I think the poster has a significant point.

I have been a linux user for many years, various distros; I recently decided to get myself an up to date Ubuntu capable laptop, that would run wifi, etc without 4 hours of installing ndiswrapper or other weird stuff from odd sites.

Clearly I can order a box from a specialized builder, but I was curious to see of that could be bypassed, apparently not.

So far I estimate I have spent at least 4 hours trying to identify a laptop I can simply walk in and buy from Sams Club, or any major store, and expect it to run Ubuntu and have the devices work.

This is not something Jo Internet should even attempt, or be expected to figure out.

Hardware compatibility lists are basically obscure and useless, and often outdated. The detail is way inadequate.

I like many HP laptop boxes (price quality choice mix is good), but there are so many variants and so little detail on the installed chipsets, no sane person should try to figure it out. Both dell and HP seem to have recently (quietly) walked away from providing ready to go linux on their sites.

So what does the linux community expect Jo Internet to do, randomly buy a laptop and hope it works, until an update breaks it silently?

My Girlfriend (yes, really) recently had a working laptop (HP Pavilion) with working wifi connection (probably the most critical item for most laptop users) which was silently broken by an Ubuntu upgrade. It took me several hours to find the necessary changes, download stuff and fix the driver, security is unavailable. Not acceptable and not someting Jo Internet will do.

I agree with the posters comment that the purist view of open source is impractical in the real business workld of patents and hostile trolls.

If there there was a usable and stable binary interface, and the distro's included the install of closed source drivers, then rational self interest will take over and the hardware manufacturers will release drivers, to enable increased sales of their gadgets.

Clearly there will be anticompetitive actions, which will probably be quietly ignored by our open source hostile and arguably incompetent/corrupt DOJ, (the ludicrous never ending failure of the war on drugs shows the DOJ has no idea what supply and demand even means). Supply and demand always wins in the end. Anticompetitive actions don't really matter in the long run, unless we choose to think they do.

The problem is not linux, or any distro, or the boot, or the desktop, or Gnome vs KD; The problem is that the wise and ancient Self Appointed Benevolent Dictators For Life have slowly become Self Appointed Barriers to Success.

This is a common problem in any form of endeavour, when successful it can grow far beyond the capabilites of the original inventors;

Dear SABDFL's, you have won, the future is going to be open, so take the bows, polish up your egos, do the lecture circuit, write books, FOSS is here to stay, many thanks; now, please let the rest of us do business in the real world.

Please don't misunderstand me, I am not saying we give up the ideals of open source software and the real freedoms and security it provides.

Is enabling closed (redistributable) device drivers a slippery slope?

Not really, it is a necessary evil, so lets not get paranoid, just allow it carefully in the legal licensing and Distros.

I agree with parent post that we need to provide a hybrid? closed source + open source license structure and a usable Binary Interface, so hardware manufactureres have the business incentives to provide working

We all want Jo Internet to walk into a store, look for the fat penguin on the box and know the gadget will just work.

Eventually, there will have been so many boxes sold because of the fat penguin, that business folks may be willing to open source drivers, if that really even matters, (it does not matter to Jo Internet); but until that bright shiny morning arrives, we should simply make it a no brainer for the device driver manufacturers to release working drivers, because it increases their profits.

1. Professor Stephen Hawking is probably right, we do need to get off this rock, sooner rather than later. "It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species"

2. We evolved to survive on an unguided mudball, third rock out from a slightly variable star; we haven't found the thermostat yet. Sooner or later, our luck will run out, one natural extinction level event and it's game over.

3. It's worth boldly going somewhere that will probably kill you, if and only if, there is a damn good reason to be bold.

4. Our current space drive technology consists of throwing stuff as hard as we can in one direction so we get a bit of usable thrust in another. It's a losing game, a pathetically inadequate method, compared to our needs and dreams.

5. Mars has a deep gravity well, with an unbreathable, and (worse) unflyable atmosphere. We have no known scientific or commercial reason to go there, or means of survival if we did.

6. Robots are expendable, cheap to make, specialized, and inexpensive to remotely control, even in space. Humans, are expendable, cheap to make, generally useful, but ridiculously expensive to operate, especially in space.

7. Robot probes in space, historically have produced vastly more science per dollar expended, than humans. We should boldly go somewhere when we intend to colonize, not to send back wish you were here postcards... 8. To colonize, there must exist usable resources, in vast and accessible quantities, easy pickings. At minimum we will need Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen (CHON), plus metals, trace elements and usable energy. There must be shielding from radiation and the other obvious space hazards. Such resources do in fact exist in limitless abundance, in open space, as the larger comets and asteroids. The orbital vectors and masses (that we know about) are currently a little inconvenient.

