No. He thinks he's Hans Reiser. Careful what you say to him on the mailing list, or you'll disappear too.

The Banana Pi BPI-R3 is a fantastic piece of hardware (there are a thousand reviews and articles on it, so just google it), and in conjunction with OpenWrt becomes a great roll-your-own router. Technically it is a development board, but this actually is a benefit since they throw in a lot of extras. For example, for storage it can use any one of its built in 8gb emmc, NAND flash, NOR flash, or a microSD card slot. It has USB 3 and PCI (m.2 or can be adapted to use mini PCIe) for expansion.

You can get BPI-R3 board in complete kits with board, case, antennae, cables, and power supply on Ali Express, or you can do any combination of your own premium pieces. The SoC and networking is all Mediatek, which works very well with OpenWrt and Linux. Mediatek offers a lot of hardware offloading capability in their chipsets and OpenWrt can take advantage of that. Not that the board needs it, since it has quite a bit of horsepower. In addition to being my router, it is a full home server. DMCA media server, Syncthing file sharing server, VPN server, VPN client so I can put my whole home network on a commercial VPN when desired (or any piece of it), and it's half of a custom tcpip-over-http tunnel server so I can access anything I want from work (where I live behind a draconian firewall/proxy).

I have been using Banana Pi router boards since the original. Once or twice they made poor decisions, but for the most part they have been fantastic and I have a BPI-R2, BPI-R64, and BPI-R3 all in current use for different things. Before the R3 I wouldn't have recommended them for general use - they were experimenter's and hacker boards and needed extra bits (wifi PCIe board from AsiaRF, for example). But the R3 is a very mature and complete system and very easy to assemble and use. I can't say enough positive things about it.

No, but in that case, a) the developer has at least used all the libs they are referencing, and b) the end user is not vulnerable to the whims of dependency changes made by third parties. When it's just something on PyPI or CPAN, the chain of dependencies can shift and change in ways the original author doesn't even know about long after release. And once the bad-actor module is in PyPI or CPAN, you can bet its authors and supporters are going to be working behind the scenes to be getting it linked in to the chain.

I usually don't write "Ya, me too" replies, but in this case, not just no but fuck no.

Pacstall and Rhino-pkg are both satanic. In the almost literal sense of lulling you with a siren song of half-truths and "just let us do this for you and it will just work". APT is the glittering jewel of all Debian-based systems. It has been a long and fucking painful road to get where Debian's package system is now, and we aren't "there" yet. It is far from perfect, but it's a good system and it encourages packages to be built the right way, with dependency tracking that pulls in what they need with other actual packages. I have had the same rolling Linux Mint installation on the last five Windows laptops living inside a VirtualBox VM. It has been upgraded across seven major and I honestly lost count of how many minor revisions. It provides all the services I can't trust to Windows and is a full development environment. It is a full OS and can live easily inside a small container on my Windows machine exactly because Mint does it right.

Flatpak, Appimage, and SNAP are all counter-productive. They encourage poorly constructed packages to be used by making them "just work" at the expense of short-circuiting the system and bloating you with more and more stuff you don't and shouldn't need. Mint already does the right way what Rhino is saying they will do by using Pacstall and Rhino-pkg to clutter your computer into a frankensystem with all and sundry.

Just say no to people who want to sell you "it just works" this way.

From the article...

Nobody liked the old clippy, and the new one is worse. Copilot is just one more thing to have to disable to get the system to a base level of sanity and reduced invasiveness.

Apple vs Microsoft is like Hillary vs Donald. There just wasn't a good choice there. Just one that was (very slightly) less evil than the other.

The "Year of the Linux Desktop"(tm) is likely still going to be exactly never, but damned if I'm not close to it myself. For the last ten years I've used a rolling installation of Linux Mint inside a seamless-mode VirtualBox VM its "start" menu/task bar on the top of my desktop as an adjunct to Windows. It started as a place to put the stuff I couldn't run in Windows, and is now where I put the stuff I can't trust in my OS, like my password manager, or important SSH keys. I've used Open/Libre Office exclusively for a decade too, and have not run into an MS Office document in years that LibreOffice couldn't handle.

Maybe as time moves along, Linux on the desktop will never arrive the sudden singularity that the pundits all spend time equally mocking and hoping for, but with a quiet very gradual whisper as more and more people realize that the mechanisms they have been long using to circumvent all the corporate shite shoveled by MS and Apple are really quite conducive to just switching to open source entirely.

the year of the D.B. Cooper reveal. And the Linux Desktop.

This is one reason why I never use CPAN, PyPI, Go-anything. Many application authors want to deploy their applications using these tools, or to deploy the application without the supporting libraries and insist you go to these tools to get them. This happens sometimes even when applications are put into distribution packages, that the authors want to deploy updates or bug fixes using these language-specific repositories instead of releasing update packages.

The issue is, that the maintainer of these repositories aren't (and shouldn't be asked to be) security experts. But as reliance on them increases, so does their attractiveness as a vector to exploit both technical and behavioral vulnerabilities. Get something sketchy in there, and then expend your effort to move it from the outskirts of dependencies in to more and more mainstream use.

From the beginnings I have never liked these systems much as they have never played well with system packages, This is just another reason why to avoid them and insist that application developers deploy their fare in traditional ways.

Ever heard the phrase "value for your money"? Like "wow, that's a good value for your money!". Now (this is the hard pard) think... Do you think that when people use the phrase "value for your money" that they really mean "money for your money" or "value for your value"? So clearly the words are not equivalent.

How about the phrase "cost benefit analysis". Have you heard that one? I hope you have - capitalists invented it.

