The things holding back Linux for the unwashed masses have diminished to minor annoyances in the last 15 years, especially when compared to the nonsense wintel still puts its users through. It finally has gotten through to ords that there are solid reasons why experts don't even consider Windows as an option when doing mission critical stuff these days. ChromeOS and Android are signs of the things to come and Windows isn't even on the radar with those usage patterns.

Looks like linux has finally gotten critical mass for regular end users. I certainly wouldn't mind. My last Windows was Win2k and that's been a while. I occasionally bump into poor bastards using whatever the newest Windows is and always experience a bizarre throwback into distant and long gone times messing with ultra proprietary systems and their bullshit. Very strange. Personally I fundamentally do not get why M$ even has a business case with their system. And I even am a well paying customer who is quite happy with his XBoxes.

I've been creating YouTube videos since 2006 or so and I have a cupboard with about 20TB of archived video and project files on external USB hard drives -- most of that has been created since I switched to recording in 4K about four years ago. With the move to 6K or even 8K raw footage, 30TB is *not* a lot of storage -- although I would be nervous about committing so much data to a single drive in a non-enterprise environment. At the very least you'd want a redundant RAID setup which would mean buying multiple of these drives.

Since my storage requirements don't mandate "online" storage, just archival, I'll stick with cheap USB-connected hard drives in the meantime where any loss is limited to about 4TB maximum.

Technologies like OAUTH 2.0 have been around for a long, long time, and their purpose is to provide a verifiable audit-trail for users.

And it works! Although there have been (and will always be) security issues, the reality is that technologies like SAML and OAUTH do provide a very useful level of trust.

Except that, although these technologies do allow for a useful transfer of identity, the agents widely used to provide this identity (the IDP) is never an entity that provides a uniformly useful level of identity.

Here I am: Bill Jones (not my real name) citizen of the UK (not my real country, either) and I have no way to properly assert that to, say, Bank of the West (not my real bank, either) or Northern Airlines. (not my real airline)

If I have to assert my true identity, I have a state-issued driver's license or passport. Why do I have no way to assert either of these identification documents electronically?

Why can't I use my passport ID to assert myself to the bank, or the airline?

Seems to me that it would be HIGHLY USEFUL if I could. And it seems to be self-evident and proper that the agencies that issue drivers licenses or passports could offer electronic identification, even if it's sourced out to a tech company with a good reputation.

In the US, it's now become increasingly common to have a unified electronic ID to interact with agencies: see id.me. This is a start, and I know government agencies work GLACIALLY SLOWLY so maybe by the time my grandkids are having babies this could be a thing.

Eh?

> At some point you have to ask why you're using RAID at all. If it's for always-on, avoiding data loss due to hardware failures, and speed, then RAID 6 isn't really am great solution for avoiding data loss when disks get to these kinds of sizes, the chances of getting more than one disk fail simultaneously is approaching one, and obviously it was never great for speed.

If you're at this point, then using drives at all is probably already off the table. But I think this position is probably ridiculous.

I have many years of experience managing file clusters in scopes ranging from SOHO to serving up to 15,000 people at a time in a single cluster. In a cluster of 24 drives under these constant, enterprise-level loads, I saw maybe 1 drive fail in a year.

I've heard this trope about "failure rate approaching 1" since 500GB drives were new. From my own experience, it wasn't really true then, any more than it's true now.

Yes, HDDs have failure rates to keep in mind, but outside the occasional "bad batch", they are still shockingly reliable. Failure rates per unit haven't changed much, even though with rising capacities, that makes the failure rate per GB rise. It still doesn't matter as much as you think.

You can have a great time if you follow a few rules, in my experience:

1) Engineer your system so that any drive cluster going truly offline is survivable. AKA "DR" or "Disaster Recovery". What happens if your data center gets flooded or burns to the ground? And once you have solid DR plans, TRUMPET THE HECK OUT OF IT and tell all your customers. Let them know that they really are safe! It can be a HUGE selling point.

2) Engineer your system so that likely failures are casually survivable. For me, this was ZFS/RAIDZ2, with 6 or 8 drive vdevs, on "white box" 24 bay SuperMicro servers with redundant power.

