aard

I’ve let my google developer account expire quite a while ago after they kept asking for more and more stupid stuff. Nowadays if you don’t get paid a lot for it you must be either a masochist or a bit stupid if you upload to google play.

If you can afford it see if Eaton has a smaller tower UPS suitable for you.

Performance of the snapdragons is roughly that of an i7 from a decade ago - so yes, it’s a good machine for office tasks and light development, but in no way suitable for gaming. That’s not a Windows problem, though, just the hardware is not suitable for that.

I’ve been using an Arm notebook with Windows for over a year now (not as main system, but development system for a customer project). I’m running a lot of x86 software (like Emacs) as a gcc port for Windows/Arm is being developed only now - with no problems. It integrates nicely into the native stuff - which is one area where you run into issues on the Mac: If you start a shell in rosetta it’s annoying to make calls to native arm binaries.

The only issue I ran into were some drivers not available for Arm - emulation layer (unsurprisingly) just is for userland, not kernel drivers. Also x86 emulation isn’t working well if Windows is running in a virtual machine on MacOS - but supposedly that’ll be fixed in the upcoming Windows release.

All of this only applies to Windows 11 - if for some reason you decide to run Windows 10 on Arm you’re in a world of pain.

Windows 11 has pretty good x86 emulation, both 32 and 64bit - imo better than what macos does with rosetta. Windows 10 for arm is just a pretty broken tech preview, though.

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.

x230 with x220 keyboard also is pretty nice - but unfortunately no longer suitable as main notebook. As nothing useful came out of lenovo after that, others are even worse, nobody has a decent trackpoint and sensible amount of RAM only exist for macs I ended up with one of those for work few months ago.

Pretty much same here - I kept an x230 alive until I had to accept earlier this year that it just is bad for overall productivity, and ended up getting a macbook. None of the newer thinkpads are good - and they’re still one of the less bad manufacturers.

There’s also enough stuff I don’t like about the mac - but the current keyboard is one of the better notebook keyboards available right now, and if you want long battery life, lots of RAM and a lot of CPU power available in a compact device they’re the only manufacturer currently offering that.

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.

It helps not having a computer with specs from a decade ago.

It should work - possible that it won’t let you create a one disk raid 0, but creating a one disk raid 1 and then converting it to a two disk raid 0 should word. It’s been years since I played with a pure raid 0 (don’t see much sense in them), but managed conversion back then.

If your install is using LVM (which anything installed over a bit more than a decade should be) you can set up the new second drive as a RAID with a missing device, add it as additional PV, use pvmove to move all PEs to the RAID, remove the old PV, and now add that disk to the RAID.

I just mentioned that because google drive links are one of the very few things I’m opening in chrome - and they’re the only site where I need a 3rd party cookie exemption for.

They probably couldn’t get google drive to work without 3rd party cookies.

The annoying aspect from somebody with decades of IT experience is - what should happen is that crowdstrike gets sued into oblivion, and people responsible for buying that shit should have an epihpany and properly look at how they are doing their infra.

But will happen is that they’ll just buy a new crwodstrike product that promises to mitigate the fallout of them fucking up again.

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.

It’s already in the name - XDG stands for X Desktop Group (nowadays freedesktop), which works on interoperability for desktop environments. In a pure shell environment (or even if you’re not running a full desktop) none of the XDG variables are defined, and especially in shell environments the default fallbacks specified by XDG are not necessarily what the operator would expect.

Probably half the entries in that list are not GUI apps, and XDG doesn’t apply (though some still support it). For some others there (like emacs) XDG is used if it exists.

The problem with renewables is the fluctuation. So you need something you can quickly spin up or down to compensate. Now you can do that with nuclear reactors to some extent - but they barely break even at current energy prices, and they keep having the same high cost while idle.

So a combination of grid storage and power plants with low cost when idle (like water) is the way to go now.