spauldo

Unless you travel a lot and live in hotels for months at a time, like I do. Granted, that's not horribly common but there are still legitimate reasons to want an ICE.

I would. Why wouldn't I? I park my car in an attached garage. If I had an EV or PHEV, I'd walk right past the charger on my way to the door into the house. I don't like standing around at the gas station waiting on the tank to fill. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

I actually wanted a PHEV, since my car is mostly used for local driving but I also drive hundreds of miles for work trips. Unfortunately I couldn't find one I liked.

Whether he believed in it or not, he passed rigorous physical tests for the Navy and NASA. They don't let just any slob be a fighter pilot, much less a test pilot or astronaut. If you don't have good cardiovascular fitness, you can't handle high G-forces or maintain good judgement while sleep deprived (those jets didn't fly themselves while the pilot napped like modern ones do).

Maybe he was just naturally fit. Some people are. But he was undoubtedly fit.

There were effectively no free compilers in the 80s. If you had an expensive UNIX workstation it might come with one, but everyone in the micro world had to pay. Or they wrote in Assembly or a BASIC interpreter.

Granted, some were pretty cheap, at least by the early 90s.

I dunno, given the reputation we Americans have as tourists, it'd be nice to point out good ol' Alex and say, "hey, it could be worse!"

Everybody smoked back then. Besides, until you get older your health is much more affected by your lifestyle than whether or not you smoke.

Most astronauts were chosen from a decent sized pool of military pilots. Pilots are some of the most expensive assets the military has (moreso than the planes they fly) and they have to be physically fit. People wanting to become astronauts are subjected to rigorous physical testing.

No, they're not Olympic athletes but they're considerably more fit than the average American.

They'd lose a whole lot of users if they killed Java edition, since the modded community is so large. They'd quickly find one of the Minecraft clones reaching feature parity. And there's no good reason for it - it's not like Java is a threat anymore.

We already have to trust that none of the people involved in the official images are foreign (or even domestic) intelligence agents, so it's not that different.

I don't recall the Bible saying much about who to vote for, given that democracy wasn't much of a thing in the ancient middle east.

I haven't used Linux as a gateway in years, so I can only compare pf to iptables. The two biggest differences are the way the rules are applied and the logging.

pf rules work a little backwards compared to iptables. A packet traverses the entire ruleset and the last rule to match wins. You can short-circuit this with a "quick" directive. It takes a bit of getting used to coming from iptables.

The logging on pf doesn't integrate with syslog automatically like iptables does. You're expected to set up a logging system for your particular use case. There are several ways to do it, and for production you'd be doing it regardless, but for honelab setups it's an extra thing you need to worry about.

I prefer pf, but I don't recommend it to people new to firewalls.

You're confusing two different things.

For most C and C++ software, you use the system packaging which uses libraries that (usually) have stable ABIs. If your program uses one of those problematic libraries, you might need to recompile your program when you update the library, but most of the time there's no problem.

For your company's custom mission critical application where you need total control of the dependencies, then yes you need to manage it yourself.

That's when you rewrite your codebase in the SPARK dialect of Ada and play innocent when your management questions you about it.

True, there are exceptions. Stallman thought strategically. Having a free-but-non-copyleft licensed reference implementation is necessary if you are trying to wrest dominance from an established but proprietary standard.

But I'm willing to bet that he'd have pushed for GPL if he wasn't trying to topple MP3.

The FSF has written extensively on why (in their opinion) you should prefer copyleft licenses over non-copyleft licenses, but they don't require a license to be copyleft in order to be considered free. It's worth spending a bit of time on their site to understand their point of view. Just be careful not to drink too much of the Kool-Aid or you'll become one of those annoying people who never shut up about the GPL on forums.

It's not the development model at fault here. It's the simple fact that Windows makes up nearly the entire user base for PCs. Companies make sure their hardware works with Windows, but many don't bother with Linux because it's such a tiny percentage of their sales.

Yeah, V8 is the shape of the engine - 8 cylinders in two rows offset at an acute angle (i. e. V-shaped). Likewise a V6 has the same number of cylinders as an inline 6 but performs very differently. There's a handful of different engine shapes - I'm fond of the rotary engines used in early aircraft. Traditionally, the name of an engine was just the year, the manufacturer, and the displacement (like 1965 Ford 352). You often leave off the year and even the manufacturer if it's not required by context.

The Ford 351 is a bit special because there were two different engines made by Ford in the same time period with the same displacement, so they tacked on the city they were manufactured in (Windsor or Cleveland).

Especially since, IIRC, it actually predates C.

A Linux-based system would be identical to a Windows-based system as far as operator experience goes. They interact with HMI software and only see the OS underneath when Windows pops up silly notifications and errors.

Windows owns the industrial space for historical reasons, mostly to do with OPC being Windows-only and software for doing maintenance on field devices originally running on DOS. It quickly became a chicken-and-egg situation - everyone wrote their software for Windows because everyone else wrote their software for Windows. SCO owned a decent chunk of the field before that, but we know how that worked out.

We're seeing some change now that OPC is being phased out. Ignition now has feature parity between Linux and Windows (barring OPC, of course). Windows won't go away any time soon (if ever), but you can now have a fully functioning SCADA system with no Windows at all.

