The article doesn't answer how many, so I've counted.
It takes 1298 GNU/Linux users to change a light bulb.
Including the father of the first user, excluding the 6 that complained, and then complained again (they're counted only once). And also, assuming there's no overlap between all the groups, which is probably unrealistic.
That last part... so this is a real incident that happened to me: I am originally from Ukraine. I came to the US a long time ago but was in Ukraine as a teenager. My father and his father also live in the US. One day my father asked me to come over and help him finish building his fence so I did. When I got there the two of them were working on it and it turned out that my help would consist of driving them to Home Depot with my slightly larger than my father’s car to bring some wooden planks and hardware back. So the three of us go and pick out the planks (that could have probably easily fit into my father’s car but whatever) and then we hit a crisis: they needed to pick a gate latch as the final bit of hardware. We go to the correct aisle and the two of them start looking for the correct kind of latch. My grandfather who was born in a small village not too much prior to WWII immediately goes to the very end of the section and picks up the cheapest latch that costs $0.49 and says “this is clearly the best choice.” My father goes next to him and picks out a $0.79 latch that is 30 cents nicer and says “I don’t want a cheap latch. I want this fence and gate to look nice.” My grandfather counters with “this is just a latch. Who cares how nice it is?” My father counters with “this is my fence and I don’t want to be embarrassed about how it looks. Quality matters.” My grandfather responds with something like “it’s not the latch that matters it’s how you build it.” They went on like this for about 15 minutes. Eventually I came up and grabbed a $1.19 latch and said “how about I just buy you this one and we can get out of here?” to which both of them responded with “you can’t do that. You don’t know what you are talking about.” To which I said “it’s my money and this thing costs so little that why would it matter?” My grandfather countered with “then you are clearly not good with money, spending too dollar on something like a latch. They are all the same, so why pay more?” This is when a Home Depot employee approached us to ask if we needed any help and was told by my father that no we were all set and we found the latch we needed (the one he was holding). The employee walked away clearly knowing we were far from all set but also knowing full well that this was a family matter. After 15 more minutes my father put his foot down and went to the checkout and bought the $0.79 latch. The ride home was very tense and silent though my grandfather did help him install the latch when we got back.
I am still not sure what the moral of the story is but since then I have been fortunate enough to not need to advice anyone on gate latch choices.
Apple was at its nadir at that point so the "How doea an apple engineer change the lightbulb" was "He sticks the bulb in the socket and waits for the world to revolve around him"
There will be significant difference in marketing and pricing.
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Telemetry included free of charge.
Let me take you back to the 1970s. Like Gates, some 20 years later, Lucas decided to diversify his product line. And he got to work on making vacuum cleaners. Unfortunately, it was the only product he ever sold that didn't suck.
Very insecure to run all your light bulbs in the same user context. I use SELightBulb to isolate light bulb actions. If you add PAM and pam-fingerprint you can require a fingerprint to alter lightbulb state for better security. Advise two-factor unless you really don't care for electricity at all.
> In case your Smarter Coffee machine has become stuck while updating, please follow the steps below to manually perform the firmware update...
- Turn product off at the wall.
- Press and hold the 2 left buttons on the control panel.
- Turn the power on at the wall and keep holding the two buttons for 10 seconds.
- The "Update" screen should then appear. (Check this has appeared on the screen, good news if it has!)
- Connect to the "Update" network and wait for it to connect. (Check that the signal bars at the top of the iPhone screen are there, this can take up to 55 seconds)
- Open the Smarter app
- Select "update" firmware either via the 'pop-up' or from the 'About' page
- Select 'next', it will take you to the page where it tells you to connect to update network.
- Close and open the app ONCE.
- Press next
- It should update...
- Once it reaches 100%, the coffee machine screen will say "Loading" while it reboots.
Regarding that burning - my home wood pellet furnace needed software updates after installation to start fully working. Good luck that I had mobile internet available.
> needed software updates after installation to start fully working
Not too bad, at least it's a one-time job, better than some IoT thermostats that crash randomly in winter midnights and freeze everyone to death (figuratively)...
> The Nest Learning Thermostat is dead to me, literally. Last week, my once-beloved “smart” thermostat suffered from a mysterious software bug that drained its battery and sent our home into a chill in the middle of the night.
