khm

In my city, cameras for traffic light control are on almost every signalized intersection, and the video is public record and frequently used to review collisions. These cameras are extremely cheaply and easily adapted to surveillance. Public records are public records statewide.

This isn't true. Municipal routes can be optimized to serve the majority of people, and then a ride hailing service can be offered to feed off-route users into the fixed-route network. Most transit agencies offer this service, and many offer full-on ride-hailing (example: C-TRAN's "The Current" in Vancouver, WA).

I don't know where this "can't use a phone" thing comes from. ADA requires that transit services above a certain size offer paratransit, but doesn't specify how those rides are booked. I haven't run into anyone who can't make phone calls and can't book rides online.

I wonder why, when people from Baltimore "always say this," your instinct is to assume they're also lying. I wonder if there might be other reasons people from Baltimore "always say this"?

They would seem less implausible if you spent some time in Baltimore. Fond memories of a guy dressed as a hedgehog threatening to blow up a TV station until the police shot him with a beanbag and the bomb robot discovered his explosives were foil-wrapped chocolate. For a while there was an anti-gang gang. Omar Little and Avon Barksdale were based on real people. There is very little bullshit in the show.

DOE clusters are also massive arrays of customer grade hardware. Private cloud can only keep up in low precision work, and that is why they're still playing with remote memory access over TCP, because it's good enough for web and ML.

High precision HPC exists in the private cloud, but you only hear "we don't want to embarrass others" excuses because otherwise you would be able to calculate the cost.

On prem HPC is still very, very much cheaper than hiring out.

It's Debian running GNOME. You can install whatever UI you want from the repos, but the developers have written convenience tools in the form of GNOME extensions, which you can see in the top bar in the photos. It works fine, in my experience, modulo some finicky bits involving the onscreen keyboard. I have the original developer model, and I don't know what differences exist in the community edition.

I was told on the MTA-STS working group list that well-known URIs were chosen because the working group did not think email server administrators were smart enough to use DNSSEC.

I also asked why this is better than just standardizing on a port and using SMTP over TLS with existing certificate infrastructure, but they did not answer that question.

Yes, I've modified circuits. I swapped out a capacitor in the audio circuit, I used to have cell protection bodged into my battery carriers prior to the advent of the revised version, and the second half of your question is silly, since there's only one "linux-first" notebook on the market, and the Pinebook Pro is not even nearly the same class of machine. It's a toy.

I have a stack of Thinkpads for which I can no longer acquire batteries. I'm glad you haven't had that experience, but you don't get to pretend I haven't.

The Reform design process specifically involved testing various displays. For other laptops you can, if you're lucky, get a part number for a hardware maintenance manual; failing that you get to disassemble it, find the part number, and look up compatible options. MNT had this information in the documentation at launch.

"Secret sauce" was a vague term. Let me be clear: I have a BOM for the mainboard of this laptop. I have the schematics, including KiCAD, for its PCB. The RK3588 is no better or worse than any other product on the market. For all the talk of RISC-V being open, you can't buy one capable of running modern software which is actually open. So, from my perspective, it doesn't matter if it's IMX.8, RK3588, RISC-V, or x86. It's the entire rest of the computer I'm concerned with, and the Reform is more open-hardware than any other computer, including the Framework.

You seem to be a 'single-issue consumer' with this binary blob fixation. I don't have any problem with that; I just don't care about binary blobs. I like open hardware for the maintainability and the extensibility. But at this point with incorrect comments like '3D-printed case' I'm no longer sure you're even arguing in good faith here, so I won't bother following this comment up.

I've been doing "real work" on the much slower IMX8 module since the Reform came out. I did an entire Masters degree on this laptop in addition to work.

Anyway, the RK3588 module works in the original Reform; the SoM form factor is shared among all three devices. I don't think you have all the facts here.

I have daily driven this laptop since it came out. It's fine that you are not the target market, but there are enough people who don't care about all the points you made and have other priorities, even setting aside the weird airport comment (I fly with the Reform regularly):

I have schematics for every circuit and case part. I can (and have) use these to make whatever changes I want. If I run into trouble I have direct access to the engineer who designed them.

It uses standardized batteries I can get from many vendors for the foreseeable future.

If the screen breaks there are at least four different part numbers I can order to replace it.

I do not have to use a trackpad. The keyboard is mechanical and several layouts are available, some from third party designers.

The design of the laptop was a public affair in which I directly participated. I can include patches in firmware bug reports and they will be merged.

Instead of buying a new laptop every few years, I finally have one which has no secret sauce and I'm not locked into a vendor. Since I work in IT, I know how to take advantage of networking and distributed systems to leverage faster computers when I want to. In short, it's the computer I've always wanted.

I don't care that it's unfashionably thick, but others do, and I don't see any reason MNT shouldn't cater to them as well.

People can and will pay for a sustainable product made in a first-world country by workers earning a living wage. If you want a cheap Intel laptop, there are hundreds to choose from. The existence of a product which doesn't fit the norm doesn't make it "shit," it just makes it something you personally won't buy.

The computers seem to still be in the building, and many of them are online. 'ssh [email protected]' seems to have trouble connecting to this particular machine right now.

By connecting via ssh to '[email protected]' you can try the other machines -- I was able to log into the TOPS-20 system running on the TOAD2, for instance.