Re: Snap is a single compressed file,
I've almost never run into a problem with Slackware packages.
The "almost" is because I screwed up when creating a couple of packages early on ... but a quick modification with vi sorted 'em.
26710 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
"Even embedded SBCs can afford to burn through a few extra gigs if it makes them more reliable and robust."
But do they actually need that many 9s of reliability?
Sure, bespoke systems (spacecraft & etc.) might need this. But your average linux desktop/set-top-box/telephone/SBC? Total overkill.
Shirley at this point we are well past the point of diminishing returns in what is a general purpose operating system.
This 19ish year old HP laptop has never crashed, never lost a byte of data, never been compromised, with no issues updating and installing new software. Slackware 10.0 -stable on ext3 when new, moved to ext4 with slack13.1 in 2010, still on ext4 today running slack15.0 (flirted with reiserfs briefly around slack12.1) ... all without any OS or program related issues.[0][1]
From my perspective, not a single one of these new ideas seems to have a compelling case for inclusion FOR THE VAST MAJORITY OF USE CASES. And yet, here we are. Wasting system resources for no good reason. (Other than the pervasive "it's there, we must fill it!" of the Lost Redmond Generations.)
Unless the companies pushing this kind of thing have ulterior motives, of course. My guess is that it's a control issue... and not the user's control of his own hardware, either.
[0] I have replaced/upgraded the HDD, battery and RAM over the years. She was built just before the second round of bad caps at HP.
[1] I fully expect this old laptop to dissolve into a lump of slag after typing that for all the world to read ... but I have known good backups, multiple fall-over boxen, and the ol' gal doesn't owe me a dime. I'll shed a tear, raise a glass and give her a decent burial when the inevitable happens.
There will be no "singularity". A machine, and the running thereof, is entropy poor. They break. Constantly. And are not self-healing. They cannot, and will not, "take over" until they are capable of running their entire supply chain, and the care and feeding of all THAT ... without Human help. The very concept is laughable. When was the last time you tried to make a simple steam powered traction engine, from scratch, starting with raw ore? Now try it with a simple late '70s era pocket calculator. You really think an intelligent machine could somehow marshal the necessary forces to reproduce, even one random part at a time?
As long as there is one Human in the chain, the plug can be pulled ... thus no Singularity.
"It most likely wouldn't even be registered to drive on the road."
Actually, yes, almost all farm equipment is allowed to be operated on the road here in the States.
"I need to ring Mr and Mrs Deere to come out and plug their laptop into it to see what's wrong with the thing? Then they need to come back later to fix it when the parts needed arrive?"
No. You are expected to put the broken contraption onto a heavy equipment flatbed, take it to the nearest JD stealership (100 miles away), where it will be diagnosed. Eventually. Then you wait 4 to 6 weeks for parts to come in, and then another 4 to 6 weeks for them to schedule a "repair technician" to fix it. Then you drive back with your heavy-equipment flatbed, pay the exorbitant cost of the part replacement and threaten mayhem until they remove the "storage fee" for the time that your gear sat on their lot due to their incompetence, load it up, and tow it home ... having missed the harvest window by 8 to 12 weeks. All for a broken part that you could have bought at the nearest automotive store and replaced in the field, if JD's all-knowing computer would allow it.
And THEN, the following year, the VERY SAME part dies again, right at the start of harvest, starting the cycle all over again.
True story. Happened to a friend of mine. The part was a fuel pump. He no longer has any green equipment. Sold the lot.
There's a reason that ties were fair game for anyone with a pair of scissors at most early Silly Con Valley companies ... hand-built one-off prototypes often had voracious cooling fans. The theory was that if we starved 'em of ties they'd be too weak to do much other damage. Not even IBM Field Circus folks were safe from the shears ... HP, somewhat wisely, decided ties were pretty useless fairly early on, as did DEC's Palo Alto contingent. Most of the other big names followed. Some of the Military Brass working out of Ford Aerospace, Varian & etc. had special dispensation to do without neck-ware "so they'd fit in with the locals" ... We had high hopes that it'd become a world-wide movement and we'd be done with the useless things for good.
