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Dice unleashes Slashdot Beta, everyone scatters. Pipedot born ...

Websites you used to visit all the time that, rather than die, just went craptastic. My vote is for msnbc.com, which turned into nbcnews.com about a year ago, and metrofied their home page 6 months ago. Haven't been back since. There have been others but I can't remember them now.

Put a choice for each generation, Atari to PS4/Xbox One.

"Open Sesame"
"Mekka Lekka Hi Mekka Hiney Ho"
"Shazam"
"I Have the Power!"
"Beetlejuice" x3
"Bibidi Babadi Boo"
"Word to Your Mother"
etc.

Maybe a poll about what android version people are running?

[Ed. note: I've got a bad feeling about this.]

"The Lord giveth (uselessd) and the Lord taketh away (this)"

But let's be positive: the good thing is that they're not Gnome's developers. So maybe they can get it right ?

Seems the best way to promote new development is to release something that fails or that everyone despises.

OpenSSL fails -> LibreSSL released; upstream cleanup and fixes pushed out.
TrueCrypt closes -> DoxBox released.
Gnome sucks -> XFCE, LXDE, and other alternative desktops benefit.
Upstart falls short -> systemd developed.
systemd despised -> a number of new init development projects emerge.

OK, unfortunately we can't modify a poll once it's been published, but you're right. So, what's your device?

Sounds like a strange remake of The Gods Must Be Crazy

A little surprised your payback is that long even though the investment was under $10K.

Ya, I live in an area with very cheap electricity. With my bill previously only being $85 a month, it takes a while to pay off $9000.

What about that reliance on the remote Internet service for all monitoring and reporting? What happens if they go out of business? I'd much rather see a local option.

I would too. That's why I slurp the data off their servers into my own database every day. If they go out of business, I'll at least still have my current data set. Of course, their own webpage is set up to display the statistic data too - I'm sure a lot of their customers wouldn't have the ability/desire to code up their own database and host a web interface like I did.

Your Leaf comparison is a bit slanted. That's a $30,000 car versus my well equipped 35mpg gas econobox that cost less than half that.

I totally agree that the Leaf is more expensive than similar sized ICE cars. Sure, I'd rather have only spent $15-20k on it, but I really wanted an electric plug in vehicle. When I bought my VW Jetta new in 2002, I swore that it would be my last gas-powered vehicle. For many years, while all the major car manufacturers totally ignored EVs, I dreaded having to go the home-made route and build everything myself if my Jetta ever died. But then Tesla happened. The Prius became popular. Nissan bet big on the Leaf, and even Chevy came out with the Volt.

So, I was already looking to replace my 12 year old car with something... Here are the models that I test-drove/researched:

• Plug in Prius (nearly no range on EV alone due to small 4.4 kWh battery)
• Chevy Volt (over $50k and little more than a hybrid with a small battery)
• Tesla Model S (nice, but too expensive for my blood, sorry)
• Nissan Leaf (correct range, zero emissions, heck of a lot cheaper than a Tesla)

Obviously, I picked the Leaf. The U.S. has a nice $7,500 federal rebate on the first "X" number of EV cars produced for each model. I was expecting to keep driving my ageing Jetta for a few more years, but the "X" number was just about to be reached for the Leaf. So I bought the bullet a little early so that I could get the full federal rebate.

I'm imagining what that would look like: You're hanging out there with the family, a helicopter goes by. Suddenly, the sky is filled with sex toys attached to parachutes. Banzai! Not sure if it's the best solution, but it would be damned funny to see.

The old trolls called it 'cute', but it never really caught on. Fortunately. I hate 'cute'. You can say 'I am a C++ guy', 'I am a GTK+ guy', 'I am a JAVA guy'... but how does 'I am a cute guy' sound? :-D

And here's the sequel:


Solar Power - Part 4
Solar Power - Part 5
Solar Power - Part 6


Solar Power - Part 7
Solar Power - Part 8
Solar Power - Part 9

On the high-end of 100mi/day (just 5 days/week), I get close to $3,000/year in gasoline, for a break-even of just 5 years.

And that's being extra-generous to your "35mpg gas econobox," since you'll waste gas idling in traffic, while an EV won't, your mileage will suffer significantly in city driving, you might have to go significantly out-of-your-way to fuel-up, etc.

I tend to agree the payoff isn't there if you don't drive as much, but there's a significant use-case where PEVs already do pay-off, right now, and I'd love to see a small plug-in hybrid SUV...

Then maybe the best bet is to do a trade-in program where people can bring their current cooking pots/pans and get a 1:1 trade for new, safe cookware.

Not that it's hard to figure out, but all 3 of those links point to the first page.

