Recall is a legal term for the car industry which includes stuff like reporting obligations. So if the defect meets the severity level of a recall it should be called as such, even if it is ‘just’ a software update. Ambiguous terms for safety violations are dangerous and may cost lives.
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.
Helsinki is getting out of the “burning stuff to make electricity” business. It used to have coal power plants - last ones closed down in 2023 and 2024. There are some dedicated plants for district heating still, but also there’s the trend to move away from burning stuff.
Ukraine took hundreds of prisoners so far, and a fair share of that probably are conscripts. That already is a bit of a mess he’ll have to solve.
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.
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.
A recording of 4’33".
And as soon as I learned about that I stopped using it. Turns out it was the right choice - since then more then one company had breaches where authenticator seeds extracted from a google account were used to bypass 2fa.
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.
I was referring to work setups with the overengineering - if I had a cent for every time I had to argue with somebody at work to not make things more complex than we actually need I’d have retired a long time ago.
Unless you are gunning for a job in infrastructure you don’t need to go into kubernetes or terraform or anything like that,
Even then knowing when not to use k8s or similar things is often more valuable than having deep knowledge of those - a lot of stuff where I see k8s or similar stuff used doesn’t have the uptime requirements to warrant the complexity. If I have something that just should be up during working hours, and have reliable monitoring plus the ability to re-deploy it via ansible within 10 minutes if it goes poof maybe putting a few additional layers that can blow up in between isn’t the best idea.
Everything is deployed via ansible - including nameservices. So I already have the description of my infra in ansible, and rest is just a matter of writing scripts to pull it in a more readable form, and maybe add a few comment labels that also get extracted for easily forgettable admin URLs.
As a non-Windows-user I see that as a good thing. LLMs are not going away - but that kind of nonsense at least will make sure all PCs will eventually have cheap and reasonably fast AI acceleration. Which is required for killing off centrally hosted LLMs (plus nvidias cash grabbing)
RCS is just stupid. When I was still building phones a decade ago we had some operators ask for it - but after reading the standards decided to just ignore it and hope it passes. Pretty much everybody did that, until google got interested - presumably because they figured it’d be a good way to get control of messaging on a lower level. As that’s exactly what RCS is: control of messaging, and ideally the option to charge for it, just like SMS and MMS before that.
While failing at art he was still Austrian.
If you can afford it see if Eaton has a smaller tower UPS suitable for you.