IMHO:

a. We (Humans) need to invest heavily in science and engineering that may lead to much better space propulsion, techniques for mining and commercial and civic use of such open space accessible resources.

b. We need to develop much better remote probe and manipulation technology, so the robots can investigate anywhere we want, and possibly alter the orbits of low mass, high value objects, as cheaply as possible.

c. We need to develop space habitats, on comets and asteroids, to exploit their resources as a long term (effectively infinite) space habitat.

d. Our most likely cause of extinction as a species is our non-existent space colonization strategy. We are led by a clueless collection of dumbass politicians who cannot see beyond Buck Rogers pointy spaceship sci-fi and (much more importantly) their own short term military and pork barrel political aims. There is no coherent, international, long term, human survival and colonization oriented strategy.

e. When some damn big rock arrives at 5 miles per second, we are all going to look equally stupid and just as extinct; fossilized human politicians will look almost identical, as the "intelligent" humans remains.

The answer is 54, you just have to know that reads as 42 in base 13.
The discussion in our small software ecosystem about skills and capabilities gets similarly confused. All the marketing, sales and head hunters have no deep understanding about the business of software. In their ignorance, they believe that they don't need to understand us; they are wrong. They are parasites, not symbionts.
To all of them, people like me are an inconvenient truth, an irritating oxymoron, because... I specialize in being a generalist. I dont fit into their curricula, or populations, or territories, or verticals, or skillsets, or . So screw them!, Their opinions, though much publicized, do not matter.
You will see irritating jobs and career adverts that list required skills in excruciating detail, often impossibly so. You may be interviewed by idiots who ask for 5 years expereince in a 3 year old Tech, just ignore all that crap.
I believe that building software should always be fun and practical Any software woth developing, has never been built before, it's complex and hard, but you must think it worthwhile, worth the effort; that's kinda the point.
I am just a happy SOB that got into this business to build real and useful systems for real and useful people. No BS, I figured I would usually get paid that way, for once I was mostly right.
Whatever your reasons may be, I suggest pursuing whatever is interesting and fun and practical. Learn the original meaning of "Hacker", before it was corrupted by the lazy media to be a synonym for "Cracker"
Find the edge, the too hard stuff, the useful stuff, the stuff people really need, the stuff that nobody has done, yet. Then build it, using whatever tools and languages you may need.
Learn how to learn whatever you need to know.
For me... Expertise in particular things... was, and is, a random side effect of the effort to create something useful.
Some people call it experience, mostly I call it irrelevant, or history.
You asked a great question, and surprisingly your school seems to doing the right thing.
Kudos.
Enjoy the ride, and welcome to the real world.

"We found that the salts in water solutions can reduce the melting point of water, which may help explain how liquid water existed in a frozen Martian environment" -- Alberto Fairen, a space scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. and the lead author of the study.

Scientists concluded that salty liquid water on Mars may explain the stability of fluids against freezing on the Martian surface at temperatures below 0C

No! Really? That's completely well... unsurprising...

I always wondered why we spread salt on the road in wintertime, turns out it helps melt ice. Thanks for spending valuable research money to clear that up NASA!
There are however, three real mysteries here:

• 1. How to get a job at Ames re-discovering totally obvious stuff.
• 2. Why such a lame waste of taxpayers money makes it as an Article in Nature.
• 3. Why lame articles in Nature make it into Slashdot as "news"

Whenever I get stuck on layover between flights, I always find myself wandering around some crowded seating area at some gate trying to find some way of setting up a laptop comfortably and plugging it into a power supply. I am not alone, you usually find others who have sneaked a cord behind the check in desk, or similar, so they can stay online for a couple of hours.

Given the lousy flight overbooking policies of airlines and the fewer and much more crowded flights, on smaller planes, the likelihood of getting stuck in some area near a gate for 3 hours, perhaps more than once on a trip, is quite high; especially as no one sane is going to leave the security zone after passing through our TSA's overlords latest Guilty until Proven Innocent Security Theatre and random traveller abuse process...

IMHO airport designers are ignoring a clear and obvious opportunity. Simply provide seating with basic power supply and a basic foldout that can hold a laptop securely. Make a simple and free WIFI connection setup available, not some intermittent, weird signup / login process that gives my info to some bizarre company I will never use again and don't trust. I gave up on expecting wifi service long ago, I now use a broadband card for that exact reason.

Business travellers, most with laptops are the target market for airlines and airports, so why is providing such a basic and obvious service so hard for the airports to understand? My conclusion is that it's not hard to see the need, they just don't care. Their goal is not to provide any actual services or facilities, because their few remaining customers are considered to be TSA captive targets to be overcharged for food and other abuse, as much as possible.

For me, the bottom line is that the public needs move away from our ridiculous dependence on airports and airlines, which is why I support building a high speed rail network to directly compete with the continuously worsening service the airline industry provides. Let's have an alternative system of transport... then the free market will deal with the airports...

Why would we ever de-orbit the ISS ? Why not either boost it to a Lagrange point? Alternatively give it an Ion engine and use a long term Hohmann transfer to Mars orbit, then use it as a handy orbital waypost when we first get there ? We could even use it to transfer supplies for initial use when we first send people to explore Mars. NASA just successfully repaired the Hubble. Many objects in space far exceed the short term media objectives and limited marketing imaginations that caused them to be launched in the first place... Turns out rocket scientists really are smarter than the political idiots they are obliged to work for. I can't guess how useful the ISS may eventually be if preserved in space, but I am sure that a debris field of carbonized lumps at the bottom of the Pacific represents an inexcusable waste of resources.