jasoneckert

> Commodore is one of the few companies that manufacture their own chips.

This is one of the best takeaways from this ad. Because they owned MOS, Commodore had an advantage over their competitors that is commonly replicated today.

> Prices for those in the US (like me) just tripled due to import tariffs (ordering the 32 GB model went from $400 to $1500).

This was the biggest takeaway for me in this post. In the past, to experiment with a particular piece of new hardware, we had to a) obtain the hardware, and b) obtain or create software for it. With a) fast becoming out-of-reach for most people, this puts a dampener on b).

The Internet has been stored safe on my desk since that time: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/i-created-the-internet/...

Best to see it for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv6JIMtX8Qc

The speeches tonight by Chrétien and Carney were quite powerful and succinct. There were a lot of gems in there that will likely go viral on US and Canada news networks.

But what struck me the most from the speeches was the strong sense of certainty that Carney is the right person to take Canada into the next decade.

Linux definitely breathed life into that great platform. I still have an Alpha Personal Workstation 600au in my basement running Red Hat from that time period.

I remember the early days of Linux well. There was quite a bit of interest for it at the University of Waterloo in the mid 90s, but there was also a lot of talk of issues getting it to install, or getting it to run stably on certain systems (albeit not uncommon for any OS at the time). Those were the days of having to know how to compile your own kernel and fight with XFree86.

Linux distributions like Red Hat really squashed those concerns within a short time and made things much easier on all fronts. Their documentation was also excellent.

By the late 1990s, Red Hat was as common as Solaris, AIX, and IRIX at the university, but most still considered it inferior to Solaris. And now, RHEL is the main *nix system used there (a few use Debian).

I agree that Novell was great for SUSE back in the day.

I co-wrote 6 academic textbooks with Novell on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for Thompson / Course Technology, and I have fond memories of the whole team at Novell during that time.

Each time I was asked to write another textbook for Novell on SUSE, the publisher used YaST (Yet another SUSE Textbook) in the subject line of the email.

Oh, and yes, SUSE is a great distro!

I've never heard of Hotline, even though I was heavily involved in the Apple community in the 1990s, but according to the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications), it looks like a good-but-shortlived product that was killed from within:

"However, a few months after Hinkley moved to Canada, he and his colleagues at Hotline Communications got into a major disagreement and Hinkley left the firm, encrypting source files for Hotline on Hotline Communication's computers, thus crippling the company."

Last year, Linus approached the topic of Rust in the kernel as if it were two opposite communities that were each passionate about their cause: https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/19/torvalds_talks_rust_i...

And his viewpoint at the time seemed fairly agnostic - he enjoyed the passion on both sides but said nothing about what his thoughts were. This leads me to believe that he hasn't spent the time to think about the important issues on either side and make a decision (the failure of leadership mentioned in the parent comment).

Personally, I'm surprised Linus hasn't gone 100% in on Rust as he is normally very forward-thinking, so perhaps that has added to the frustration from so many kernel developers like Hector.

What I find the most comical about this is that the whole situation could be loosely summarized as "OpenAI is losing its job to AI."

What is the rationale behind sharing this link? It's merely the status of support for M3 devices for Asahi Linux, and there doesn't seem to be any significant recent progress to comment on.

And with such a small sample size, the variance will be high.

For example, I estimate that my own emotional support network quadrupled from about 1-2 before the age of 30 to 5-8 after the age of 40.

I must say, however, that Marie Kondo's method does work well. I've used it on several occasions, and felt good about it afterwards.

The only thing I find it doesn't work well with are the dozens of old SUN computers I have in my basement, because they all SPARC joy.

After getting sick of maintaining the JavaScript in iWeb myself after Apple deprecated it, I ended up migrating my personal blog from iWeb to Hugo almost a decade ago. And when getting my Hugo template set up, I considered RSS a 'nice to have but not need to have' thing during the process.

After the migration was complete without an RSS feed, I received dozens of emails within the same week from people I never knew read my blog specifically requesting an RSS feed on the new site. So I added it.

That quickly reminded me about how important and common RSS is, and I'll continue ensuring that RSS feeds exist on any blog I create as a result.

I did the same, but with my old 12" PowerBook G4 when it became obsolete. I replaced the PATA HDD with a PATA SSD for speed, and removed the problematic cells in the original battery (so it must run with the power supply attached). This made it incredibly lightweight (most likely lighter than the Mac Mini G4), and more portable (it doesn't need to be plugged into a screen, although it could be).

