Honestly a lot of kids in the US/UK should have no problem finding a used desktop/laptop to play with if they're into that sort of stuff. Even a 15 year old computer can run Linux today and people are practically throwing those out.
I do wonder where old computers end up at (or where they should be taken to), they don't seem to have much at charity shops for example which used to be great for things like secondhand PCs.
I have an old PC at home still collecting dust (~10 years old I think), I need to clean its storage and get rid of it.
Some charity shops (e.g. Oxfam) no longer take mains-powered electronics - my guess is because of the burden of testing them to make sure they're safe. Others will take computers but have various prohibitions - for instance, the Red Cross won't take computer hard drives (they say they're not legally allowed to sell hard drives containing software); the British Heart Foundation won't take gaming machines.
It's not as much _fun_ as making an obvious circuit board do Stuff (tm). There's a very tactile satisfaction about making an RPi or similar go. YMMV, of course
They probably could make it faster by rendering server-side a preview of sorts. I don't think that most papers are large enough for this to have a major impact unless you have a very slow connection.
Interestingly enough I was actually discussing this with a friend (who works in enterprise IT) the other day. Basically rack servers are purpose build for the task, with hot swappable components, redundant power/storage, multiple NICs, ECC, remote management, and so on. They come with enterprise support and can be easily maintained in the field.
Meanwhile a Mini cluster is literally a bunch of mini pcs in a rack, and idk if Apple even supports this kind of industrial use. While it's a quality product the Mini isn't really designed for the datacenter.
> and idk if Apple even supports this kind of industrial use. While it's a quality product the Mini isn't really designed for the datacenter.
I think they know of it and tacitly approve of this use case, as evidenced by the Mac Mini having the same form factor for ages. They’re well aware that a lot of people use Minis (and Studios now) in data centers, and that the Mini footprint is sort of “standardized” at this point.
They actually had a Mac Mini Server as well for a bit. It made sense because it had a second hard drive instead of an optical drive and came with a Mac OS X server, back when that was a standalone $499 product: https://support.apple.com/kb/SP586
(Not sure what differentiates the later model Mac Mini Servers from the regular Mac Minis, since Mac OS X Server just became a $19 App Store purchase, and optical drives were no longer a thing in Mac Minis)
I have one of the 2009 Mac mini Servers running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS like a champ. It’s still a great machine. Upgrading the HDDs to SSDs was a bit of a chore, but doable.
They discontinued the Mac mini Server line in October 2014, which was still sold with two drives instead of one. Configurable to order with SSDs by that time.
There was also a "server" model Mini but it was very short lived and was basically a regular Mini with the "Server" software pre-installed, something that you could just throw in via the App Store with one click anyway.
It had a five year run and saw four different hardware models. It included two hard drives instead of either one hard drive and an optical drive, or just one hard drive (after they ditched ODDs).
Mac OS X Server was its own operating system originally. It was still the same core OS, but had a ton of additional servers built in. Non-exhaustively, they included IPSec VPN, email, calendaring, wiki, SMB and AFS file shares (including support to act as a Time Machine backup destination), LDAP, DNS, and software update caching before it came to macOS proper. The Server app released via the App Store was a shadow of Mac OS X Server.
These were quite popular in small professional offices like law firms.
I saw it save the ass of a client who had one, as they got robbed and all their desktop computers, mostly iMacs, were stolen. The Mini was as much as lost in the wiring in the network closet and was overlooked, so everything had backups.
Back in the old days with no 2FA and only username/password access geolocation lockouts happened every time I went travelling. You could regain access by getting a code from a recovery email, but that often got locked out as well!
Eventually I set up my own VPN server so that the services still thought I was using my home IP.
While this might seem to be intended for DJ remixes a demixer also lets you jam along to your favorite songs. For instance you can extract only the voice, bass, and drums and play along with your guitar like you were a part of the band.
Do the manufacturers have seperate aggrements for corporate/government fleet vehicles? Lots of confidential information would otherwise be recorded, like business deals and patient information.
> We cannot recommend external resolver services such as those run by Google, Cloudflare, Quad9, among others, for a variety of reasons. We have no control over how these services are run or what private data is logged. Even though most of these services have explicit privacy policies, they do log some data and we have no control or insight into that.
I find it very ironic that Wikipedia themselves talk about the privacy/logging practices of other DNS services but neglect to indicate a clear policy for their own service. I would imagine it's based off the regular Wikipedia privacy policy but they should clearly indicate that.
It's in the privacy policy section >Wikimedia DNS is still being beta-tested and evaluated both internally and with our community. As such, there are no guarantees of the reliability or future availability of the service, and there is no formal privacy policy published yet. That said, our current configuration (visible here: dnsdist.conf.erb and recursor.conf.erb) does not currently log anything.
We currently intend, in broad strokes, to adhere to the Foundation's long-standing values around privacy-related issues, as well as to Mozilla's TRR policy, when and if this service is more-formally launched in the future.
It's very easy to throw shade at other providers, then not provide those assurances in your own service.
It seems like a weak attempt to throw shade at other providers without substantiated claims. Take Quad9 for instance, they have plenty of information in their transparency report regarding their service, over and above what Wikimedia has provided.