We recommend counting with Mississippi (1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi, etc.).
Start with your bulb off for at least 5 seconds.
Turn on for 8 seconds
Turn off for 2 seconds
Turn on for 8 seconds
Turn off for 2 seconds
Turn on for 8 seconds
Turn off for 2 seconds
Turn on for 8 seconds
Turn off for 2 seconds
Turn on for 8 seconds
Turn off for 2 seconds
Turn on
Bulb will flash on and off 3 times if it has been successfully reset.
TIP: If the factory reset above was unsuccessful, you might have an older version of the C by GE bulb. Please follow the instructions below to reset.
Given the state of modern software, it blows me away that anyone is dumb enough to buy that junk. I work with computers all day, the last thing I want is more of that hassle in my life.
After debugging configuration error for last 7 days, where even logs didn't help because manufacturer decided to use reference clock from different pin which was not documented officially to be able to do this - moder IoT sucks, because chip manufacturers release documentation as confidential and then firmware is implemented by hardware guys. As a programmer who can design some simple digital circuits, I could very mean things about HW guys doing SW/Fw, but I can see how much my HW skills suck and how funny my designs look from the other side.
What I’m finding is the components themselves are so cheap ... if you’ve a little knowledge you can rig up your own IOT setup that you actually have control over for pennies. Raspberry Pi is a great place to start.
You are VERY underestimating knowledge required to do this. Most people don't even know what is an ip address (and google wants to even remove url bar). How will they setup a server to control their devices?
I’m not talking most people. I’m saying what little knowledge I have on this topic has saved me hundreds if not thousands on my home setup and I have complete control over it
I like the term "Yak shaving", however the story told was quite anticlimactic. Yak at a zoo? Really?
Why not go all the way to Tibet. (Acknowledging the exclusive western perspective here. I fail to think of an analogy for the west...)
There is an opportunity missed pointing out the ignored complexity of related implied conditionals (like flying across the globe), which were consequently not exploded onto the described stack. That is, within the narrative. Missed, because the scope of conditional complexity is pretty much arbitrary (point in the reader's resonance); "importance" is mostly a matter of subjective perception merely experienced as rational thoughts. Every egosyntonic thought is experienced as rational.
Internal task prioritization is part of executive functioning and e.g. broken in ADHD (everything feels important). However, it's perceived as consistent with the internal model of reality and not foreign (aka egosyntonic; "rational") no matter the expression and functional applicability.
There is the problem. It's not a question of better thinking or simple rules for analysing a problem, it's a problem asking for an hypervisor, who cares about time management/energy expenditure, not reasonability. For some people an instance can be internalized, or even just works out-of-the-box; for others it needs to be externalized.
"Shaving the Yak" is great. However I often think of the MITM video when in these situations; and personally refer to it as "Hal's Tangent" which has a kind of philosophical/mathematics feel to it.
I’m going to work that into every conversation I can now. My workplace is theoretically involved in supplying IT functions to a university but mainly seems to employ an army of yak shavers.
Alpine Linux already does it, musl + busybox. Not BSD though. Nowadays I use "GNU/Linux" vs "Linux" to distinguish between an ordinary Linux distro (which comes with gcc, glibcs, coreutils, and all the other tools you expect) vs a minimum or embedded distro or system (OpenWrt, Android, Alpine, etc).
Hella Nor Cal or Totally So Cal?: The Perceptual Dialectology of California
Mary Bucholtz, Nancy Bermudez, Victor Fung, Lisa Edwards and Rosalva Vargas.
Journal of English Linguistics 2007; 35; 325. DOI: 10.1177/0075424207307780
Abstract
This study provides the first detailed account of perceptual dialectology within California (as well as one of the first accounts of perceptual dialectology within any single state). Quantitative analysis of a map-labeling task carried out in Southern California reveals that California’s most salient linguistic boundary is between the northern and southern regions of the state. Whereas studies of the perceptual dialectology of the United States as a whole have focused almost exclusively on regional dialect differences, respondents associated particular regions of California less with distinctive dialects than with differences in language (English versus Spanish), slang use, and social groups. The diverse socio linguistic situation of California is reflected in the emphasis both on highly salient social groups thought to be stereotypical of California by residents and nonresidents alike (e.g., surfers) and on groups that, though prominent in the cultural landscape of the state, remain largely unrecognized by outsiders (e.g., hicks).
