I moved from macbooks to thinkpads for many reasons (including freedom - I want a machine that runs coreboot) but the keyboard was just a big unexpected surprise.
Now, I am a big fan of the pre-X220 "classic" 7 rows keyboards, found on every model before. It's simple, comfortable and standard. I remember how a Thinkpad 600 felt "good" about 15 years ago, and now I just get the same good feeling back. Maybe it's nostalgia, but it feels quite good.
For my desktop computer, I have a SK8845 (same thinkpad keyboard in usb form factor), with a trackpoint + a trackpad + 5 mouse buttons all in one device. Very handy, and no window keys to bother me. You can fetch a new one off ebay for like $30. The SK8855 are expansive - a new one will set you back by $200.
My only question: can you physically have a 512Gb ssd inside that thing? Anything else is irrelevant to me. The previous Chromebook pixel had the mini PCIe port used by the WWAN modem wired with only the USB lines, meaning you couldn't do that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0_u8bjQFzg
I won't buy a chromebook pixel until I can at least get a decent storage. It doesn't have to be sold with this storage. The motherboard just needs the right tracks to the mini PCIe and mSATA support so that I can do it. Google might have saved 2 cents, but won't be getting a dollar from me and other people from this thread who say "this laptop would be absolutely perfect for me if it had more storage"
Having inspiration, whether from any ideal or from God, is what makes one burn the midnight oil, and design something out of the ordinary.
It increases not just efficiency but something else harder to define, something that could be said to be beauty. It makes the result stand out as a something special, where all the parts have a purpose and are arranged in just the right way. Read http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/djb to get a better idea of this something:
djb’s programs are some of the greatest works of beauty to be comprehended by the human mind. As with great art, the outline of the code is somehow visually pleasing — there is balance and rhythm and meter that rivals even the best typography. As with great poetry, every character counts — every single one is there because it needs to be. But these programs are not just for being seen or read — like a graceful dancer, they move! And not just as a single dancer either, but a whole choreographed number — processes splitting and moving and recombining at great speeds, around and around again.
But, unlike a dance, this movement has a purpose. They accomplish things that need accomplishing — they find your websites, they ferry your email from place to place. In the most fantastic movies, the routing and sorting of the post office is imagined as a giant endless choreographed dance number.
TempleOS is impressive. The only thing I could say after watching the youtube presentations was "wow". I see great value in it, at least as a teaching tool - a bit like Minix.
But there's more to it. Another potential use would be for hardware intensive tasks, when you want to squeeze the last bit of juice you have. Maybe for nodes doing distributed computation where GPU are not the solution, to remove the cruft of a full OS. The compiler would have to be quite optimized too, and some network features would be needed. Then there are some scaling issues, but still, if TempleOS could be say 10 to 20% more efficient than a standard Linux, there could be a usecase. Even for a smaller percentage, I believe some guys in finance would like that advantage for high-frequency trading.
I will follow your progress with great interest. Best of luck!
Some other poster is talking about "hubris", "neopotism", or "tales from the aristocracy."
Are we so focused the 99% / 1% difference that we are too blind to see we're all in the same team, team Humanity?
Nothing is sadder that a live going away, knowledge, experience, etc all going to waste. Sentient creatures have a moral duty to live.
Extending our lifespan is also a necessary first step for serious large scale projects. I don't think we are ready with a 70 years lifespan to care about the consequences of our present days actions in 500 years, or to tackle serious projects such as building a Dyson sphere.
To all those who talk about how some people won't have access to that technology - yes, just like how they don't have access to antibiotics, cellphones or the internet in Africa.
Great article. After using AZERTY in France, I remember experimenting with alternative layouts, then preferring the Canadian CSA layout (standard on Macs, PC picture on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACNOR) for 2 reasons:
- it had the accents I needed for french
- it was QWERTY, which mean no more problems in the BIOS or anything else like grub, lilo etc.
- it was easy to get - in any Applestore, and also for Thinkpads - even as a replacement part!. Now try to order a mainstream laptop with a Dvorak keyboard.
Everybody else around me was still using AZERTY, but it just made sense to switch. I haven't looked bad ever since, except I'm now using the US QWERTY as the accents in the 3rd level (using the control keys for the 3rd level, and caps as a control key) are even easier.
