Yes but now we have people who grew up on iPods and their one-button simplicity. The mere existence of support for something they do not care about offends their sense of decor.
"Linux is getting more and more similar to Windows"
Windows throws away support for old hardware all the time. I have a shelf full of network adapters, soundcards and more that are perfectly adequate for most purposes however only under Linux as Windows has no drivers.
One of the things I love about Linux is all the old and esoteric hardware it supports. I don't want to throw away something that suites me just fine only because it isn't popular anymore.
I do agree that costs and benefits shoudl be weighed. But where is all this old hardware support complicating scripts that you speak of? The place I am used to seeing hardware support is in the kernel. It's a dropdown... build it in, make it a module or don't support it. I'm guessing that 90% or so of users don't even see that anyway! They are probably running kernels that came with their distros.
I don't even mind if distros chose not to build in modules for ancient hardware. So long as I am free to compile my own kernel who cares? But.. where are these scripts that will be oh so better if only we flipped the bird to the few people still using some hardware and told them they can't have their toy anymore?
Also.. even if removing support for one piece of hardware only alienates a few people... If you really clean house then that's a few people per each device you condemn to obsolesence. Don't you think they might add up?
Rolling your own 'Just like Linus did' may be a little extreme. I don't think you need a whole new kernel!
Just install Linux from scratch and don't put all that *kit, etc.. crap in it. I would imagine you could even get rid of udev and all that stuff if you are willing to run mknode yourself. Roll it like it's 1995.
You will lose out on some convenience if you are using a portable device such as a laptop but on a desktop with fairly static hardware everything should work just fine.
If having your own custom simple Linux isn't good enough for you then take it to the next step and start your own distro that leaves all that stuff out.
"That's one hell of a marketing 2x4 that the NSA is giving away for free"
I'm not so sure about that. To you, me and most of the people here on Slashdot I'm sure that would be a great marketing move. However, the other side has plenty of shills in the media. I can see them painting our new favorite company as enabling terrorists in the media. I don't have much faith in the population to see through that BS.
"For instance, the music Scope will pull songs from Grooveshark alongside music stored locally on your device, without strong differentiation between the two"
I love this idea! I use my Android phone constantly and mostly listen to Pandora myself. I do have some music I purchased through Google and would buy more except what I want is to somehow mix my purchased music with Pandora.
For example, I have a doc by my bed, another at work and one in my car. For each I get to setup alarm clock and driving modes. In them I get to pick a Music player. The same goes with the various voice assistant apps I have installed.
But which music player do I pick? Play Music or Pandora? I get bored with the same songs repeated so I pick Pandora. But that means I never listed to what I paid for. So.. I don't buy any more. I'd love to mix them!
But.. then the different Music providers don' t get to sell their brand as much. Your experience is Ubuntu, not Google or Pandora or Grooveshark. I don't see the various mainstream providers accepting this. So.. it will always be fringe. Oh well...
Newbie1: "I hear about this Linux thing too. How do I get that?" Linux Advocate: "Here, I'll help you install "
= some newbie oriented distro that Linux Advocate is familiar with just for this purpose and recommends to all his/her newbies Newbie1: "OK.. procedes to ask questions when needed.. eventually graduates to doing things on own and probably uses a more complex distro... Newbie1 is now a Linux advocate too"
Newbie2: "I hear about this Linux thing too. How do I get that?" Linux Advocate: "Here, I'll help you install " Newbie2: "distro? there are choices! that is totally unhip! Later Loser!" Linux Advocate: "Wait, come back... just use this, it's easy, you don't HAVE to make any choices, you just can if you want to" Newbie2:
I installed Jesse on an old computer just to see what the fuss was about. I'm still looking. All the commands I was used to using are still there. Service, shutdown, poweroff... they all work./etc/init.d contains scripts. I don't know, maybe they are just wrappers, I didn't read them. Calling the scripts in/etc/init.d directly or using the service command gets me more information than I am used to seeing. That's kind of neat. I'm coming from Gentoo though, not Debian, maybe Debian's init scripts were always more informative?
I tried starting and stopping services with sysctl. I rebooted with it to. Of course that worked. Just like doing it the old way. Whooptie! I remember reading some set of commands that were for doing these things in Systemd that sounded like long classpaths and namespaces, more like programming than shell commands. I would have hated doing it that way. I am glad to see I don't have to.
I know systemd has it's own way of doing most of Cron's functionality. Cron was there in Jesse, installed and running by default anyway, it worked just like I am used to.