All of `fortune -m Californian` is worth reading (and probably mostly
dated).
(riddles)
%
Q: How many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Five. One to screw in the light bulb and four to share the
experience. (Actually, Californians don't screw in
light bulbs, they screw in hot tubs.)
Q: How many Oregonians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Three. One to screw in the light bulb and two to fend off all
those Californians trying to share the experience.
%
Q: How many mathematicians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: One. He gives it to six Californians, thereby reducing the problem
to the earlier joke.
%
(ethnic)
%
Hear about the Californian terrorist that tried to blow up a bus?
Burned his lips on the exhaust pipe.
%
To a Californian, a person must prove himself criminally insane before he
is allowed to drive a taxi in New York. For New York cabbies, honesty and
stopping at red lights are both optional.
-- From "East vs. West: The War Between the Coasts
%
To a Californian, all New Yorkers are cold; even in heat they rarely go
above fifty-eight degrees. If you collapse on a street in New York, plan
to spend a few days there.
-- From "East vs. West: The War Between the Coasts
%
To a New Yorker, all Californians are blond, even the blacks. There are,
in fact, whole neighborhoods that are zoned only for blond people. The
only way to tell the difference between California and Sweden is that the
Swedes speak better English."
-- From "East vs. West: The War Between the Coasts
I don't trust the Sun or light-as-a-service, I want to live completely self-sustained without relying on external light sources whose terms of use may or may not change next year.
Sure, the Sun is free now, but that will change once they figure out how to monetize it.
Light-as-a-service could work... where you outsource all your light switches to an AWS lambda function, and turn them on/off via a subscription based "AI Powered Easy To Use App!"
AI powered of course in that it knows when you've entered and exited a room, unlike dumb humans who have problems with this... or something.
This is actually sounding like a perfect startup proposal.
The startup puts a full suite of smart bulbs/switches in your house for free, and then charges you a monthly subscription fee (flat fee + a per-candela-second rate). Sure, there's a large up-front cost for the startup followed by a long amortization period before you start actually making money, but that's what VC is for.
(There's more where this is coming from. If you want to help me write a book for ages 5-7 entitled "ed and the awk", I have a first draft and would enjoy sharing it).
The lightbulb never gets changed. It's still there buried under layers and layers of improvements meant to work around the limitations of the dead lighbulb including several other partially finished lightbulbs and an array of mirrors to try and cast some light around the room. The last time someone tried to go in and actually remove the lightbulb, they were lost and never returned. Legends say they're still there trying to wrestle the bulb out from underneath everything.
1 user who says "I have a perfect solution for this that's been working perfectly for me and fixed all my lightbulb issues, I'll share later" only to never post again...
What's scary is Hue bulbs are some of the MORE performant of the IoT stuff I have - and work when offline.
That second part is the key - so much stuff is designed "cloud first" and that introduces lots of delays and errors when the Internet isn't working perfectly.
Yup, If you are prepared to crank out some JSON to your Hue hub, you can 100% control them offline. I do this via scripts for my Hue based outside lights. My Hue Hub is blocked from accessing the internet too.
There was a related thread internal at CSAIL, a few/several years ago, in which, IIRC, a professor wrote lightbulb-changing story as criticism of things RMS was advocating, and then I couldn't resist writing a response story that turned that around.
RMS asked me to post it somewhere, so he could link to it, but the other person's post was important for context and effect. (Also, I was trying to move away from too much open source and societal issues involvement, to move back into a commercial dotcoms/startup track, and there was a danger of getting typecast by associations.)
> 1 former GNU/Linux user who still frequents the forum, to suggest to install an Apple iBulb, which has a fresh and innovating design and it costs $250.
Well, in this particular case the reality got funnier than the joke.
One to tell you to use arch. One to tell you arch is not necessary and Ubuntu works great. One to tell you that why not just use Debian, because it's the original pure form of Ubuntu? Then a FreeBSD hacker will come in and tell us about the manual pages. Soemone from a crypt in a dark forest of Germany will come out and ask us our thoughts on Open SUSE.
