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ANT+ is basically dead because of an EU legal requirement to ensure that personal information is encrypted. So no new devices will be supporting it, and everything has to move to BLE.

It was quite a rich ecosystem of sensor devices, especially for cycling, including speed and cadence sensors, heart rate monitors, power meters, lights, radar, etc.

It has been extremely popular over the last 20 years.

It looks like eg. their USB drivers use the IOKit API.

(1) Agreed.

(2) There’s very few sustainable global competitive advantages. Sometimes you might have a better natural resource by virtue of geography and getting in first to “own“ it. But for most businesses, reducing trade barriers really just introduces more competition.

The Tn chip.

Prior to that, modern Macs were just PCs. Then Apple started to introduce, and then depend upon, their unique hardware.

Then the ARM migration using proprietary CPUs and GPUs really kicked it up a level. The OS relies on the hardware, which is unique to Apple now.

XNU has some interesting features.

It’s Mach based, so it has Mach ports, which are an IPC system that is fairly heavily used by macOS.

It has DriverKit, which is a C++ framework for drivers that’s got morecsuppirt than the usual Unix driver model.

Mach-O does more than ELF, and enables the two-layer namespacing that makes macOS able to manage dynamic linking dependencies better than ELF.

Nothing really earth-shattering but interesting enough. And far easier to build a macOS environment on than FreeBSD.

If it’s only decades, we’ve been very, very lucky.

> If it was easy to stop emitting greenhouse gases we would've managed to do it 25+ years ago.

Also, if it weren’t so profitable.

And cars.

The real costs are externalized.

Is it possible to determine which sectors are physically sequential given remapping for wear-leveling?

Otherwise the claimed defragmentation here is not actually resulting in sequential data.

Until very recently, that was a pretty common view. Countries generally want unconstrained exports, while limiting competitive imports.

Do you see that changing as parts are designed for additive manufacturing? Things that basically cannot be made another way, but have strength, weight, and even functional benefits over a traditionally made part?

I’m thinking of say cooling channels built into walls of rocket combustion chambers, or car brake/axle assemblies, and some of the „organic“ designs that are lighter and stronger than a cast/machined part.

Sure. But … so was Linux, or Firefox, or GNOME or KDE, etc.

Even RISC-V itself was adopted by volunteers and supported by toolchains, and then kernels, and applications.

The amount of work is less a problem than the motivation. And motivation really just depends on recognizing that the status quo sucks, but is fixable.

And yet, new ISAs arise fairly regularly, for various reasons. RISC-V itself succeeded largely because it is gratis, I think.

Err … RISC-V is an ISA without a fab?

So … use RISC-V as the strawman, and create a community-based RISC-6 that doesn’t have these weaknesses? Better to get in now before it becomes too solidly entrenched.

I used Perihelion’s Helios on Transputers for several years. It was a cool system, and gets far less credit than it deserves. Plan9 and Helios were independently developed but have a lot in common.

Historically, there was a large population of FOSS prior to Linux, and its distributions (starting with HJ Lu, SLS, Slackware, etc) were mostly just uniform packaging and easy installation. This wasn’t entirely new: commercial Unix had packaging mechanisms, but lacked the motivation for gratis distribution.

Prior to Linux, autotools was a standardization that made installation easy across the many commercial Unix variants.

That’s now moved on. There are dozens of packaging and distribution formats, none of which is universally applicable (as the OP says). And users’ expectations have moved well beyond the autotools invocation.

It’d be great for both end users and application developers for a universal solution to emerge, but there’s no sign of it happening.

You’re forgetting blame: if an on-prem system has an issue, that’s 100% on you. If AWS/GCP/Azure has an outage, that’s just bad luck, and everyone else suffers too.

But the "actual thing" is presumably software too? Why is it any different to a dev tool? All software is now more-or-less available for the token cost, given a specification of what is required.

It's not just FOSS: the era of commercial software is equally over. Why pay for something that leaves you dependent on a third party for bug fixes or new features? Vibe it up yourself, and pay for only what you need, when you need it.

I don't know about the long term, but the medium term looks like "Claude, make a replacement for <software>, with the same functionality and user experience."

Code generation (by compiler) has one major difference: it's deterministic.

The Plan9 network API is an interesting successor to all of STREAMS, streams, and sockets.

There’s an interesting middle ground: not fully malleable software, where the end user has full customisation ability but requires full programming skill, but eg the Unix tool model where prebuilt utilities can be composed with a simple syntax.

Pre-existing (or importable) ELisp functions are kinda similar, just a slightly higher level of user skill.

That's not what Glynne said. The whole justification for Starlink was to create demand for Falcon.

Falcon9 has basically no market: the only thing that keeps it flying is Starlink.

The whole AI/orbital datacentres/launch thing is a giant grift.

I think this is an important point.

A time when a take-home, closed-book test, relying on the honesty and integrity of the students, was viable seems completely unrealistic now. I assume there were always some who cheated, but I can imagine that it was sufficiently socially unacceptable that many didn't.

That seems like a very different world.

The same logic applies.

At least where I live, universities used to run entrance exams. They didn't care about high school grades, or even if you'd ever been to high school: if you passed the entrance exam, you could enroll.

At my child's high school, phones are "off and away all day", and the punishment for being caught with a phone in your pocket (or hands) is pretty severe.

During an exam, it's an instant zero mark, on top of the after-school detention (the punishments escalate to suspension and expulsion for repeat offenses).

I'm hopeless at pure cursive writing. My default writing is a joined-up-ish kind of printing. Writing using it works really well for retaining information for me.

It's been clearly shown to be beneficial for some people. I too happen to be one of them.

For others, hearing stuff (and saying stuff) out loud is more useful. I had a friend who'd make nonsense songs of stuff to learn: just doggerel, but by singing it to himself when revising, he had a massive uptick in retention. He was so happy when he worked that out.

I imagine there might be other modes that work for other people too?