Posts by Jason Hindle 950 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009
Running under Parallels on my M1 Pro MacBook, an ARM build of Ubuntu just works. I had (wrongly) assumed said same distribution would simply install on a (none Apple) ARM PC.
Software can be a problem... I don't think there is anything like Rosetta (or its perfectly decent Windows equivalent) for Linux. If a thing hasn't been ported then you don't get to have that thing.
"how does blood get on Musk's hand if he indeed achieved that explosive-laden submarines washed ashore harmlessly ? If Ukraine wants to fight a war with Russia it's fine (I suppose, or they wouldn't do it) but that doesn't mean we must take sides."
You seem to miss the point about the US and its allies picking an actual side (and most peeps are comfortable with that).
Erm, yes and no. Useless for things like spying and terrorism - you can hide a paragraph inside an misplaced apostrophe in a thankyou message for last night's lovely meal. OTOH, some people people really are thick enough to send illegal pr0nographic images using the likes of WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram. Tracking those down is fine in principle, but when I hear the tub-thumping, populist rantings of some of our politicians (I'm looking at you Cruella Braverman) I'm thinking I really don't want them to have that power.
> And how do you design a sustainable business model that 'builds for the buyer'? Or rather, how do you design a business model that produces products in alignment with what is good for the buyer? What if the buyer doesn't know what is good for them? Or what they want?
Exactly. I see this is being like Alto or Lisa. Apple have been around long enough to know these headsets are not going to be a huge hit, sales wise. Monied early adopters will buy them, kinks will be ironed out, improvements made to hardware and software, and a scaling up/reduction of cost over time. As it stands, the product out of the gates looks vastly better than anything Meta has managed so far. If this starts out well enough for Apple, and early adopter reaction is positive, we can expect another pivot/U-turn from The Zuck.
I think this is an iPhone moment. We might be looking at the future of HCI/MMI. What? You think WIMP and keyboards are here for all eternity? I suggest the a quick gander at the Marques Brownlee vid on YouTube. It is version one. Quite frankly, if you buy this you are funding the development - it should come with a couple of complimentary Apple shares!
“ I only use Word and Excel.”
Both available standalone from the Mac App Store. Install, fire up, sign in; job done. And the best part is this method makes them super easy to delete. I would never use the monolithic Office installer on the Mac.
Laptop, favourite keyboard, Slave One (my MX Master), paper notebook, pens, automatic pencil; job done. They can go with me. Oh, and I expect to land at a spotless desk with a good enough monitor and docking station. Otherwise, you can change my name by deed poll to Mr. Furious. Decent pub, nearby, is filed under nice to have.
I use macOS and Linux. If macOS is officially UNIX then to call Linux UNIX-like is pretty close to laughable. At work, I also occasionally use Solaris. The differences are a little more obvious but that’s more down to a lack of recent evolution where Solaris is concerned.
<downvoteBait>Oddly enough, Musk might have been the best man for the job.</downvoteBait> If, that is, he had the bandwidth and could perhaps keep his impulses under control. What a spectacularly flawed man! Listening to them airing technical dirty laundry in public, Twitter starts to look like a version 1 product, and any fule no that version 1 is mostly people just trying to get stuff to work any way they can. Getting that under control takes someone who can absorb the technical side and then make coherent decisions. Musk can at least be that man.
Getting the politics of the business under control and the advertisers back on board is another matter. On top of that, you’ve got the problem that most of the best engineers have probably gone. The sackings were very indiscriminate and that is a tragedy. A business the size of Twitter is always going to have plenty of passengers and I suspect it’s down to HR not being competent enough to have a list of those ready to go. Edit: Oh, and the passengers would have been first to sign that pledge. Anything to keep the gravy train on track.
With all that in mind… Gates, if he were ten years younger and not busy saving the world. Or perhaps a pointy haired CEO and an iron CTO. That would be Torvalds, if were not running the world already. Busy man. Trust me, Torvalds is looking down on us has a plan for all of us.
Perhaps saving Twitter should fall to a brain trust of industry luminaries?