Boot time is fairly fast. The only other install I had ever done on that machine was Ubuntu with Upstart. That was another one I put on just for testing and didn't really use for long so I don't have a good frame of reference for boot time on that particular machine.
Shutdown time is kind of weird. Sometimes it shuts down kind of fast. Other times it is so quick I almost wonder if it 'knew' I was about to press the button and started shutting down early!
Those things being said.. I don't really care about (re)boot time. My main desktop rarely gets rebooted. It is also my development server (to save electricity and maintenance time/effort). My live server is rented. I quit carying a laptop years ago. Grandfathered Verizon unlimitted data on my phone means I can use my Lapdock or iPad to VNC back to home from pretty much anywhere. So what's to reboot?
So... liking the idea of being able to tell the init system to respawn things (I still miss the days when it was considered acceptable to go right to inittab for that!) and also hoping to cure an annoying problem with DHCP not working on startup I decided to convert my Gentoo box to Systemd. There are Systemd profiles for Gnome and KDE. I use the vanilla Desktop profile.(which is only available for openrc) I try to keep Gnome and KDE bloat off my system as much as possible. I was NOT willing to switch to one of those profiles.
Supposedly you can install Systemd on any profile if you are willing to mess with the USE variable enough. I ended up with a huge mess of USE changes, and yet still had a bunch of conflicts. I couldn't find any useful documentation on doing it this way. For what little difference I saw between running Openrc and Systemd I decided it wasn't worth it. I put everything back. Maybe someday there will be a vanilla Systemd profile and I will try again. Maybe not.
I really don't care that much!
For now I'll continue worrying about the X to Wayland migration and fear that I might lose my LAN connected X-terminal. I will not worry about Systemd. It doesn't seem to affect me!
So.. go ahead.. fight on in the init flamewar! It's better than arguing about text editors I guess. Clearly Emacs is the only true contender! Vi sucks! What's to argue?
There is no equivalence. One is all about logic and mathematics. The other.. language skills and dealing with the illogical, more human stuff. CS is all about strict rules that cannot be broken. Natural human languages are so full of inconsistancies and exceptions the rules barely exist. Learning a foreign language is about learning to wrap your mind around how a different group of people think and perceive the world not how to logically construct an algorithm.
Substituting one for the other makes about as much sense as substituting math for english or vice versa. A well rounded person needs math, logic AND language.
Give him a couple more years sitting on his couch-bed in his mother's basement drinking Mountain Dew and eating chips while playing video games and troling Slashdot.
He WILL know all about lancets! Or be dead. One or the other.
I'm not too impressed with the reasons why the program "can't" be restarted. The thing is, someday this will have to be done somewhere. When the politicians and scared public finally get their thumbs out of their 4ss3s they will have to designate funds, hire a staff, and deal with NIMBY syndrom. All of this is true regardless of where they put it.
Here's a location where the studies have already been done. Call it a restart of the old program or call it a new one.. either way it will make more sense to just finish the job at Yucca.
" A few decades from now we will have more knowledge about geology, radiation, engineering, etc."
And a few decades from then someone will be there to point out that in a few more decades "we" will know even more.
And a few decades from that...
And a few decades from that...
Meanwhile the waste sits in what was supposed to be temporary storage requiring more maintenance than permanent storage would, opening it up to more chances for an accident or even theft. And this is at the power plants, near population centers as opposed to in the middle of a desert mountain.
If there is a concern that we might want to re-use it some day just go get it back from the mountain!
"If I needed one of these for myself, I would sincerely hope that the hospital could afford better than an entry level"
Agreed although they can use whatever they want if it's the best that they have and my alternative is death.
"It only works in this context because they're experimenting"
Yup.. that makes sense. They can prove the concept here before buying the million dollar magic bot.
"In some ways, 3D printing gets used because it's a way to promote 3D printing"
Ok... sure. I see that all the time. But they aren't promoting "3D printing". They are specifically promoting one entry-level 3D printer manufacturer. If they wanted to promote 3D printing they could just say "3D printing technology" or if they wanted to emphasize that this was being done with tools that mere mortals can obtain or at least get access to they could say something like "hobyist leve 3d printing technology". By why is Makerbot somehow being singled out as unique? They are basically just RepRap technology in a shinier box, not unlike a couple dozen or so other that are out there.