My "landline" is VoIP and I can hardly squeeze through a FAX 20% of the time, let alone a nice 56k session. :(

remains for specialization and outsourcing, meaning Apple is still sort of the only vertical integrator around here, even if they rely on others for the manufacturing process. The risk of course is of over-specialization, where all the different chip manufacturers wind up waiting on line for the one foundry that has the tech and the equipment to actually fab the chips. Your average Joe doesn't just decide to throw his hat in the ring and start up a foundry, meaning the risk of overspecialization becomes a security risk.

Just thinking out loud here. Maybe it will lead to lowered prices for chips, which is a good thing, and would free up resources for innovation. Was just reading Ritchie's rant from 30 years ago that little innovation was happening anymore and Linux was simply a copy of Unix technology. I think he was deploring that we'd largely come away from investigation into things like alternative chip architectures, the Lisp machines, and similar experiments. He's right - I think that era died out a while ago, while we've decided to milk the current architecture to its eventual limits instead.

It would have to be dead-simple tech, though. I've spent the past 25 years living in countries (half of that in Africa) where people steal manhole covers, melt them down over charcoal fires, and bang them into cooking pots. Just to point out that the level of tech here needs to be at around the level of people using charcoal as their fuel source.

Hmm, you've either thought more deeply about this, or are way smarter than me, or probably both.

In that case, anyone want to buy a used Trendnet 56K dial-up modem, cheap? :)

Hang on, I've been planning on building either a BBS or a gophernet site. Maybe I'll hang onto it a bit longer.

It's cute and funny... but I did stop reading the summary as well once I realised how much of a headache it would be.

Still, no distro is better than arch anyway, so I didn't need to read the article. :p

Hey Bryan nice writeup! FYI those 3 links all point to episode 1. It took some elite URL hacking to read the rest of your series.

Glad you like your system. A little surprised your payback is that long even though the investment was under $10K.

Just two critical comments:

1. What about that reliance on the remote Internet service for all monitoring and reporting? What happens if they go out of business? I'd much rather see a local option.

2. Your Leaf comparison is a bit slanted. That's a $30,000 car versus my well equipped 35mpg gas econobox that cost less than half that. That's an awfully big differential to make back on 50-100 miles per day (say $7 in gas) even with your "free" electricity.

Sorry, but your summary is damn near impossible for me to read. I'm not a native English speaker, and I can't be bothered to learn stupid slang that's rarely used. I would have liked to know more about Trisomy GNU/Linux, but now I probably won't because of the bad summary.

I've added some info on my solar installation to my journal:

Solar Power - Part 1
Solar Power - Part 2
Solar Power - Part 3

Also, you can view my hourly production stats since August 2013 in a neat graphical form or the raw table form.

agreed.
But maybe I will give it a try in some kvm because there the emulated hardware should be quite "standard" ;)

Am looking at this one now

Woohoo! They have a torrent on their download page

:-)

Good to see these sites have donation forms there too.

Very informative and cost effective if you can live with just the basic channels. Unfortunately, because a lot of the shows that I enjoy are aired only on cable channels, I'm afraid I'd miss out on too much.

Game of Thrones (HBO), Dexter (Showtime), Defiance (SyFy), etc...

I would still forgo the cable subscription (I've never had one) and instead get a Netflix DVD plan. This way you get both TV and movies at the full Bluray 1080p quality with no censorship (cursewords, altered scenes, etc) and no commercials.

Thanks for a great review! I enjoy reading these weekly reviews. The distros picked are a bit odd, so there is a big chance nobody know them well enough for commenting and staying on topic at this point.

Way to go, registered Pipedot users. Keep up the pointless downmodding and renew my lack of faith in your judgment.

If you disagree with someone or find them rude, SAY SO. Stop downmodding like weenies.

Another challenge for the scientific community: Find a cheap way to remove lead from recycled metals as part of the recovery process

Good question. The last mobile gaming device I used was a Nintendo game & watch. I had Donkey Kong and Bombsweeper.

For the post-apocalyptic future, you should stock-up on low-power computer and ham radio equipment, in a bunker and sufficiently EMP shielded. Shortwave radio would definitely be the fastest and cheapest way to bootstrap regional, national, and international communications systems again.

In the longer term, as long as people are around who remember which technologies worked out and which ones were dead-ends, and which feats were possible and which were never realized, the world would be rebuilt from the dirt, to largely-modern standards, pretty quickly. First farming the most successful crops, then engines and electricity, then information exchange. I

f you're going to lay a wire, you wouldn't resort to dial-up, at least not for long, but would jump up to something faster, like DSL or right to fiber optics.

population problem solved

Am having a look now actually. Some of us take 10 hours to see the article :)

Really? After they sold their PC business and declared a move towards services years ago

This is a tried and proven way to solve the problems of over population and poverty

The Middle East only has oil, which isn't used for electric generation almost anywhere, so solar panels aren't a direct replacement. Rising oil prices would spur adoption of PEVs, which might slightly increase electric prices, indirectly, but not too badly. A study of PEV owners shows they choose the option of peak/off-peak metering from the electric company, and then charge their EVs starting right at midnight, when rates are lowest. The higher electrical demand makes PV more attractive at homes with PEVs, too, but it's still a rather indirect relationship.