Is QWERTY perfectible? Yes. It QWERTY good enough? Yes too, even for French.
So with the network effects, bothering with anything else is a waste of time and money.
Unless you want bloatware that sucks RAM and battery, what else are you supposed to use?
I went from Firefox to Safari to Chrome and back to Firefox. Firefox was bloatware before. Now it's acceptable when compared to Chrome and Safari.
Either Firefox was improved, or wasn't improved while hardware was, and while Safari and Chrome added useless feature after useless feature.
In any case, I do not see any alternative to Firefox for 'power users'. I'm very happy to use it. The report that Firefox marketshare is shrinking is weird. I've seen more and more people using it recently.
Maybe I'm just odd but I love firefox on MacOS, Linux and android because it just works at a decent speed.
As you clearly say, your job is to serve your clients, the manufacturers who do not want their BIOSes to be replaced with something else like coreboot.
You say "Intel has to consider the needs of the system manufacturer along with the end user", but the balance is obviously slanted in one direction. The reason is simple: we end users are not your customers.
As pointed out before, the trickiest issues are with Intel ME and AMT, who can not be removed except on the X200. Otherwise, the luckiest machines will reboot every 30 minutes only. The others won't boot.
You say "Making firmware more open and more secure is an interesting balancing act, and I hope we work towards getting it right". I'm sorry but you don't. Having a backdoor that the physical owner of the machine can not remove is neither secure nor open. If there was a jumper than could be used by the knowledgeable end user to override all his, yes. There is no such things, only barriers.
This is a nice PR attempt to deflect the heat towards Lenovo (for the thinkpads), but sorry, that's vacuous.
There is a moral responsibility in a given design.
At the moment, this is at best the moral equivalent of making weapons without a safety and saying it's not your fault if they can harm the end user, and that the end user should direct the complains to whoever is selling these defective guns. Sorry, but I disagree.
Mortality is the #1 bug of human hardware (with cancer a close #2). It may have been a feature a few thousand years ago, with limited resources, but it's now hampering our progress.
I don't want mankind achievements to be limited by our limited lifespan. The first 20 to 30 years are wasted on learning - almost like 1/3 of a average life. But with linespans in the 200 to 300 years, that would be 10% - and these added productive years could bring so many more good things. Imagine if Feynman and Einstein were still alive today, having new ideas, discovering new things. Imagine if we still learn during 1/3 of the lifespan - the amount of knowledge that would be acquired, and the marvels we could achieve with it.
For those who will lament on how this would be bad/capitalism/not respecting nature or (insert your favorite deity), nobody will force you do to anything. Die of old age at 90 if you want.
Personally, I want extended life or immortality to do crazy thing when I'm still young in my early 200 (or young again thanks to cures we can't even imagine at the moment)
In healthcare, there are many skeletons in the closet - and many closets.
This FDA story is sad, but not surprising. The article seems to suggest the European equivalent (the EMA) is way better. Maybe it did behave better on this case, but as a rule of thumb, I strongly doubt it is much better.
The only advantage Europe has is how it works: if you want to bring a drug to the market, you either have it to get it accepted in one member state (then you can sell it everywhere) or go to the EMA. That's moderate competition. It may works slightly better, but it's still limited by the number of countries and regulatory agencies.
The only conclusion we should make from such stories is that there should be no public bodies susceptible to regulatory capture, but various independent organizations doing that.
See that as adding redundancy - if one was found to cheat and lie, it wouldn't be too big to fail, and a competitor would be glad to update its rating on say the 40 generics whose bioequivalence ratings are based on cooked data. That's a bit like how I trust Michelin guides more than any government evaluation of restaurants.
EDIT: I noticed a comment about financial ratings agencies. You realize there are only 3 big ones (Moody's, S&P, Finch) and that they have very strong ties to some governments, right? I predict they give you more quality that the FDA (because it's a legal monopoly), but less than what more competition could bring.
Really? He says he doesn't want to look anymore, then that it's too complicated. He mustn't have searched really hard, or he would have found it's udisk job.
So why couldn't he find it?