No, I'm not commenting on the fact that they used a Makerbot, I'm commenting on the fact that they refer to it as Makerbot technology as though 3D printing is something solely owned and developed by Makerbot.
What are they, Kleenex?
"...even if you could get something cheaper and faster by just having someone carve the same thing out of styrofoam."
Doubtful.. they need to use a material that is biocompatible. I don't know what all materials that includes but unless styrofoam or something similarly easy to work with is one of them...
I didn't know that PLA is biocompatible enough to make implants. I guess it makes sense given what PLA is made from.
I wouldn't want to try to carve a block of PLA by hand! Injection molding would probably be best for mass-production. For prototyping though... 3D printing probably IS the best tool. Actually... since these things are for implanting in real human bodies.. which have all sorts of natural variances this may be one of the very few industries where 3D printing makes sense in production, beyond the experimental stages.
Why so specific? There are a lot of comercial competitors as well as DIY printers in the same league as the Makerbot Replicator. None of this was available in today's affordable form before the RepRap project. This almost sounds like a very strange ad and unless there is something very special about Makerbot many contributors to 3d printing technology could find it offensive.
The ability to change sex wasn't something they evolved in the movie. It was something they either had all along, inherited from a common ancestor or got from the frog DNA that was used to fill in the gaps in their genome.
Why wouldn't these E. Coli be expected to evolve independance from the artificial stuff? Because it takes generations to evolve something.. and.. there is no selection pressure to do so until it is already too late. They don't evolve because they die.
If you were on a budget and the upgrade to PCI had to come in stages that just meant you had a mixed system. Now you had plug and play PCI devices that couldn't understand why some resources were just not available since they were already taken by the old ISA hardware. That started to improve once BIOSs got smart enough to let you block off resources from the PnP pool.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes but now we have people who grew up on iPods and their one-button simplicity. The mere existence of support for something they do not care about offends their sense of decor.
"Linux is getting more and more similar to Windows"
Windows throws away support for old hardware all the time. I have a shelf full of network adapters, soundcards and more that are perfectly adequate for most purposes however only under Linux as Windows has no drivers.
Either one will do. mtab usually still exists.. as a link to /proc/mounts.
How about an example?
One of the things I love about Linux is all the old and esoteric hardware it supports. I don't want to throw away something that suites me just fine only because it isn't popular anymore.
I do agree that costs and benefits shoudl be weighed. But where is all this old hardware support complicating scripts that you speak of? The place I am used to seeing hardware support is in the kernel. It's a dropdown... build it in, make it a module or don't support it. I'm guessing that 90% or so of users don't even see that anyway! They are probably running kernels that came with their distros.
I don't even mind if distros chose not to build in modules for ancient hardware. So long as I am free to compile my own kernel who cares? But.. where are these scripts that will be oh so better if only we flipped the bird to the few people still using some hardware and told them they can't have their toy anymore?
Also.. even if removing support for one piece of hardware only alienates a few people... If you really clean house then that's a few people per each device you condemn to obsolesence. Don't you think they might add up?
Rolling your own 'Just like Linus did' may be a little extreme. I don't think you need a whole new kernel!
Just install Linux from scratch and don't put all that *kit, etc.. crap in it. I would imagine you could even get rid of udev and all that stuff if you are willing to run mknode yourself. Roll it like it's 1995.
You will lose out on some convenience if you are using a portable device such as a laptop but on a desktop with fairly static hardware everything should work just fine.
If having your own custom simple Linux isn't good enough for you then take it to the next step and start your own distro that leaves all that stuff out.
No, it became too complex years ago. And it just keeps getting worse!
"That's one hell of a marketing 2x4 that the NSA is giving away for free"
I'm not so sure about that. To you, me and most of the people here on Slashdot I'm sure that would be a great marketing move. However, the other side has plenty of shills in the media. I can see them painting our new favorite company as enabling terrorists in the media. I don't have much faith in the population to see through that BS.
"professionals that don't know much about Linux is hard to imagine, but they are there"
Well, yah ya know... it's not like they haven't had 20 years or so to catch up. I mean... Linux just took over everything in a single night!
"For instance, the music Scope will pull songs from Grooveshark alongside music stored locally on your device, without strong differentiation between the two"
I love this idea! I use my Android phone constantly and mostly listen to Pandora myself. I do have some music I purchased through Google and would buy more except what I want is to somehow mix my purchased music with Pandora.
