DSL has always been a derivative of Knoppix. In 2008, one of the DSL community members, Robert Shingledecker, had a falling out with the others and started Tiny Core Linux, which expanded support across hardware architectures to ARM and run on raspberry pi systems in addition to X86 / X86-64. TCL has been in development consistently since the 2008 split. DSL fell to the wayside from 2008 until seeing it get picked up this year.

Knoppix has abandoned the CDROM scale and is exclusively a DVD img release now. With the availability of USB flash drives, this makes a lot of sense. The live distro can boot from its static files, but utilize a writeable home directory on a separate partition on the flash drive thereby maintaining data across restarts.

So Netflix is paying $5 billion, but who is going to insert their commercials into the breaks? Does WWE also take that revenue as well? I'm guessing the no-commercials Netflix subscription doesn't apply to WWE and sports? No insight from me, just questions.

My favorite Devo song has always been Freedom of Choice. It complements the Alvin Toffler book, Future Shock, quite well. One of the premises of the book is that mass production has overwhelmed consumers with choices. He illustrates this by describing the number of permutations of Ford Mustang that could be custom-ordered due to the combinations of exterior & interior color, trim packages, etc. while people don't actually care to expend the mental energy to navigate those selections. Instead, they would prefer to buy the car with these choices made for them.

Freedom of choice is what you got, Freedom from choice is what you want.

Devo even emphasized the inane choices confronting consumers with the physical single for the song. The record did not have an "A" or "B" side labelled. Instead, the owner of the record would need to decide for themselves which song was on side A or B and fill out a checkbox denoting their choice on the cover and record label.

Really looking forward to seeing this documentary.

I copy-pasted the URL into an existing YouTube tab I had open. Appropriately, the video I had previously been watching was detailing a new feature in Minecraft called an "Autocrafter". It's a new block that can be created that will take material inputs and output objects that would normally require a human player to create using a crafting table.

Your video is insightful, David. Thank you for posting it here.

I didn't say anything about whether Reiser was rehabilitated or capable of such. He's still in prison, so the system believes him not to be.

He currently has a significant interest in convincing people that he is rehabilitated due to the benefit of assisting with his release. This increases the probability that his messaging may be carefully architected to portray him in a favorable light and is certainly a one-sided narrative due to his wife not being alive to comment. I was commenting to criticize Slashdot for enabling Reiser to potentially whitewash himself to try to get released from prison.

If he does get out, I hope that he will dedicate his remaining life to supporting victims of domestic violence. I'll be happy to read his letter to Slashdot at that time documenting his work going forward.

Dude killed his wife and his legacy, thinks he's going to rescue the latter by writing an open letter to a website that has catastrophically diminished during his incarceration. I suppose that's fitting.

Since his wife doesn't have the opportunity to have a letter printed, I would've preferred that Slashdot not give him this attention, regardless of how limited that attention is nowadays. Weirdly, the letter was transmitted to Slashdot, but this summary references an Ars Techica story about the letter...

Twitter laid off 80% of its workforce and there was never a story on Slashdot. Discord lays off far fewer staff and it gets one. Weird.

The food chain in our neighborhood would solve that nightly. Possums and raccoons will gladly finish the meal left for them outside the cat door. We hardly even compost food waste anymore through the city program- just throw bread crusts, leftovers, etc. in the backyard and it's gone by next morning.

I don't have first-hand experience with the Pixel 8 photo quality, but if it's at all competitive with equivalent iPhone photography, it takes dang good pictures. The crappiest DSLRs with three lenses are going to be nowhere near $200, new or even used. That's a reasonable price.

Regarding the price for repair parts... manufacturers price repair parts partly based on the anticipated frequency of their failure. It costs them a lot to warehouse the parts until the product is officially EOL and they're off the hook for providing the parts. I remember when Apple used to sell re-badged HP inkjet printers and stored all the repair parts. Things that would NEVER likely break, like the internal printer frame had to be available as a repair part, but it was extremely expensive. Far more than just buying another printer. I anticipate some of these Pixel 8 parts are priced the same way. Camera likely will need to be replaced a lot because of impacts to the lenses, so they've priced it reasonably at $200, I think.

Would be nice if Nikon and Canon released firmware for previous generations of camera to add this functionality. I know mirrorless is what many people are migrating to, but there are some of us sweeping up the legacy equipment out there for cheap. Would it be prohibitively expensive for Nikon to release firmware for the higher-end models with shutters that feature this signature functionality? I'd appreciate that.

The director who capitalized on Winnie the Pooh falling into public domain seems not to be able to get funding to go forward with a similar bastardization of Mickey Mouse. Too intimidated by Disney at this point.

Here's a real life trip, but calculated in a non-Performance Model 3, from my house to my buddy's house in Jackson TN (2023 Model 3 LongRange... 295 Wh/mi).

