Have been using it since late 90s, stopped using it with the shutdown of SixXs as there still were no viable native options in pretty all my infra locations. Recently started using it again as I finally have an ISP providing proper v6.

Funny thing is that the only reason I’ve found *arrs a few years ago was Netflix deciding to be stupid, making me look at how I can manage my local library better nowadays.

Screen is another thing - but I can live with that, mostly - it’s a bit hard to find x86 notebooks with decent resolution (not talking retina style, just better than “1080p on a 14 inch display”). And while the screen itself is nice on the apples I’d prefer a lower resolution one if I can get a matte screen instead.

But fact is that nobody wants to sell you a proper x86 notebook. It’s almost impossible to find something with more than 32GB of RAM, and while there are a few with more than 64GB they’re all xeon based monsters larger than 16", as far as I can tell can’t really be ordered, and have a price tag equal or larger to a full spec 14" mac book pro. And obviously you can’t really think about battery life with intels space heaters.

It’s especially sad as current mobile Ryzen CPUs could very well compete with Apples ARM CPUs - the one thing Apple is better at is the absolute low power state, as soon as it has too actually do something the power (and TDP) curve is very close to mobile Ryzen. But pretty much every manufacturer fucks up the thermal design, or gimps it in other ways.

One exception nowadays: Business notebooks - and that’s only because the rest of the notebook market went to shit. If you want a somewhat compact notebook with more than 64GB of RAM, decent CPU performance and good battery life Apple currently is the only one offering something.

With my N900 I used to travel with 6 to 10 charged batteries to have a few days of runtime. Things got better now with powerbanks - but for something like hiking just carrying a few spares would still be smaller and lighter.

There was the 386DX and significantly cheaper SX - first was full 32 bit, second just 32bit instruction set with smaller external busses.

Then you could add the math coprocessor. And of course RAM and disks were expensive. 16MB RAM was way above normal for that time.

About 20 years ago I made a script that converts pictures to HTML tables. Back then RAM was a severe problem for this, and even for more powerful hardware browsers tended to just crash on larger pictures.

I checked it again a few years later, and things looked way better. I guess using CSS it’d be rather trivial nowadays to do the same with a short video by just cycling through showing/hiding tables of each frame.

I’m not super familiar with MacOS, but do you know if Gatekeeper or XProtect run at ring 0?

Gatekeeper does mainly signature checking. XProtect does signature checking on an applications first launch. Both of those things would be pretty stupid to implement in ring 0, so I’m pretty sure they are not.

If they do run at ring 0, would you consider that anticompetitive?

No, as they’re not doing any active monitoring. They’re pretty much the “you downloaded this file from the internet, do you really want to run it?” of MacOS.

I’m almost certain Apple will move or did move to depreciate kernel extensions. Which means it would be the same situation Microsoft wanted to force as you described.

That is indeed the case, but I’m not aware of any Apple products relying on being a kernel extension. Apple is facing action from the EU for locking down devices from device owners, though - mainly applying to phones/tablets. On Macs you can turn pretty much everything off and do whatever you want.

The other argument with Defender is you could at least have a choice to use it or not.

Without providing a proper API Defender (both the free one, and the paid one offering more features) would be able to provide more features than 3rd parties. Microsoft also wouldn’t have an incentive to fix the APIs, as bugs don’t impact them.

The correct way forward here is introducing an API, and moving Defender to it as well - and recent comments from Microsoft point in that direction. If they don’t they’ll probably be forced by the EU in the long run - back then it was just a decision on fair competition, without looking at the technical details: Typically those rulings are just “look, you need to give everybody the same access you have, but we’ll leave it up to you how to do it”. Now we have a lot of damage, so now another department will get active and say “you’ve proven that you can’t make the correct technical decision, so we’ll make it for you”.

A recent precedent for that would be the USB-C charger cable mandate - originally this was “guys, agree on something, we don’t care what”, which mostly worked - we first had pretty much everything micro USB, and then everything USB-C. But as Apple refused the EU went “look, you had a decade to sort it out, so now we’re just telling you that you have to use USB-C”

That’s bullshit. Microsoft wanted to force others to use an API, while keep using kernel level access for Defender (which for enterprise use is a paid product). That’s text book anti competitive. Nobody ever had a problem of Microsoft rolling out and enforcing an API for that if they restrict their own security products to that API as well.