The macOS user in the back meanwhile has already changed the bulb and is doing other things now.
(fwiw I have appreciation for virtually all operating systems this is just meant to be a joke)
On Apple computers since 2017, there are no user-replaceable bulbs. Bring it in to the Genius Bar where it will either be swapped out under warranty in about 20 minutes, or, if out of warranty, will be handled for slightly less than the price of a new MacBook.
Microsoft users have seventeen thousand lightbulbs to choose from. The free ones come with malware. The cheap ones vary in quality. The expensive ones come with no warrant of functionality, and all of them come with EULAs too long for any two lawyers to decipher identically.
Hmm... we still need that one guy saying light bulbs are an outdated housing paradigm and no longer supported on GNOME3, fifty people asking "Well, fine, how do I see stuff at night then?", a cricket and a tumbleweed, one more guy saying "Well screw it, I'm installing KDE!", another poor girl finding out her light bulb's closed-source firmware doesn't work with her home wiring, and one Linus Torvalds to throw a middle finger at the light bulb's maker.
But have you tried turning off and on the power for at least 5 minutes? There is a known bug that happens with some vendors causing malfunction of the bus, losing power or bricking your device.
That was a fun joke when it was originally posted (2013 according to Internet Archive) but today some them are actually real things with smart homes and smart bulbs, different vendors, different protocols etc etc
1 said it is ok to use the new light bulb but 350 said no because it is under gpl 3.0
1 said the whole thing using electricity is no good to earth and start to use solar based light system instead, and his web site on how to do got 10,000 comments in HN for commenting not the light bulb, but his using python static site.
The first to buy one and change it. The second to tell the world that because it was him who repeatedly complained that the lightbulb should be changed, and he did help to grab a non-contact voltage detector and ladder while the first was working on it, hence they should be called "GNU/Linux" lightbulb changers, not "Linux" lightbulb changers, despite him not being the one who actually changed it.
Light bulbs and cars have significant marginal costs that software does not have. Some types of software (operating systems, DB, browsers) also have a network or platform effect, so people actually have an incentive to get other people to use or even improve their software.
Even so, geek themselves are a pretty nice market. Would you not buy an open source printer? I know I hate HP after the last one died just after warranty ended and they have no spare parts whatsoever.
Same with other things. I would buy those things.
And if they really are good they can become a mass market product.
Yet, we only get a phone or something and that's it.
My answer would be: The cost of distributing or running a software package is almost zero, same is not true for hardware, followed by an argument of how hardware manufacturing depends on the economics of scale, unlike software.
However, I soon realized your question is much deeper. It is not "Would you not buy an open source printer?", but "If you can buy an open source phone, would you not buy a printer?" - I think it's a good thought-provoking question. I'm not sure about the answer yet.
Yes, the name is a bit cumbersome. I simply call my operating system "GNU", no need to specify the kernel.
Paired with a neat interface (black xterm on a solid black background without panel nor window decorations), people walk confusedly by my computer and ask: what's that wicked system of yours? And I say: "That's the GNU operating system, man!" It never ceases to cause a stir.
I don't want to diminish rms and gnu's work in progressing software freedom and these programs are of course big contributions to a lot of Linux systems. However, I use i3 instead of gnome, systemd isn't a part of gnu, I also use Firefox instead of Epiphany.
Should I refer to my system as gnu/i3/systemd/Mozilla/Linux?
It's easier to refer to modular systems using the one guaranteed common element, in this case, the kernel. It's not necessary to specify every major user-space program.
You are correct, it is not necessary to specify every major user-space program. But with GNU/Linux, GNU is the operating system. In fact, there have been Linux distros ported to run on *BSD kernels.
It's more like this: the whole OS is GNU (the coreutils), minus the kernel (most of which is device drivers). That's why they do it. Or at least why there are those that are passionate about the naming.
Also the reason why, had 4.3BSD not been in legal limbo, we'd all most likely be using GNU/FreeBSD.