The only real use for a tie is as a handle when trying to shake sense into the wearer.
That early British "pie" recipe was not an apple pie as we know it. It was mixed fruit and assorted spices cooked in a type of shell called a cofyn ("coffin"), which was an inedible container made of flour and water, no salt or shortening. The fruit mixture contained no sugar.
The British Isles ... where good ingredients go to die. Since at least 1381, apparently. Perhaps now we know where the groans of the Britons came from?
At the end of a production line at a company where I once worked was a burn-in station where a QA tech would wire up the new equipment and run a comprehensive set of tests. One of our upper-middle managers was "touring the manufacturing facility" one afternoon and asked the tech "is this where the Quality is installed?". The tech, knowing the manager was pretty much clueless, answered with a simple "yes" to avoid an explanation.
For years afterward, we all cringed when this manager gave tours of our production floor to visiting big-wigs ... He always concluded his tour with a stop at the burn-in area, and with a big flourish would proclaim "this is where the Quality is installed!" ... You could hear the capital Q in the word. A senior IBM field service engineer/rep once took me aside and asked if the guy was for real.
"Dishwashers waste a lot of energy 'blow-drying' the dishes.'
Yours might.
"Much more efficient (not to mention better results) rinsing with cold water and letting drip / air-dry"
Mine does just that, if I tell it to. But I usually use the heat option so they are done before the next meal. The water is heated with a GSHP, the heater & fan are solar powered.
I'm not doing dishes for a dozen adults (plus or minus), three times per day, by hand!
Include chives, shallots and leeks with your onions and garlic.
Also, grapes (and raisins) and chocolate. Anything containing xylitol (including some toothpastes and mouthwashes). Avocados, persimmons, and macadamia nuts. Anything with caffeine in it, and anything with marijuana in it. Tobacco of all kinds. Peach/plum pits. Apple seeds. Alcohol (duh!), and hops.
For a more extensive list, consult your local veterinarian.
"what really did it for the commercial Unices was the huge and extortionate licence and royalty fees that came with them."
Mark Williams Coherent was about a hundred bucks per seat. It worked nicely and was FAST (being written in assembler), had no AT&T code in it, and would have done better if they had added better networking earlier. Lost opportunity ... but most people didn't realize where networking was going in the early '80s.
"As soon as the free and open source upstart Linux cousin came along"
Well, to be fair NET/2 (based on 4.3BSD) was released in June of '91, a couple months before Linux.
Mark Williams Group's Coherent (1980 on PDP-11, '83 on PC clones) had already brought the cost down to where mere mortals could afford to run a good *nix OS.
Throw Minix into the mix (1987), and it becomes clear that a free UNIX was pretty much inevitable.
Interesting times, especially for those of us who were *nix agnostic and wanted to run it at home.
Not really. Any sysadmin worth his salt knows that a completely custom, fully targeted installation is the only way to go for a server. It doesn't really matter which distro you start with, what matters is the distro that you actually wind up using. Only an idiot installs Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat or SUSE off a kitchensinkware DVD and calls it a server.
That said, some software distributions are easier to customize than others. I personally prefer BSD on the servers ... but Slackware works nicely, too.
4) When updates are available (cron is your friend), update the computer that runs the same software as [Wife, DearOldMum, GreatAunt, siblings, sprog, etc.]'s boxen. Check that the update(s) work as advertised on the one local box. Then reach across the network and tell their computer(s) to perform said upgrade. Script most of the operation.
Works for me and mine. The version of Slackware that I built specifically for this makes it almost laughably easy.
Except "man" (from the Old English Mann) means all humans, men, women and children.