I did not sign with them after I had some issues with the contract provided, and the resulting interactions with my future manager. I’d say at least for someone from Europe the company culture is less than ideal from that encounter.

AMD keeps some older generations in production as their budget options - and as they had excellent CPUs for multiple generations now you also get pretty good computers out of that. Even better - with some planning you’ll be able to upgrade to another CPU later when checking chipset lifecycle.

AMD has established by now that they deliver what they promise - and intel couldn’t compete with them for a few generations over pretty much the complete product line - so they can afford now to have the bleeding edge hardware at higher prices. It’s still far away from what intel was charging when they were dominant 10 years ago - and if you need that performance for work well worth the money. For most private systems I’d always recommend getting last gen, though.

This doesn’t have anything to do with user control - modern windows versions need drivers to be WHQL signed to get that kind of access. Alternatively you’ll need to enable developer mode on your system, and install your own developer certificate into its keyring for running own code, which has its own drawbacks.

Crowdstrike is implemented as a device driver - but as there is no device Microsoft could’ve argued that this is abusing the APIs, and refused the WHQL certification. Microsofts own security solution (Defender) also is implemented as a device driver, though, and that’s what the EU ruling is about: Microsoft needs to provide the same access they’re using in their own products to competitors. Which is a good thing - but if Microsoft didn’t have Defender, or they’d have done it without that type of access it’d have been fully legal for them to deny the certification for Crowdstrike.

Both MacOS and Linux have the ability to run the type of thing that requires those privileges on Windows in an unprivileged process - and on newer Linux versions Crowdstrike is using that (older versions got broken by them the same way they now broke Windows). So Microsoft now trying to blame the EU can be seen as an attempt to keep people from questioning why Microsoft didn’t implement a low privilege API as well, which would’ve prevented this whole mess.

I have a 96 core one. While it’ll be fine as a desktop for compiling I’d stick with an AMD system.

The devkit has 6 memory channels, and you’ll want to fill them all - there’s a surprisingly high performance penalty if you don’t. Even then, compiling a code base which could be spread over hundreds of cores is still significantly slower on the ampere compared to my old 3970x.

One thing I find very amusing about this is that AMD used to have a reputation for pulling too much power and running hot for years (before zen and bulldozer, when they had otherwise competetive CPUs). And now intel has been struggling with this for years - while AMD increases performance and power efficiency with each generation.

At the time of sending the mail I need the metadata - so offering a SMTP server implementation which keeps this in memory while forwarding is not hard. You’d lose a persistent spool in case of delivery errors - but we’ve been doing relays that keep the client connection open while trying to deliver the mail to relay errors directly to the client already 30 years ago, so that also isn’t an excuse.

For IMAP - if you don’t do serverside searching or similar it’ll work with fully encrypted mails.

They will have access to metadata - otherwise they wouldn’t be able to work as email service. That’s sufficient to implement those protocols.

The client then would have to bring their own crypto, and you’d probably want the SMTP server to reject mails if delivered unencrypted (though their FAQ says you can send unencrypted mails).

The reason they claim they can’t is probably trying to keep full control over what users are doing, in which case I agree - fuck them, don’t use services like that.

Does Apple lack a feature to turn off or hide the file menu?

I have no idea. They decided to put a notch with the webcam in the middle of the screen, so I’d not be able to use that space properly with anything else anyway.

My point here wasn’t about mac, though (it was just handy for doing the screenshot at this moment , though it’s my least used platform for this: I had it upgraded, and as I have no intention of upgrading it on my Linux system after that experience I made the screenshot before the downgrade) - my point was the needless waste of space in the newer PrusaSlicer, which applies on all platforms.

I’m fine with that. I don’t want to talk with people - I just want an email address to write to.

A recording of 4’33".

You still had a 4GB memory limit for processes, as well as a total memory limit of 64GB. Especially the first one was a problem for Java apps before AMD introduced 64bit extensions and a reason to use Sun servers for that.