Universities have been running Linux since the very early versions. Slackware was pretty common back in the 90s and 2000s and universities had labs full of them not least because there weren’t really laptops so they had to have enough machines for all the students. Universities have been heavily involved in the development of unix from its inception and a lot of the tools were initially written by university professors.

I noticed today searching that the date search no longer seems to work right. There are some terms that only appeared since 2020 and up until my recent attempts those terms produced no results on DDG when date constrained but now produce terms in articles clearly after that date. I don’t know if this is some personalisation nonsense or always pulling but results if the constraints don’t match or what but its seriously problematic and means I can’t trust the date constraints anymore.

AMD has unfortunately a long history of abandoning products before its reasonable on its graphics division. Its not really acceptable, up until earlier this year my NAS/server was running a 3600 and its only for power saving purposes I changed that as its still a very workable CPU in that role.

There are capitalist elements. The Picard family still owns a farm and farm house and pass it down generations. There is still some concept of money being used by humans who are pursing payments for rare and stolen goods. Most of what we see around Starfleet is merit driven people working in starfleet out of self interest but the ships appear to be owned by Starfleet and they seem to have some democractic structure. Since most basic needs are met via replicators it seems they are post scarcity and trips to the doctors seem free but is not really socialism in the sense of people owning the means of production, there doesn’t seem to be much of anything said about how these ships get built and the implication is its a lot of automation but there seem to be a lot of facilities on Earth with people in them like Starfleet academy and in bars. We have no idea how factories work in this world other than on other planets and people work in them.

I don’t think its brilliantly clear, there are a mix of ideologies on display and what makes it hang together is the humans are all behaving well, which isn’t very human nature like at all. People don’t seem to own what they are working with in all cases but they do in some of the smaller settlements so its a bit of a mix dependent on circumstances.

They are going to get sued for billions and this little stunt isn’t going to change that. Should have implemented proper software testing before you took ever corporate computer in the world, but companies like this always force their developers to rush instead of do the right thing and when it bites them expect that things will carry on as normal. I can’t see many renewals in their future.

Either Intel is extremely incompetent and genuinely has no idea what is causing this problem or it knows full well is doing all it can to drag this out and avoid recalls. This saga has been going on all year now this is getting ridiculous.

It really depends on the project. Some of them take breaking changes seriously and don’t do them and auto migrate and others will throw them out on “minor” number releases and there might be a lot of breaking changes but you only run into one that impacts you occasionally. I typically don’t want containers that are going to be a lot of work to keep up to date so I jettison projects that have unreliable releases for whatever reason and if they put out a breaking change its a good time to re evaluate whether I want that container at all and look at alternatives.

So no its not safe, but depending on the project it actually can be.

Linux was in use on some university machines although I lot of them were still running Sun hardware OS. The main distribution I used at the time was Slackware.

Over the years I have used OSMC for my TV. I have never used it for streaming however always internal across the network streaming of my own content. It worked reasonably well for the most part although I have had issues with Samba in recent versions and have stopped using it. I can’t say much about its streaming, mostly for that you need a supported android or similar device rather than an open source one.

I have done this a few times, so long as the drive isn’t mounted it works fine.

One advantage of this approach compared to clonezilla is you can pipe it through netcat or similar and move it to another machine. You can also first pipe it through gzip as well to save on the transfer bytes a bit as well and then on the other end just store the compressed image or unzip it. Combine a few tools together and you have quite a lot of capability for complete image backups but its usually best done for the boot drives from a live USB.

Ideally for your router you want something that runs an open source firmware (OpenWRT, DD-WRT, OPNSense, FreshTomato). Its better because you get a completely unlocked everything you need system with security patches for the hardware’s true lifetime. Every router company stops with the security updates after a few years and then at some point it becomes part of a bot net or one of this mass hack events. Its best not to play in that game and instead run some open source firmware from the outset.

The best way to start is to look at the website for openwrt.org and use their filtering to find a device that supports your needs (at least 5 LAN ethernet ports I guess and some wifi but AC sounds like it will do). The other option is a more typical 4 LAN port router which will give you a lot more options and then add a switch to that, doesn’t sound like you care too much about it being managed or >1gbps so they are also dirt cheap.

For not a lot more you can now get NUC like machines with Celeron’s, Pentiums and get to choose NVMe SSDS and RAM amounts and even Wifi cards (so wifi 6e or 7) and 2.5 gbit/s ethernet. At these sorts of prices they are running into the low end of NUCs at $100 and they don’t compete well on a whole range of factors. They are still cheaper but its not the 30-40 of the Pi before prices went nuts and this new higher price point isn’t as clear cut.

Its not very price competitive now. Its moved into the low end N100 territory with ITX boards and while its smaller and a bit less power its no where near as performant. They will still have some use in smaller applications but 5V x 5A is a chunky cable. I am not convinced this is the way now.

I do both. I have a custom built NAS based on a Ryzen 3600 and ZFS across 4 drives which runs about 20 self hosted applications and stores the majority of my files but its only accessible from within the home. I also rent a small VPS for personal webspace and hosting self hosted apps I want out of the house.

In the past I have also hosted raw servers from Hetzner or bigger VPS from Amazon for the purpose of hosting a game server. Alongside those I often had community applications like website, forums, wikis and custom chat and voice comms services.

Its all self hosting to me since I run it. The various options are all about the trade offs of security, accessibility, cost and performance. The cheaper cloud options when you add it up can be cheap compared to buying and running your own hardware when you take into account electrical costs and the likely hardware replacement needs within 5 years. The big cloud providers aren’t price competitive but Contabo/Hetzner really surprisingly are especially if you pay a lot for electricity. But then if you need a game server it can be quite hard to find good fast CPUs on the cloud and its not going to be 24/7 for communities, so the trade off flips back to having your own.

Since I got 1 gbit/s fibre internet my need for internal NAS has definitely reduced as the internet is nearly as fast as the local network so I could now have my NAS needs remote.

Even the main search engines don’t index the entire internet of content these days and their databases are truly massive already. Writing a basic web crawler to produce a search index isn’t all that hard (I used to do it as a programming exercise for applicants) but dealing with the volume of data of the entire internet and storing it to produce a worthwhile search engine however is just not feasible on home hardware, it would be TB’s at least. It wouldn’t just be a little worse it would dramatically worse unless you put substantial resources to it including enormous amounts of network bandwidth which would have your ISP questioning your “unlimited 1 gbps fibre” contract. It would probably take years to get decent and always be many months out of date at best.

Doesn’t seem practical to try to self host based on the need to download and index every single page of the internet its a truly massive scale problem.