For example, I have a doc by my bed, another at work and one in my car. For each I get to setup alarm clock and driving modes. In them I get to pick a Music player. The same goes with the various voice assistant apps I have installed.
But which music player do I pick? Play Music or Pandora? I get bored with the same songs repeated so I pick Pandora. But that means I never listed to what I paid for. So.. I don't buy any more. I'd love to mix them!
But.. then the different Music providers don' t get to sell their brand as much. Your experience is Ubuntu, not Google or Pandora or Grooveshark. I don't see the various mainstream providers accepting this. So.. it will always be fringe. Oh well...
Nah, more like this
Newbie2 is an Apple fan, Newbie1 is not
Newbie1: "I hear about this Linux thing too. How do I get that?"
Linux Advocate: "Here, I'll help you install "
= some newbie oriented distro that Linux Advocate is familiar with just for this purpose and recommends to all his/her newbies
Newbie1: "OK.. procedes to ask questions when needed.. eventually graduates to doing things on own and probably uses a more complex distro... Newbie1 is now a Linux advocate too"
Newbie2: "I hear about this Linux thing too. How do I get that?"
Linux Advocate: "Here, I'll help you install "
Newbie2: "distro? there are choices! that is totally unhip! Later Loser!"
Linux Advocate: "Wait, come back... just use this, it's easy, you don't HAVE to make any choices, you just can if you want to"
Newbie2:
I installed Jesse on an old computer just to see what the fuss was about. I'm still looking. All the commands I was used to using are still there. Service, shutdown, poweroff... they all work. /etc/init.d contains scripts. I don't know, maybe they are just wrappers, I didn't read them. Calling the scripts in /etc/init.d directly or using the service command gets me more information than I am used to seeing. That's kind of neat. I'm coming from Gentoo though, not Debian, maybe Debian's init scripts were always more informative?
I tried starting and stopping services with sysctl. I rebooted with it to. Of course that worked. Just like doing it the old way. Whooptie! I remember reading some set of commands that were for doing these things in Systemd that sounded like long classpaths and namespaces, more like programming than shell commands. I would have hated doing it that way. I am glad to see I don't have to.
I know systemd has it's own way of doing most of Cron's functionality. Cron was there in Jesse, installed and running by default anyway, it worked just like I am used to.
Boot time is fairly fast. The only other install I had ever done on that machine was Ubuntu with Upstart. That was another one I put on just for testing and didn't really use for long so I don't have a good frame of reference for boot time on that particular machine.
Shutdown time is kind of weird. Sometimes it shuts down kind of fast. Other times it is so quick I almost wonder if it 'knew' I was about to press the button and started shutting down early!
Those things being said.. I don't really care about (re)boot time. My main desktop rarely gets rebooted. It is also my development server (to save electricity and maintenance time/effort). My live server is rented. I quit carying a laptop years ago. Grandfathered Verizon unlimitted data on my phone means I can use my Lapdock or iPad to VNC back to home from pretty much anywhere. So what's to reboot?
So... liking the idea of being able to tell the init system to respawn things (I still miss the days when it was considered acceptable to go right to inittab for that!) and also hoping to cure an annoying problem with DHCP not working on startup I decided to convert my Gentoo box to Systemd. There are Systemd profiles for Gnome and KDE. I use the vanilla Desktop profile.(which is only available for openrc) I try to keep Gnome and KDE bloat off my system as much as possible. I was NOT willing to switch to one of those profiles.
Supposedly you can install Systemd on any profile if you are willing to mess with the USE variable enough. I ended up with a huge mess of USE changes, and yet still had a bunch of conflicts. I couldn't find any useful documentation on doing it this way. For what little difference I saw between running Openrc and Systemd I decided it wasn't worth it. I put everything back. Maybe someday there will be a vanilla Systemd profile and I will try again. Maybe not.
I really don't care that much!
For now I'll continue worrying about the X to Wayland migration and fear that I might lose my LAN connected X-terminal. I will not worry about Systemd. It doesn't seem to affect me!
So.. go ahead.. fight on in the init flamewar! It's better than arguing about text editors I guess. Clearly Emacs is the only true contender! Vi sucks! What's to argue?
The wingnuts will not be acting like the wingnuts they are until after the election.
There is no equivalence. One is all about logic and mathematics. The other.. language skills and dealing with the illogical, more human stuff. CS is all about strict rules that cannot be broken. Natural human languages are so full of inconsistancies and exceptions the rules barely exist. Learning a foreign language is about learning to wrap your mind around how a different group of people think and perceive the world not how to logically construct an algorithm.