You forgort to mention that the actual reason to call it GNU/Linux is not so much these technical details, but to attract attention to the GNU project and its fight for freedom (while Linux is just "open-source").
Quote:
Granted that the GNU Project deserves credit for this work, is it really worth a fuss when people don't give credit? Isn't the important thing that the job was done, not who did it? You ought to relax, take pride in the job well done, and not worry about the credit.
This would be wise advice, if only the situation were like that—if the job were done and it were time to relax. If only that were true! But challenges abound, and this is no time to take the future for granted. Our community's strength rests on commitment to freedom and cooperation. Using the name GNU/Linux is a way for people to remind themselves and inform others of these goals.
Yes, it's the same reason to say Free Software, or FLO[1] Software, instead of Open Source Software. Technically the definitions are the same, but they have a different political message.
Tbh there’s also the growing real need to specify that you’re talking about a GNU userland. At this point it’s not very rare to see Busybox and the many others that exist mentioned while googling for things.
Conversely, if you get a root shell on an Android device and muck around for a bit, it feels very, very different from your typical Linux desktop or server. (Which only proves your point.)
Why not? Some variants of embedded Linux distros have graphic server (Wayland), init system, libc, and toolset (busybox), in their name. It's faster to sort out irrelevant ones.
I used Void/musl as the daily driver for a while; but I switched to the GNU libc version as I had to run VirtualBox for my (at the time new) job, and that doesn't work with musl libc (or perhaps it does with some workarounds/chroot/whatnot, but I couldn't be bothered).
There are some other things that won't work out-of-the-box either; such as the whole Widevine thing, or most Linux games from GOG.com.
None of this is musl's fault of course; but in general I found that for me, personally, running Void/musl on the desktop was too much effort with not enough benefit. I'm not a huge fan of GNU's libc, but it does work quite well overall.
I do use Alpine on my servers, and haven't had any issues there.
Only almost everything of the programs (ls, grep, bash, gcc, etc). Linux is just the kernel. Stallman lead development of most of the shell environment you use today.
what people call "Linux" is much more "GNU" (system tools, commands, shell, system programms, libraries, stadards, conventions) and less "Linux" (only the kernel).
Honestly I think this is probably like 90% of the reason Linux won the naming war to describe open-source Unix-like systems.
You can tell people your startup's web-servers are running on Linux, a new open-source OS written by a guy named Linus, and the conversation stops there, or you can tell them they're running on the guh-nu, or maybe it's just "nu", OS, and depending on which pronunciation you have chosen either start with a bit of the "Who's on first" routine where you try to explain "no, the name of the OS is new" or dive right into explaining that the answer to the question "Well, if guh-new is not Unix, what is it?" is Unix, and in either case your investors have already decided to pass on your company because you made them feel stupid and not in the way that made them think you were smart.
That's a bit of an exaggeration; Xorg isn't GNU, neither is Firefox, or a lot of other desktop and server applications and programming environments beyond gcc.
It also depends heavily on the machine; if you use GNOME then you've got another big chunk of GNU in there, but in my case the only major part that I actually use frequently is GNU libc, a subset of the GNU coreutils (which I'd very much like to replace with something better by the way), and maybe a few others libraries left or right used by some applications.
But beyond that it's just occasional stuff (GIMP for example).
On my Alpine Linux servers I'm not sure if there's any GNU.
It also depends heavily on the machine; if you use GNOME then you've got another big chunk of GNU in there, but in my case the only major part that I actually use frequently is GNU libc, a subset of the GNU coreutils (which I'd very much like to replace with something better by the way), and maybe a few others libraries left or right used by some applications.
Isn't GNOME independent from GNU nowadays, it has its own foundation?
I'm not sure; it's listed on the GNU website but https://www.gnu.org/software/gnome/ redirects to gnome.org, and I can't find GNU mentioned on gnome.org at all. GNOME also has its own infrastructure. So yeah, any relationship between GNOME, GTK, and associated projects seems very weak at best, if it still exists at all.
The article doesn't answer how many, so I've counted.
It takes 1298 GNU/Linux users to change a light bulb.
Including the father of the first user, excluding the 6 that complained, and then complained again (they're counted only once). And also, assuming there's no overlap between all the groups, which is probably unrealistic.