[Disclosure: I'm an engineer at Wikimedia involved with this project]
Wikimedia hasn't actually formally launched or announced this project. We've been working on it in the background for a long time, and we've just recently reached the point of wanting to do a slightly-broader round of both beta-testing the service and soliciting other meta-feedback on the plans with our Wikipedia editor and reader communities.
Unfortunately, the only way we can do this testing and feedback round is through a public interface like meta-wiki. And of course, once we've put out public information on how to use and access it, it's being picked up on various social media and news sites and publicized beyond what we desired at this stage. We knew that was a risk, but it's still a little jarring how fast it has shown up in places like this HN thread.
We absolutely plan to have a published privacy policy and other such things in place when the service is actually, officially launched. Launching some time in the future is not yet certain to even happen, as there is still internal evaluation/debate of the project's various costs and risk/benefit going on during this phase as well.
Beta service or not I still think it's a good idea to have a policy up as soon as possible, even if it's a broad one saying that this is still in development and all queries are logged for diagnostics or something. Considering how this is on HN it's going to be on Reddit and Twitter soon and it'll explode from there.
> With "contracts" of adhesion proliferating, and how impossible it has become to exist in the modern world without acceding to them (something as simple as buying a new SSD involves agreeing to one), this problem is getting worse by the day.
The craziest example of this is how all these contracts are appearing in the physical world as well. There are stores that actually have a sign indicating that entering the store constitutes acceptance of contract terms (with a QR code that you presumably can scan with your phone to read the contract). I've also seen public parks with the same thing basically indicating that entry binds you to a legal agreement to not sue the park/follow posted rules/etc.
There’s a dead reply to your post saying that this occurs because of the insanely litigious nature of the USA. I think it’s worth highlighting — business/property owners are essentially trying to use contract law to route around the fact that the US legal system is broken with regards to civil litigation and throwing out bogus cases. For example, having a private pool in your own back yard can make you liable for someone else’s child breaking in and injuring themselves in your pool because you not having enough barriers to stop them means you allowed the access.
> the US legal system is broken with regards to civil litigation
And the problem with that has a lot do with corporations. For instance, if you are a pedestrian and get hit by a car and end up in the hospital, in a lot of places in the USA your health insurance will not cover you at all -- you have to sue the driver and get compensated from their auto insurance. The logical method would be for your insurance to cover you and then the health insurance would recover costs through appropriate parties.
It is the same with ridiculous lawsuits like the aunt who sued her sister because the nephew jumped on her and threw out her back. In order to recoup medical costs she had to sue her sister since the sister had homeowner's insurance.
You can't entirely blame the legal system when the corporations are using it to perpetuate the problem for their own gains at the expense of everyone.
It's not either/or - the legal/legislative system is jointly at fault, for letting corporations run amok with generating endless complexity in the form of "terms" that nobody reads, understands, or actually agrees to. The big print of "health insurance" is that it covers medical expenses. From a basic legal perspective it should be impossible for any fine print to walk that back. From a consumer protection perspective, insurances sold to consumers should have to cover complete scopes that fulfill public policy goals.
I sometimes feel like insurance in general is one of the greater "hidden" evils in this world. They prey on your worries and fears, and then they try to do anything possible to weasel out of paying out when a fear becomes a reality.
Don't get me wrong, I think there is some good in it (mostly around risk calculations), but the entire industry feels scummy.
And the litigiousness is downstream of having freakish medical expenses and no universal safety net. An accident can incur costs your could work you whole life to pay off so of course there's a complex adversarial social system built around those consequences.
Fortunately this is mostly done for defense. A company isn't going to sue you for violating a 12 page contract you walked by, but they might ask you to leave and not come back. They probably won't mention the contract until you sue them for illegal discrimination, at which point they will refer to the contract and argue they were only enforcing their own posted rules and not illegally discriminating.
Public parks saying that is kind of strange because the city or town could already set the rules by enacting an ordinance. Presumably they could also delegate that authority to the parks department. I suppose Parks might be doing it because the city council or mayor isn’t enacting the ordinances they want.
It is partly due to the crazy litigation in the US and the rewards people get for some coffee they spill on themselves just because the coffee was "too hot". There are two sides to this story and it is not only the business' owners who are the culprits here.
Look up that case. The victim suffered third-degree burns and required skin grafts. The myth that it’s a ridiculous, over-litigious case is just that: a myth. The coffee was absolutely too hot.
And it was caused by a profit-seeking behavior - an assumption that most, if not all people, would wait to drink the coffee until after they were out of the vehicle, which could be up to X minutes; as such they wouldn't want cold or lukewarm coffee. If most people equated mcdonalds coffee with "bad lukewarm coffee", less people would go to mcdonalds for anything, including coffee. I forget how hot they served the coffee, but it was up around 95C/200F. I know that you have to specifically request "extra hot" at places like SB and CB&TL, otherwise you get coffee hot enough to still be "hot coffee" after adding creamer, i venture 130F or so. AFAIK McDs doesn't offer "extra hot" coffee. Once bitten, and all.
I don't know about the changes made due to this lawsuit, but i reckon they changed their cups to keep ~120F coffee at that temperature longer.
edit: aside: I just realized why i prefer Fahrenheit even though i understand Centigrade. Stuff over 100F is "hotter than i am" It's intuitive in a way that merely remembering 37 is body temp (my dad was born in '37 so that's why i remember) and "anything over 40 is hot" doesn't really roll off the tongue, even though it's roughly as accurate as my ">100F is hot"