3) If 24x7x36* uptime is really critical, have 3 levels of redundancy, so even in a failure condition, you fail to a redundant state. For me engineering at "enterprise" level, we used application-layer logic so there were always at least 2 independent drive clusters containing full copies of all data. We had 3 drive clusters using different filesystem technologies (ZFS, XFS/LVM) and sometimes we chose to take one offline to do filesystem level processing or analysis.

4) Backups: You *do* have backups, and you do adhere to the 3-2-1 rule, right? In our case, we used ZFS replication and merged backups and DR. This combined with automated monitoring ensured that we were ready for emergencies, which did happen and were always managed in a satisfactory way.

... Blender just piling on to it's already solid critical mass of professional functions and features after finally gaining wide-spread industry recognition a few years back. I'm an early Blender user and even have an original commercial license from NAN more than 20 years ago, before Blender was liberated into open source. Back then it was a curious underdog that had full OpenGL UI rendering (a first), a fully configurable UI (also a rare feature) and it fit on a 3,5" disk (absolutely unique).

25 years later Blender has finally taken the industry lead with other 3D kits keeping up by lowering their prices and emphasising special features and optimized workflows. Good to see the laughed-at FOSS underdog in this state of things.

Could this be due to stress and cortisol reduction caused by the drugs effects? Not unlikely, right?

YouTube's only concern these days is revenue and profit.

They breach their own community guidelines each and every day by running scam ads that continue to run despite hundreds or even thousand viewer-reports. Those ads run until the advertiser's spend is exhausted -- however if a creator (the life-blood of the platform) is falsely accused of "scams or deceptive practices" by YT's AI then they're gone in the blink of an eye.

They also allow AI spambots to post endless comments linking to porn pages/sites and claim that their AI can't automatically detect such things -- although that same AI, when unleashed on creator's videos, constantly demonetizes anything that is deemed to be unsuitable.

I hate the AI dross that is overwhelming YT as much as anyone but I really have doubts that YT intends to do anything effective to stem its flow. You see, so long as AI-generated videos are getting eyeballs on ads, YouTube will be happy because they'll be generating revenue and profits.

Let's face it, YouTube is actually *encouraging* the use of AI on its platform. AI suggests ideas for new videos and will create thumbnails for you. VEO3 will even create shorts or entire videos on demand. Google wants to sell its AI services and is pitching them at YouTube creators so they're not going to shoot themselves in the foot are they?

This is why I'm moving to self-hosting my own videos on an instance of PeerTube and I encourage other creators to do the same. When you self-host you have *FULL* control and you no longer have to worry about censorship or losing your entire community just because one of YT's AI bots has runamok and identifies your cute cat videos as CSAM.

Let me get this straight: A little desktop sized cutesy robot that looks like a crippled Wall-E, doesn't have arms and can't even move besided nodding it's head in 4 directions is going to "disrupt the AI robot industry"? Nonsense.

LOL! I know Fisher-Technik robot arms from the freakin' 1980ies that were driven by a C64 homecomputer that are more useful than this thing.

Yeah, no one reads their product names before launch any more.

And I have a 1994 Toyota pickup. There are literally millions of "old" Toyotas on the roads which will likely continue running for decades -- because they're so well designed and built. I'm 72 years old and mine will certainly outlive me.

I'm not a CS type, but I work in STEM, and having tried numerous times to bring obscure scientific stuff over from Unix or Linux and get it to build on MacOS, I absolutely agree with what you just said above. That sort of stuff is better left to experienced developers who focus on MacOS. I do use Linux, Windows and MacOS every workday, but I don't use Windows on weekends. I'd pick a Mac laptop 10 times out of 10 for general use, presuming I had access to networked Linux systems.

"Seven Fingers of Death."

... are having a hard time justifying their favorable ratings. With one the US has moved from AAA to AA a few years back and even that was seen as being nice and kind. I hope the US doesn't squander trust beyond the Trump era, lest you guys be sitting on a pile of money that the world has finally noticed not being worth the paper it's printed on.

It is my opinion that you could have a true revolution, a bottom-up redo of the US constitution and fixes for the most glaring broken parts of the US system up and running within months without even a single bullet fired. AFAICT from across the pond basically _everyone_ agrees that the current state of things has become untenable. You don't need to be a bunch of Trumpists storming the Capitol to see this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...