thirty-degree Celsius range...However, it's all built "right." At this point I'm going to build a second heatcore and replace the thermistor attached to the nozzle with a new one (that I had to order from somewhere else) in hopes that something is wrong with either of these two items.
I am proficient with electronics assembly and repair, to the point where I build my own pedals to use with my bass, repair my own bass gear, repair other folks' pedals and gear, etc. I do computer software troubleshooting and programming for work, so I'm fairly proficient with that. I'm also a hard-core gearhead; I've been playing with mechanical things from guns to cars to motorcycles to machine tools and just about everything in between for as long as I can remember...But I'm having a hell of a time sorting out a *basic* 3D printer. I've spent the past three weeks of weeknights and weekends working on the thing and, honestly, I'm about ready to throw the whole pile in the trash and forget the whole thing.
It doesn't help that no one local to me has any more experience with building these things than I do, and all the people that have pre-built 3D printers are also hating them right now...My old employer has a MakerBox Replicator 2X that they can not get to run right. It seems like the vendors themselves don't really know what's going on, either...The vendor I got the hot end parts kit from seems to supply wire that I would consider wholly inadequate for moving 12V@5A around, but apparently it works.
The guy that supplied the parts for me to build my Prusa Mendel purchased a Rostock kit for no small amount of money...And is having all kinds of trouble getting it working right, too.
What's holding back 3D printing? The fact that even people with higher-than-average technical proficiency in all the areas required to make a 3D printer run well are having problems with their 3D printers indicates that they are in no way ready for mainstream use.
It's not really any particular project...There's tons of them out there. There are some areas that are lacking, though...QA, RE and documentation practices suck. The major projects tend to be better at them, but most of the smaller projects are pretty terrible at all three.
I gave up maintainership of the port on 25 Nov 2010. Hopefully things have improved, cause they were running that project into the ground. I don't interact with the current port maintainer, so I can't say if things have improved or not from a "FreeBSD port maintainer point of view."
OpenArena is fun and may be an excellent project to play, but the OpenArena people themselves are terrible to work with.
I used to maintain the FreeBSD port for OpenArena. Used to. Why used to? Cause they were the *worst* group of open-source software people I've ever dealt with. When another open-source OS asks you what it takes to get your app built and running, the correct answer is *not* "just download the Linux version and use that." Asking FreeBSD users to use the Linux binaries when there is source available is tantamount to telling Linux users to use the Windows version when there's source available.
I had done all the work necessary to update the OpenArena port to the latest version at the time, and then played "follow the patchlevels cause their dev practices suck" for several more versions. I edited their wiki, writing out directions for getting the game running from source on FreeBSD, which was pretty easy to do...Which they promptly deleted and said, "just use the Linux version."
When I was working on the port I asked them repeatedly what the build deps were and such...They didn't know. They generally just banged on it and installed stuff until OA built and ran. Never once did they actually document what it took to build the game. They were truly representative of the kids-table level of QA/RE that seems to be commonplace in the small-project OSS development community at large. How many times did they make a major release, followed quickly by several patches to fix minor oversights that resulted in major problems and could have been avoided with checklist of "what to check before we release?"
Here's a dirty little secret for ya: they talk about making source changes to the engine but none of them matter. The FreeBSD port---now maintained by someone else, thankfully---runs on the ioquake3 engine and just uses the OA pak files and the like.
In short, they may have some decent modelers/map-makers/artists working with them, but their software-dev guys are terrible to work with. I wouldn't use OA as a benchmark for anything.
Yeah, I considered a Scorched Earth mention, too...Fun games, and actually useful to some degree.
Yes, the original was a relatively unsuccessful arcade game published by Atari in the '70s. I'm sure there were numerous ports.
No mention of Lunar Lander?! :) ... No, I'm not serious.
I want to hear MRI'in while freestylin'.