It's not that a current linux system is N times more complex than the sid he used to run, it's that things changed: as was properly noted by someone else on this thread, dbus was one of these important changes. Now it's systemd. Next it'll be wayland or something else.
You're correct in that he still tries to do some search, but he expects things to be like they were in the past, where he "could always get in there and fix it fairly quickly, whatever it was", i.e. to be just as efficient, without learning the new tricks!
The beginner's spirit is to want to learn new tricks, looking for answers and being really insistent in understanding better, instead of stopping after a google search and a comment on a bug report.
As said in another post I loved for it straight-to-the-fact comment, "In contrast, to 10 years ago, I do not like hours of debugging to get USB working anymore. It was fascinating then".
It's not more complex. A Linux system is a time investment, where knowledge has a half line. If you no longer can or wants to commit to learn new things at the same pace, but still want to fix things as before, maybe it's not the best idea to stick to Linux.
IHMO, the author would be best served to try say FreeBSD, where things seem to change at a slower pace. But he would still have to learn this new thing, and I strongly believe he doesn't want that - just a system as before, without any changes. Ain't gonna happen.
"That’s about as comprehensible as Vorlon poetry to me"
Potentially non politically-correct answer to the article title: maybe it's not Linux who lost its ways, but some old-time users? (who forget the beginner's spirit to look for answers on forums, manuals, to try to understand before casting a judgment)
Linux has always innovated around the paradigms, taking inspiration from everywhere. It was never "clean, logical, well put-together, and organized". It has always been messy, but in a good way.
When I first discovered linux, I had to adapt to all these new things. That was in 1992. When I decided to use again a modern linux distribution on my laptop in 2014, I had to adapt - again. I have no doubt I will have to keep adapting in my lifetime.
The error would be to consider that the "right ways" are fixed, and that innovation should be stopped.
There will be many new things, some will be kept, some will be discarded. Change is the only thing one can constantly bet on.
You see, it's a very small patch - yet it took some work. There's no magic, just effort.
And for those who think that's not replicable anywhere beyond the confines of my workstation, I intend to release very soon a debian based distribution with "proper" systemd support that gets me from grub to dwm in less than 2 seconds instead of 3s, kernel and systemd time included, on the X60 (I had some inspiration tonight!!)
It's a work-in-progress, it could be improved on the non-tablet version, but it's still something that's possible right now on 8-years old hardware. That's what I call hacking.
For me, free software is not a tribal identity. It's very practical, with great benefits far beyond fast boot times.
Things change because people work on them, and yes they're usually proud of their work, sorry about that. Pride is part of hacking.
I must say I have been quite surprised by the general tone of this thread, including the ad-hominem attacks ("Seems he is working for Intel on CoreOS") on the OP that was trying to explain stuff. Many people don't post content, they just criticize.
That's at least the 3rd time I see that article posted here!!!! It's NOT exceptional or some special kind of wizardry. Even NetworkManager now does that.
If you have an old setup, you can get matching speeds with dhcpcd and the following options added to the bottom of debian /etc/dhcpcd.conf:
ipv6rs
#ipv6ra_own
#ipv4only
noipv4ll
noarp
The latest 2 options are the helpful ones for speed. The rest is for my IPv6 setup - can't remember if the Macs give you a dhcpv6 lease that fast.
Since it's bragging time, my debian+systemd thinkpad x60 laptop using coreboot want to say it resumes from suspend in about 1 second, and it boots its kernel in 0.7s and the userspace tools in 0.5s (add another second for X thanks to SNA, and another second for LXDE/conky/etc.)
What is the boot time for mac already?
EDIT: linux laptops properly resuming is still impressive for me as I remember a time not so long ago when one had to use some kernel patches, tweak the drivers or at least do a few rmmod, and even then a proper resume could take several seconds due to the drivers reinitializing.
Linux has come a long way since them. What might have been surprising before is now taken for granted (as it should be!).
EDIT2: I see downvotes. I guess some fanboy is quite sad that linux can do the same or better.
Maybe very intelligent deaf humans would outcompete the rest of mankind in a few generations? You may not like that, but why exactly should I care?
Parents do have the best interest of their children in mind. Let them be free of making the best choices instead of government imposed ones.