Germany certainly has a lot of solar capacity installed, but I don't think ANYBODY wants to copy that model... They got it done by driving electricity prices through the roof, several times higher than the highest electric prices in the US, to pay for it.

Started reverse enginerring the baseband there. ;-)

If we all remember (and mentioned in TFA), leaded gasoline was linked to surge in violent crime, and probably causative due to lead poisoning effect on the brain. I can't fathom that this isn't hurting already fragile situations.

I have a pretty skewed vision of debt. I have virtually none beside the home and the monthly visa that I pay off.

Even so, the debt on the panels is not like the debt on your car.

http://www.solarcity.com/commercial/homebuilders
What happens if the solar panels or inverter need repair?
If we're alerted of a problem through SolarGuard, we will give you call to help diagnose the problem and dispatch a repair team to fix it if needed. SolarCity will perform all equipment repairs at no cost to you.

I don't know what that looks like on financial documents, but part of the reason SolarCity can put panels on your roof for no money down is the fact that it is so low risk. People pay their energy bill, and there isn't much that will go wrong with 'em.

I don't know credit scores, but I know there is such a thing as "healthy debt" and "unhealthy debt". A mortgage generally falls in the former. Credit cards generally the latter. I'm thinking that panels are more like the former than the latter.

Yeah, moving after a year might be harder if you have panels on your roof. I expect/hope that attitude will change over time as more folks get panels and become aware of the benefits. If you have a high energy bill, I think that'd be the biggest factor in deciding whether or not to go solar.

Thank you for a reasonable discussion, too!

I have zero security concern about sshd on my VPS. It's pretty much child's play to make it mathematiocally impossible for them to break in even if they keep trying for billions of years using thousands of bots.
1) Disallow root sshd logins. And never use root or sudo.
2) For admin, have a second UID 0 user account with a long name that no one would ever find in a dictionary. Give it a long, super obscure password and make sure it is set to use SHA512 hashing. Then login to this account using an ssh key which has a long obscure passphrase. Use ssh-agent to manage the passphrase.
3) For ordinary user accounts, use the same name and password policy.

Dude, in the other threads we're having nice little chats about the AT command set and the economics of solar power. Don't get so discouraged!

I can't comment on this distro because I never even heard of it before, let alone used it.

(And on Slashdot the thread would probably have quickly devolved into yet another round of dissertations on the greatness and/or evils of Stallman and his personal grooming.)

Well that's why we appreciate sites like this one. We're communicating primarily via text, and that works just fine at anything much over 110 baud.

(I used to be one of the wackos constantly correcting people because I knew that 1200 bps modems were still 300 "baud". Or something like that.)

A lot of the territory has gotten rehashed as mobile computing has tried to grow up along the same struggling bandwidth path. SMS/Blackberry to 3G and 4G and WiFi, all to send dumb little 139 character tweetenings.

"If your creditors take umbridge at your investing of $0 in order to reduce your monthly energy bill, and the fact that you continue to pay it off, I'm thinking you might want new creditors."

Thanks, I appreciate your thoroughness and that you responded to my points seriously. However, that particular line is silly -- we would be quite literally taking on an additional $20-something thousand dollars in personal debt, and I don't see how you can dismiss that. It's not a secured mortgage -- it's the same as taking on $25,000 in personal credit card debt, or a new car lease. The moment the lease is signed, WE OWE YOU THAT MUCH MONEY and are paying it off. It's a VERY significant debt. I honestly don't think Experian gives two crapturds that I'm "doing it for a good cause".

At least, I think that's how it works from my layman's point of view. (Techie, not a lawyer, accountant, or solar system employee.)

The other response I thought was a bit iffy was "And, frankly, if you do a lease and you end up moving in a year - no biggie. It's not like you spent money to get the system installed." You're completely forgetting that for many potential buyers the very existence of the panels and system, even aside from thet lease issue, can be a turn-off. Not everyone is happy to take on someone else's great home improvement. Again, I think panels should be the NORM, but they're currently not and some people would think of them as equivalent to a moat -- an wanted, oddball feature.

But again, thanks for the point by point.

I'm a coder, I don't speak for SolarCity, I'm not a lawyer or a construction person.

Point by point.

Nothing is free.