It's 17.4 hours of driving, plus 2.5 hours charging, on a 1,230 mile drive. By your calculations, a gas car would take 40 minutes at gas stations. Electricity cost is $105, vs about $150 for a car that gets 25 mpg. An ICE car getting 35 mpg would cost the same as the Model 3...

I personally don't do this trip straight through... a full day in the car is simply too long for me, so I usually stop at a hotel in Virginia. Now, by stopping at a hotel I can charge the car overnight, which eliminates one charge, which brings it down to 2 hours of charging the BEV, vs 40 minutes refueling the ICE car.

That's it, if you're one of those people who likes to Cannonball the drive, driving straight through without any stops to use the bathroom, or grab a bite to eat...

If, like me, you need a couple stops for food and comfort, then things are even a little better, because of course the car can be charging while you eat or use the facilities. If you figure a stop for one meal on day 1, and one meal on day 2, you knock the "sitting waiting for the car to charge" time down to about an hour on a 1,230 mile drive.

On the subject of how long a recharge time is, and you supposed 30 minutes for a charge, but the average on this trip is actually 19 minutes (this trip, 14+21+21+27+27+7+13+23) but that's if we don't do the overnight hotel stop, or stop for food or restrooms.

You mentioned the Leaf only getting 4.1 miles per kWh... That's really terrible! My Honda Fit EV got that with regular driving, but if I hyper-mile'd it (going 30-35 on back roads) I could reliably get 6 miles per kWh (in warm weather). It was a great little car, but with only 19 kWh, it didn't have much range, and no DC charging capability... It made it a great little commuter car, but road trips were impossible...

Anyway, on a 17.4 hour drive, you're adding between 1 to 2 hours depending on whether you're one of those "pee in a bottle so you don't have to stop" people, or trying to get there without killing yourself... For me, that's not an excessive amount of additional time, but some people won't allow for any extra time at all. Different people, different strokes.

Thanks for the pointer to that article... I hadn't read that... I've owned (plenty of) gas cars, one PHEV, and two BEVs... I feel like I have some experience with them...

The survey they did misses the mark slightly for me:

I guess I'd like to know the weighting of stuff like this... I'm less concerned if trim is rattling, than I am about whether the car is able to transport me to work and back. And some of it is indeed surprising (and makes me wonder about the validity of at least the headline)... For instance, Hybrid's being much more reliable than PHEVs (which were the worst, and that mirrors my experience with my PHEV)... But I think the key is:

Yeah... BEVs are generally new models... and thus are still suffering from the sorts of issues that occur with any new model... It would be nice to see the same study corrected for the "newness" of the cars... i.e. compare a 1 year old BEV to a 1 year old hybrid, and also try to correct for overall reliability... I'm not surprised to find a Toyota much more reliable than say, a GM product... but if the GM product is a BEV and the Toyota product is a hybrid... well I think that says more about the manufacturer than the particular vehicle.

And to be fair, the article called out many of these points - I think it was a well written article. The headline, on the other hand, seems to be misleading...

Anyway, interesting read.

The article I read said explicitly that's where the energy was going - especially heating during the cold months. Remember, the start/stop inefficiencies of an ICE truck are 80% recuperated by a BEV, so there's a huge efficiency gain for a vehicle that stops often. 1.34 kWh / mile is worse than a Ford F150 towing a 5,000 pound load (and most of that is aerodynamics). The NGDV is rated to spend a lot of time at 65 mph, but if you think of the average delivery route, it'll spend a lot more time at 25 mph where the aerodynamic drag is negligible.

Something still sounds off - if there's 100 delivery trucks, it's a very large post office. A post office that size needs significant power for sorters, etc. At night when the workers go home, all that power is available to charge trucks. Also, if you're serving an area that needs 100 delivery trucks, it's not a little rural post office, it sounds like a fairly metropolitan area with business etc. So, there's going to be plenty of capacity available...

Maybe you saw 100 vehicles 90 of which were junked and just sitting around to be used as spares?

I got the 7.5 trucks / post office by taking the actual number of trucks in the USPS fleet and dividing by the number of post offices in the US...

And again, because of the way the duck curve works, the demand on the grid drops off tremendously by 9-10 pm the load on the grid is way down, and there's plenty available for charging BEVs...

Care to mention the name of the town/city where you saw 100 delivery trucks?

It's certainly not a terrible idea, and I've seen a couple Prius with that. I think sitting all day in the sun may get you something like 4-7 miles which isn't a lot, but would actually cover 25% of the average person's commute...

We have a couple stores around here (REI) that have parking lot structures that mount solar panels above your car, so your car stays cool, and the panels generate electricity (but you can't plug in - it runs the store)...