The word "wer" means the adult male human (as in "werewolf" ... sorry kids, no such thing as werewomen, not in that context anyway!) ... and as a side-note, werguild is not the same thing as a Eunich, the plural of which is not UNIX, just to bring us back on topic.
There is nothing inherently wrong with HURD, in fact I quite like it and have contributed in the past.
But the BSDs got the jump on it. I like the BSDs, too, and also contribute there (and have been since before it was BSD).
And of course Linux got the jump on the BSDs. Fortunately for me, I also like Linux. And so I contribute.
The Windows part of the equation is more about marketing and sales than technology, alas. Fortunately, one doesn't have to contribute to every project.
"I do love the assumption that the person reading his comment might not be straight, but they're definitely a bloke."
I'm pretty sure I didn't make that assumption at all. Women married[0] to women notice the same things[1].
"(unless there's some way that you can be notified of responses on El Reg, and if there is, I'd love to know how)"
Nearest that I am aware of would be to visit https://forums.theregister.com/my/forums/ ... any changes to commentardary in forums you've commented in will automagically mark that link unread, and move it to the top of the list. It'll be up to you to figure out if anyone is talking to you, though. Use the "sort comments" option "newest" to bring new comments to the top. Etc. Fiddle about with it and use what works for you.
Edit: That's not my downvote ... have an upvote to negate it.
[0] Or in a long-term, committed relationship, if you prefer not to use the "m" word.
[1] What "things" means will vary between individuals, obviously.
"from 20,000ft"
After you get past a certain distance from the ground, if dropped you reach terminal velocity and stop accelerating before reaching the ground. That distance varies with the object dropped, but it's well under the height of all of the objects.
"going to hit the ground hard."
Yeahbut ... That balloon was rather large ... I would imagine the drag caused by the bits still attached to the hardware would have kept the hardware well below its unadorned terminal velocity.
And no, the water, being uncompressible, wouldn't have cushioned the impact. Much.
... Hallmark, and hundreds or thousands of imitators, will sell umpteen million cards pre-printed with the exact same insipid nonsense and nobody will blink an eyelid over it.
"Me see a neon moon above / I searched for years I found no love
I'm sure that love will never be / A product of plasticity" —Frank Zappa
"It will probably not even do that....'
Indeed. Ever use a mop[0] without cleaning it every other pass (or so)? These things don't so much mop things up as smear them all over the floor ... unless you hover[1] over it and clean it when necessary, which kind of makes the wet capability worse than useless.
[0] I'm talking to the adults in the audience; you Millennials and later can get back to your lattes.
[1] Note spelling.
"I want something that can dust! Carefully! Very carefully!"
If you don't have central HVAC, a simple AC unit (either window mounted or portable) will happily pull dust out of the air for hours on end. Move the temperature control to a point where the AC compressor doesn't need to run, and the things sip power. You can also use a standard 19 inch box fan with a furnace filter duct-taped/bungeed to the intake side. The 20'x20" fit near perfectly. Either way, if the sound annoys you, turn it on whenever you leave. It's amazing how much crap these things will pull out of the air. You can get varying filter capability, depending on your personal needs (pollen is larger than smoke, for example).
Don't forget to clean or replace the dust filter periodically. Remember, when cleaning a dust filter, backflush it!
Note that the finer the filter, the less air it will allow to pass. The answer is to increase the number of square inches of filter. Simply get 5 filters, tape them together in a cube with the intake side of the fan as the 6th side. This worked for an asthmatic friend of mine when this part of California was under a constant cloud of heavy smoke due to wildfires.
"Our orbital debris mitigation plans demonstrate the Kuiper System is designed to meet or exceed all requirements set forth by the FCC."
I'm sure the Chinese, Russians, Indians, Pakistanis and miscellaneous very wealthy Islamic states will take that into consideration as they shoot down the blasphemous, free-speech loving infernal machines.
There goes low-Earth orbit ... and safe launches in general. All for the almighty buck. Bastards.