I get a lot of ads from Boeing. They want to sell a military helicopter. No joke. I don’t think the targeting works all that well. (It’s Twitter, not insta though)
Check out Nix. Deterministic source derivations of pretty much anything you might want to build, trivially re-buildable from source by anyone. It takes seconds to install the "Nix Shell" on pretty much any of the modern OSes.
Now, to avoid the "Reflections On Trusting Trust" exploit, building the C compiler toolchain from known-good "root" compiler/linker toolchains, and then comparing the output vs. self-compilation is quite a bit harder.
Define "ordinary person", as plenty of people here have. However, there's very little difference between downloading a reproducible system that compiles everything on your machine and downloading a binary with a known checksum from a perspective of trust.
I used to use Gentoo, and I built my entire OS from source. I'm not extraordinary in any way, I'm just an ordinary person who has a deep interest in software and computers.
I've done two "stage one" builds of Gentoo. I'm not super skilled but, I had a lot of time and reference material. My bet is that folks could but would not want to. There is significant time cost.
Also, I'm still using one of those original builds on my laptop - upgraded of course...still mad love for my daily driver.
It's a pretty automated process. I'd estimate 1/10 of all people who can use a computer and install software at all could do it if they wanted to and had sufficient time.
Hahaha. Maybe by that time we will take it so for granted that time-out periods so we can see the stars better will be socialized. I still remember the blackout of 2003 rather fondly...
I live in a 3rd world country and had to go to hospital with no power and no lights. It was chaos, amputations by flashlight, doctors unable to see where to hook up IVs, etc etc. How could you honestly think that the power going off would be anything except a horrible horrible thing?
Edited to preface: my intention certainly wasn’t to dredge up any terrible memories. I’m sorry if it did so. It was more a remark on North American “go-go-go” culture that was forced to take a pause for a day or so.
In this part of the world many critical services like hospitals run on back up generators if the main grid goes down. It was part of the main grid that went down
There was surely chaos some places where traffic lights weren’t on backup power, but otherwise the worst things that would happen were maybe you have to close up the office or the worksite for the day. Transit was down but not much else could be done anyway.
It was bittersweet. I’m sure there were problems. I’m also sure that many people who’d never seen a star in their lives saw the sky unfolded like they might never again. It was a stark reminder how much we’ve drowned out with things that “matter”
Successful renewable energy infrastructure demands that large-scale, grid-tie energy storage is also in place. This is why battery tech and renewable tech are so intertwined at this time.
Sorry, but from my experience, this is not true. I did have several machines Running w95 and I did try to run OS/2 on them. It would boot but it would not run fast enough to work with it. W95, on the same hardware, worked quite well and responsive.