Yeah, I was there too.

The three companies you list are horrible examples. IBM is kind of a UNIX vendor, sort of, but not like Sun or DEC. They sell solutions, and the solutions that use AIX don't overlap with what Linux was capable of in 1998. I'd argue that, given their complete disregard for Tru-64 and pretty much all things DEC, Compaq was never a UNIX vendor - they just inherited a bunch of legacy systems they needed to support. They certainly didn't push for new Tru-64 based systems. Oracle wasn't a UNIX vendor at all and wouldn't become one for quite some time.

BSD sockets are also a bad example. They were the reference implementation, paid for by DARPA. The entire purpose of BSD sockets was to be copied into other operating systems. You'll notice that Linux copied them as well.

IBM and Compaq invested in Linux because they wanted something that ran on their lower-end server hardware and could handle web traffic. Oracle invested in Linux because they wanted to be the backend to all these new websites that were cropping up.

IBM, Oracle, and Compaq didn't give a rat's ass about the operating system code - they wanted the platform. If Linux had never happened and FreeBSD became the new hot thing all the online hackers were talking about, the result would have been exactly the same. They'd have poured money into the projects rather than trying to make their own thing because that's the financially sensible thing to do. The UNIX wars were over, and proprietary software lost.

Meanwhile, the last major UNIX vendor - Sun Microsystems - was giving away its own source code under the CDDL. FreeBSD ended up adopting a lot of it. That's the complete opposite effect from what you're talking about.

Sun got involved in the GNOME project and even deprecated their own CDE desktop in favor of it. Was it because it was GPL? No. It was because they saw that all the new desktop software was coming out of the Linux community, who didn't have access to CDE. Even if GNOME had been BSD licensed they would still have switched to it, because they were still trying to keep the workstation market alive at that point and CDE was quickly becoming irrelevant.

As far as I can see, the only companies interested in taking operating system code were the network appliance vendors and Apple. It only worked for them because they didn't care about compatibility.

No, we wouldn't. Linux climbed its way up to overtake proprietary UNIX despite being less capable, which it very much was at the time.

Linux came around at the right time when the Internet was going public and regular people had access to hardware that could run a decent UNIX. People latched onto it because it was free and an interesting project. The free BSDs were just late enough to the party that they missed out on the momentum.

All the proprietary UNIX vendors (other than SCO) relied on expensive proprietary hardware sales. Intel ate their lunch while they were too busy stabbing each other in the back to notice. Linux killed SCO because SCO was, quite frankly, overpriced crap.

None of this had anything to do with the license, other that the fact you could use it for free. It was all about hardware availability, the rise of the Internet, the wave of new IT people who had experienced Linux at home, and the fact that Linux on Intel was good enough to replace those pricy proprietary machines.

Now, you wanna talk Apple, there's where your code "theft" kicks in. But that's a whole different thing.

I doubt NetBSD gets much use by "big corps." It's used by hobbyists, researchers, and universities.

NetBSD is the slim, small, traditional BSD that has an emphasis on clean code and portability. It's great for small jobs and it'll run on that old SPARC that's collecting dust in the closet. It's simpler than FreeBSD (the industrial strength BSD) and doesn't have the hyper focus on security that OpenBSD does.

You aren't going to see OpenBSD share a kernel with anyone - it's too different and makes trade-offs the others won't accept. And NetBSD doesn't need the heavyweight kernel FreeBSD uses.

From what I've seen, the BSD community swaps code around on a regular basis. But they pick and choose what code to use based on their own goals. It seems to work pretty well.

It's my nameserver/DHCP server. I used to have it set up as an iSCSI target for backups and as a boot server for my firewall, but I do something else these days.

My main reason for using NetBSD for this is to have easy access to the man pages. Like the other BSDs, the man pages are exceptionally well-written and are a tremendous resource for doing POSIX programming. Plus I find myself digging through the code when I'm interested in how something is implemented. Having a local repository of good C code with a liberal license is worth having the extra OS to manage.

Yeah I don't buy that argument either. The amount of e-waste being saved by NetBSD is so tiny as to be insignificant.

NetBSD is great for retrocomputing, since it's a modern OS that can run on very limited hardware. It's also a very nice traditional UNIX. It's well documented, has a nice codebase, and is a pleasure to use. But for saving e-waste, Linux has it beat.

Try going to west Oklahoma sometime. Not even the people who've never traveled think it's the most beautiful place on Earth.

Norse runes are just an alphabet. As long as your language uses the same set of sounds, you can write with them today.

People get confused about them because there's a tie-in with the old Germanic religions where they're used by the gods for divination, and the neopagans have adopted them for that purpose. But they're really just a set of alphabets optimized for carving into wood.

Terry Pratchett had some books kind of like this.

The Carpet People has characters that live in the fibers of a living room carpet and are subject to mysterious phenomena they don't understand (such as a vacuum cleaner).

The Bromeliad Trilogy is similar, although the characters are a few inches high and at least have a concept of full-sized humans. They have to move their tribe from a department store that's closing down to somewhere else, which means they have to learn about the outside world.

What an outrage! Everyone knows (but big pharma tries to hide it) that if a barrel of the vaccine rolls off a high roof and falls onto your head it'll kill you instantly!