So here, I'll use small words so even you can understand. Value is the benefit you get from something. Cost is what you had to pay or what resource you had to expend to get it.

Value is the benefit. Value is what you get.
Cost is the expenditure. Cost is what you gave.

It's a little more nuanced than that, but I'm not going into that, because frankly, I don't think you'd grasp it.

You gotta love it when you have to give an American remedial lessons in capitalism.

I'd ask you the same question, but the unfortunate reality is that we all know the sad answer.

The OP didn't say nothing of cost was lost. He said nothing of value was lost.

Do you mean brought down by traffic from a news story, or brought down by an actual Shashdot story? Because if you are asking about literal Slashdotting, then unfortunate truth is, that the increased bandwidth of modern sites isn't actually a factor for getting Slashdotted any more. Slashdot has (for a long long time) been looking in the rearview at having anywhere near the clout to even take down sites with early 2000's bandwidth with its current viewership.

The sad reality is that its current owners, like what they do with Sourceforge, are content to draft off the diminishing returns of once greatness and input literally no energy into the system.

Jesus, just stop already. That rendition of "begs the question" comes from a...ahem...questionable 16th century translation of Aristotle's use of the phrase 'petitio principii', which is far better translated as that which "assumes a conclusion". The original translation was a tortuous use of the plain meaning of the words, even in the 16th century.

The phrase is today used far more often in the form of "raises the question", or, more specifically, really is now taken to mean "to a reasonable person it should raise the question". This is a far better use of the plain meaning of the words involved.

I am firmly in the court that is it perfectly fine to use it the way the plain meaning of the words suggests it should be used, and that if you want the original meaning, use the original fucking latin since you are being pretentious anyway.

Congratulations. Your entire post is a cop-out.

Which seems to be more bent more towards linguistic calisthenics than anything truly sensible.

Congratulations again! You've independently reinvented moral relativism.

You can weasel-word yourself and (unfortunately) the rest of us to oblivion, and your post made a great attempt at that. You can invoke natural selection and instinct in any order and to any depth to muddy the waters, but more years of social, intellectual, and philosophical progress than you can possibly really fathom have created a few what I will call moral facts.

Slavery is immoral.
Rape is immoral.

Maybe two thousand years from now, meat eating really will be considered that way too. But it's not today. Here's the thing. Back when white slavers were demonizing and dehumanizing their black victims in order to self-justify their behaviors, there is good evidence that even at the time they knew exactly what they were doing. Joe-unwashed--public might have bought the pseudo-science that blacks were subhuman, but it was never seriously seen as anything but sophistry.
  There is nothing like the kind of consensus today that every farmer is a little Hitler.

Equating it that way today is helpful to exactly no one. It doesn't even do their cause any good. So the best thing we can all can do is simply call bullshit on it, because a) it is, so calling bullshit is good for "us" and, b) they are shooting themselves and their own cause in the foot that way, so calling bullshit is good for "them".

I don't care how the pendulum swings on meat-eating in the future. I really don't. If they manage to push moral thought to the extent that it becomes generally taboo, that won't actually hurt my feelings, and I will call that progress. I suspect you personally would try to double-speak it as "a relative shift in values-system reference point to reflect an increased scope of personhood in light of demographic and cultural renormalizations". But if we're not even (as a people) eating meat, hopefully that's putting us way further down the continuum that eschews violence against people, and that is just simply a Good Thing. I know what you're thinking. Resist it! I believe in you. I know you want to double-think yourself out of it, but resist. That's really just plain Good. Capital "G" Good.

But the kind of equating that links farmers with rapists today, that does no one any good. It's objectively repugnant, and it revictimizes all the people involved.

While the classification of cattle is in hot dispute, they are either a species or subspecies that have no other purpose than to be meat. For more thousands of years than you can keep in your "enlightened" brain, they have been selectively bread for traits that make them utterly incapable of existing in any sort of unproitected wild setting.

So when you say things may improve, the fact is, when we stop eating them, then they will cease to exist. So if you think "better" means oblivion, then, by all means, advocate for a stop to their use as meat.

So let's assume you're successful. Let's assume we eliminate the use of animals as food for humans. What are you going to do for an encore? Should we grow millions of tons of lab meat to feed every obligate carnivore on the planet? Put separation barriers between them and all prey, because the prey have feelings? Or maybe just eliminate all carnivores, as being immoral species?

We are omnivores, and the best, highest quality nutrition we can have is by exercising that nature. The use of science to make high quality meatless options available is great, but as a method for making better high-quality nutrition available to more people. Talk of it being a substitute on moral grounds is absurd on its face. Applying inter-human morality to human-prey interactions is neither useful nor relevant.

However you feel on the subject of cows as meat, though, invoking similarities between the eating of a steak and slavery and sexual exploitation is repugnant. To put farmers on a class with slavers and rapists is literally disgusting. That does a grave injustice to people who have been oppressed and is shameful. You need to rethink your "morals". They are significantly wanting.

Then yourself a Fairphone 5. The back opens. The battery comes out. It takes a microSD card (which is more and more going the way of the Apple...er....Dodo). And every component in it is replaceable with a screwdriver.

Moore's law is only a suggestion any more, and the real reason we can't use old phones is screens break and they get behind on Android updates. With the Fairphone, the screen comes off with four screws and it's guaranteed to have Android updates for at least 5 major revisions.

For anyone in North America who wants one, Clove Technology in the UK will ship it. Its a little thicker than a flagship phone, but I actually rather like its heft. And for anyone with tinfoil hats, it's drop dead simple to put /e/OS on it too.

But I identify as a drupe.