In my brief experiments, it is in one way little different to Google: how you ask it matters. It also helps to know something about the subject matter at hand already. I asked it to give me some code generate some java code to query a Postgres database. This is something I'm very new to, but where I also have a little knowledge. I could see right away that the Chat GPT solution was a little better than what I would have done in the first instance (noob alert - it involved meta data and Chat GPT was at least polite enough to make its solution database independent).
I also asked it to develop a Flutter app that simply displays three labeled text entry fields. Although I did muck about with that a year or so back, I know bugger all about Flutter so have no idea how that will work out until and try to run it! Now imagine for a moment that in a certain part of the world, every man + woman + dog will be asking questions like that one while knowing as little as I do (or less).
Overall, it's little different to writing a specification. The better the specification, the more likely you are to get something vaguely sensible out of Chat GPT.
It’s cheaper for some than for others. Depends on how many lines of stored procedure code are at stake, not to mention any other code that isn’t database independent. Customers in banking and finance, with lots of old code, and lots of money, are a thing.
SQL Server started as a fork of Sybase. Sybase got bought out by SAP, who haven’t moved the product since 2014. You might be surprised how much Sybase can charge per core these days.
He wants to turn Twitter into a payment platform while simultaneously struggling to verify people? I’d add that Zuckerberg has been desperate to turn the likes of WhatsApp into payment platforms, copying the Chinese, for years. The regulators and legacy finance systems are having none of it.
“ There may seem to be no FOSS equivalent of Azure or AWS or Google Cloud Platform, but the intellectual infrastructure that open source provides through the ecosystem of libraries and frameworks is arguably as important to modern IT as the cloud itself.”
There is OpenStack. That is conceptually very FOSS. There will not be a FOSS cloud as such because clouds require physical things, physical spaces, physical servers and lots of leccy. Public clouds charge rent and it is up to them to justify themselves vs you owning your own data centres*. And it is up to you to decide whether or not what they offer will work better for you, vs owning your own data centre(s).
* And I do buy into a lot of their arguments. AWS/Google Cloud/Azure and friends are fine by me for many use cases.
The only reason I use it is, thanks to inertia, the other members of the Friday virtual pub lunch started under lockdown*, who can’t collectively be convinced to try anything else. I think that’s mostly because they are all addicted to the little game of fastest finger when zoom ends the meeting after 40ish minutes.
*We’re still happily working from home or wherever.
So, instead of making four, eight and ten core processors with differing combinations of graphic and ML cores, you just get one reasonably maxed out option and pay for what you need? Preferably via a subscription, because everyone loves a good subscription? Well, everyone who sells subscriptions loves a good subscription.
A lot of these people are employed by Western businesses. Some of those Western businesses have offered their Russian tech employees an out. At the foundational level, the maths, engineering and CS education is still strong in Russia. They create a lot of talent, and a lot of that talent would rather get fat and rich, in the West, rather than work in a kleptocracy. What we see today is merely an acceleration of what was happening already.
The risk to Microsoft is they push out a lot of perfectly users who then go onto discover that, actually, Libre Office is fine. And Libre Office is absolutely fine. As I’ve written here before, once you have templates that look good enough en either, the exchange fidelity issue stops being an issue. Every silver lining…
I had an original Spectrum that I’d taken to a well dodgy place in Manc that put the internals into a + body/keyboard. I bet some here did that with their own hands. WTF are Apple thinking? Even if this is an M1 Mac inside a Magic Keyboard, there is no way this is a valid patent. What drugs are they on?
“ Other bits and pieces include the shunting of the venerable SendMail to the /extra directory in favour of Postfix, and the retirement of imapd and ipop3d, which are being replaced by the Dovecot IMAP and POP3 server.”
Setting sendmail up with my demon account was a nightmare back in the day.
I think this is potentially Apple’s greatest miscalculation. That very clear separation between PC and tablet that Microsoft and Google have successfully blurred. I can see this taking a couple of years if Apple needs to do an about face. They stuck an M1 and 16GB in an iPad but won’t let you run OSX (either virtualised or side by side). The power on the top end iPad Pros looks wasted.
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