I just plug in an external SSD formatted with exFAT via the USB-C port and manually copy folders (Documents, DCIM, Downloads, etc.) to it in the Files app.

After dismounting it in the Settings app (Advanced menu), I plug it into my computer and copy any files over I want to store there too (e.g., Pictures).

While I've enjoyed the small bursts of wisdom from many of Bill Gates shorter talks, I haven't found anything noteworthy in his written reviews and books. His viewpoints are often bizarre and radical. I still chuckle when remembering reading his conviction that ISDN would become the dominant Internet technology before the year 2000 in his book "The Road Ahead" (1995). It even seemed bizarre back then to me.

The picture in this blog is the later version of the ICON, but it ran the same QNX OS, programs, and games, and used the same LEXICON file server for it all.

In case anyone is interested in more information about the earlier version of the ICON (and the LEXICON file server it ran from), here are my two blogs posts:

https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/icon-computer/

https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/lexicon-computer/

One interesting QNX command we used to get in trouble in high school was apb (all points bulletin) - here's a demo of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr8ts6zV2DU

With US monetary resources, this would be near immediate (and welcome)

The opposite would be better for the US. If the US joined Canada, they could benefit from universal healthcare, schooling, and responsible gun laws within a short period of time, given the available resources that would be added to the Canadian system.

Neither do I.

I believe the only thing anyone can do is take metrics of how the metrics are gamed, as this particular paper has done.

Happy Year++

I'm thankful that this site exists to allow me to catch up on the news, events, and perspectives that I'm most interested in. And I'm even more thankful that it uses a simple, functional layout.

Keep rockin' into 2025, HN!

One of my favourite achievements of the past several years has been to actively NOT use my phone.

I started by eliminating social media accounts, which had an immediate and positive effect on my phone use.

Next, I set hard phone time/day limits: no phone while hiking, no phone while at a social meetup or restaurant, no phone while shopping.

Finally, I focused on what I should use it for and stuck to only that: checking work email when I need to away from a PC (but replies wait until I get to a PC), the odd Googling when I'm away from a PC, scrolling my tech news feeds once per evening for up to 20 minutes, and of course, missed phone calls/texts from friends and family (checked periodically, 1-2 times per day).

And the end result? I'm very happy with my relationship with this non-invasive piece of technology, mainly because I ensured it was non-invasive.

When looked at from another angle, opt-in does work.

By adding that extra step forcing users to be aware of (and optionally decline) the vendors collection of personal data, it adds a disincentive for collecting the data in the first place.

In other words, opt-in can be thought of as a way to encourage vendors to change their behaviour. Consumers who don't see an opt-in will eventually know that the vendor isn't collecting their information compared to others and trust the product more.

Much like musicians that have dozens of musical keyboards in their collection, I've collected/built dozens of mechanical keyboards over the years. I've got ones with nearly every general type of switch (including Topre).

I like to tell people that - as a developer - I'll spend $400+ on a mechanical keyboard that makes the sound I like, and then use it alongside $500+ noise-cancelling headphones.

But all of my mechanical keyboards sit on a display shelf unused today as I prefer to use the Lenovo TrackPoint II keyboard for all of my work (including coding). It's just the best keyboard ever made in my opinion, and I love using it.

It stands for Work from Anywhere

While many here will note the potential downsides for Lexmark here, the strategic fit statement of "Xerox and Lexmark have complementary sets of operations" likely means that Xerox will keep Lexmark operating as usual in the short term. And in the long term, there is a greater possibility of them growing the Lexmark side with their resources because Lexmark is an established brand, was already an existing partner/supplier for Xerox, as well as focused on certain growth areas (e.g., IoT, WFA) that Xerox did not.

Now, if Broadcom were to acquire Lexmark, they'd likely get rid of 70% of the people and focus on extracting more money from the top 10% of Lexmark users via a subscription model that would make HP look tame by comparison.

According to Wikipedia, NS stood for NeXTSTEP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_Kit#:~:text=This%20....

I do remember people in my circles thinking it stood for NeXT Software (which was likely a more suitable name for its use at the time).

As a longtime NeXTSTEP user, I still remember the first time I perused the filesystem of Mac OS X 10.0 (Cheetah) in 2001. And I distinctly remember thinking to myself that Apple basically took NeXTSTEP and slapped their own window manager and app framework on it only. The filesystem and toolset was nearly identical, and I even found several config files (I don't remember which ones) that still had NeXTSTEP listed in the comments.

As I evolved to develop iOS apps in the 2010s, NSObject (NS=NeXTSTEP) continued to be a reminder of this same lineage.