OK, we can quibble about things that are $0 out of pocket. Let's.

You think I, and my creditors, and my credit rating, simply won't notice that I just took on an additional $25,000 in debt to hold someone ELSE's equipment on my aging roof and garage?

If your creditors take umbridge at your investing of $0 in order to reduce your monthly energy bill, and the fact that you continue to pay it off, I'm thinking you might want new creditors.

Equipment that, by the terms of your faux-lease, you will come and remove at the end, doing who-knows-what to my now-20-years-older shingles?

http://www.solarcity.com/commercial/homebuilders
You generally have four options at the end of the Lease:

• Request to renew the agreement in five year increments up to two times
• Have SolarCity remove the system for free
• Purchase the system (varies by state)
• Upgrade to a new system

What about the need to replace the roof in the interim?

Last I heard, minimal fee for SolarCity to remove and then replace the system while you re-roof. Again, I'm not a lawyer, rep, etc - and I can't find a reference to it online.

What ABOUT the home's resale value for all the years that there's complicated equipment, lease, and service deal attached to the house?

Again, not a lawyer, but this is probably the trickiest one:
http://www.solarcity.com/commercial/homebuilders

When you sell your home, you may transfer your Lease to the homebuyer at no charge. SolarCity will provide a Lease Transfer Agreement for both parties to sign and SolarCity to execute. You must provide SolarCity notice of your intent to transfer in accord with the terms of the Lease to ensure that the Lease transfer process is completed in a timely manner. Execution of the Lease transfer document by SolarCity relieves the previous Lease owner of Lease obligations. For additional questions, contact the SolarCity Customer Care Team at:CustomerCare@solarcity.com or (888) 765-2489 x5999.

I've bought 2 homes (and sold one), and one more paper to sign doesn't seem like a big deal to me...

Yes, it's a very appealing deal, but please don't pretend it's a no-brainer. If it were I'd already have the system (as would many more people steadfastly ignoring the salesshills in Home Depot and elsewhere, who represent all sorts of startups).

It's not a no brainer. If you think it's likely you will move in the next 5-10 years, then there is some cause to consider. If you don't consume much electricity, then it might not be financially viable for you at this time. But if you're not moving and you consume a reasonable amount of energy, then it's pretty straightforward.

And, frankly, if you do a lease and you end up moving in a year - no biggie. It's not like you spent money to get the system installed.

There are other concerns (panel degradation, actually declining utility rates in some areas, questionable solar exposure in the northeast, disappearing companies and resold leases, parts supply and repair issues, etc.) that I've read about too.

http://www.solarcity.com/commercial/homebuilders
How does the performance guarantee work?
SolarCity guarantees that your system will produce as much electricity as we promise, or we will pay you back. This takes into account normal weather variation and solar panel performance over time. The amount of electricity we promise to deliver is stated in your contract. We track your system performance through our SolarGuard monitoring service. For additional questions, contact the SolarCity Customer Care Team at CustomerCare@solarcity.com or (888) 765-2489 x5999.

Oh yeah, and the electric companies starting to RAISE rates and/or eliminate discounts for grid-tied users, because they claim the usage pattern of those customers is costing them money and the sold-back power is of little value to them (supposedly).

We can't control grid companies. I have colorful things to say about those kinds of practices, but I'm not a lawyer, rep, etc.

It absolutely is the future, no doubt, but frankly it still costs too much. I would prefer to see it required as part of new building codes. (I have no connection to either solar or power companies.)

For many people, it is the present. Not all. My sister lives in Washington (mid state). Her power is insanely inexpensive (lots of hydro) and they have lots of weather. Solar isn't for her (at this time). But in areas with lots of sun that run AC a lot, solar is a no brainer.

Ten hours later, a lot of name calling about the fact that I used pirate language, and no actual discussion about the distro. Kind of pathetic, actually. I'm getting better nerd conversation everywhere but here - a pity since everyone else's interface is not as nice as this one.

This place has tons of promise but writing and editing articles is a huge amount of work for very little return these days. You'd better believe the guys researching and submitting articles aren't doing it so they can have their spelling checked by the community.

They seem to be around. A Speedster at 56K can still go for $100 on Amazon.com. I bought a Trendnet for about $30 just to reduce my investment. I still have this nerd dream where we go back to the old days and only the truly neckbearded are prepared ... a fantasy, i know, but I know my Hayes command set just in case the revolution happens ... :)

As usual, Germany doesn't screw around. Their rate of adoption of renewables should be the envy of the world, if anyone cared. And the reason no one cares is that the oil economy is still 'business as usual' and prices aren't so unreasonable that people are pinched.

Let's see the MiddleEast go up in flames, the price of petrol skyrocket, and then let's see if anyone is interested in solar.