Substituting one for the other makes about as much sense as substituting math for english or vice versa. A well rounded person needs math, logic AND language.
Hey, no worries, this is Slashdot!
Give him a couple more years sitting on his couch-bed in his mother's basement drinking Mountain Dew and eating chips while playing video games and troling Slashdot.
He WILL know all about lancets! Or be dead. One or the other.
I think I will go on a quest to get rid of as many occurances of "X times LESS than ..." as possible.
I'm not too impressed with the reasons why the program "can't" be restarted. The thing is, someday this will have to be done somewhere. When the politicians and scared public finally get their thumbs out of their 4ss3s they will have to designate funds, hire a staff, and deal with NIMBY syndrom. All of this is true regardless of where they put it.
Here's a location where the studies have already been done. Call it a restart of the old program or call it a new one.. either way it will make more sense to just finish the job at Yucca.
" A few decades from now we will have more knowledge about geology, radiation, engineering, etc."
And a few decades from then someone will be there to point out that in a few more decades "we" will know even more.
And a few decades from that...
And a few decades from that...
Meanwhile the waste sits in what was supposed to be temporary storage requiring more maintenance than permanent storage would, opening it up to more chances for an accident or even theft. And this is at the power plants, near population centers as opposed to in the middle of a desert mountain.
If there is a concern that we might want to re-use it some day just go get it back from the mountain!
I was so-hoping to get a real singuaritist response that I could counter-respont to. All I got is yours which I am pretty sure would earn me a woosh!
"If I needed one of these for myself, I would sincerely hope that the hospital could afford better than an entry level"
Agreed although they can use whatever they want if it's the best that they have and my alternative is death.
"It only works in this context because they're experimenting"
Yup.. that makes sense. They can prove the concept here before buying the million dollar magic bot.
"In some ways, 3D printing gets used because it's a way to promote 3D printing"
Ok... sure. I see that all the time. But they aren't promoting "3D printing". They are specifically promoting one entry-level 3D printer manufacturer. If they wanted to promote 3D printing they could just say "3D printing technology" or if they wanted to emphasize that this was being done with tools that mere mortals can obtain or at least get access to they could say something like "hobyist leve 3d printing technology". By why is Makerbot somehow being singled out as unique? They are basically just RepRap technology in a shinier box, not unlike a couple dozen or so other that are out there.
No, I'm not commenting on the fact that they used a Makerbot, I'm commenting on the fact that they refer to it as Makerbot technology as though 3D printing is something solely owned and developed by Makerbot.
What are they, Kleenex?
"...even if you could get something cheaper and faster by just having someone carve the same thing out of styrofoam."
Doubtful.. they need to use a material that is biocompatible. I don't know what all materials that includes but unless styrofoam or something similarly easy to work with is one of them...
I didn't know that PLA is biocompatible enough to make implants. I guess it makes sense given what PLA is made from.
I wouldn't want to try to carve a block of PLA by hand! Injection molding would probably be best for mass-production. For prototyping though... 3D printing probably IS the best tool. Actually... since these things are for implanting in real human bodies.. which have all sorts of natural variances this may be one of the very few industries where 3D printing makes sense in production, beyond the experimental stages.
Then use hydrogen. It's not like you have a person riding in it to lose if it catches fire.
Why so specific? There are a lot of comercial competitors as well as DIY printers in the same league as the Makerbot Replicator. None of this was available in today's affordable form before the RepRap project. This almost sounds like a very strange ad and unless there is something very special about Makerbot many contributors to 3d printing technology could find it offensive.
>>WE ALL GONNA DIE!
Of course! Everyone does eventually!
The ability to change sex wasn't something they evolved in the movie. It was something they either had all along, inherited from a common ancestor or got from the frog DNA that was used to fill in the gaps in their genome.
Why wouldn't these E. Coli be expected to evolve independance from the artificial stuff? Because it takes generations to evolve something.. and.. there is no selection pressure to do so until it is already too late. They don't evolve because they die.
But Lysine IS found in nature. The extra security here is that they are dependant on something they cannot obtain because it is not found in nature.
If you were on a budget and the upgrade to PCI had to come in stages that just meant you had a mixed system. Now you had plug and play PCI devices that couldn't understand why some resources were just not available since they were already taken by the old ISA hardware. That started to improve once BIOSs got smart enough to let you block off resources from the PnP pool.