jasoneckert

By the end of Day 3, it seemed quite clear that Qualcomm's legal team and position was far ahead of ARM's. I feel the following snippet sums up the whole week:

"Qualcomm’s counsel turned Arm’s Piano analogy on its head. Arm compared its ISA to a Piano Keyboard design during the opening statement and used it throughout the trial. It claimed that no matter how big or small the Piano is, the keyboard design remains the same and is covered by its license. Qualcomm’s counsel extended that analogy to show how ridiculous it would be to say that because you designed the keyboard, you own all the pianos in the world. Suggesting that is what Arm is trying to do."

Source: https://www.tantraanalyst.com/ta/qualcomm-vs-arm-trial-day-3...

Does the fact that the "jurors weren’t able to agree on whether Nuvia breached the license" mean that the legal fight isn't over?

Or is that question irrelevant in light of the other findings, and the legal fight is actually over, with Qualcomm as the clear winner?

In addition to bumping it to 4GB, the only upgrade I did was for the HDD. I'm not sure if mine has a quieter PSU, but it doesn't seem (to me at least) to be louder than any other PC when running.

This is great. Perhaps it's finally time for me to upgrade from my SGI Fuel to a Linux system running MaXX: https://triosdevelopers.com/~jason.eckert/trios/SGI_Fuel.jpg

And for those of us who have to support macOS users:

   sw_vers (to display the version/build of macOS),

   dsenableroot (to enable the root user), and

   say "phrase" (useful for freaking out users over a remote SSH connection)

In short, all apps run faster - I have some more detail in this blog post (which also includes a link to my original blog post with additional performance details): https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/fedora-asahi-remix/

I suspect this is primarily due to Linux being a more performance-optimized OS compared to macOS, which seems to have introduced a great deal of bloat over the years.

While I don't feel I have enough information to comment about the likelihood that Apple would try to stop the Asahi project, those who are knowledgable are of the opinion that they would not.

However, as a Mac Studio M1 owner that has used Asahi as a daily driver for software development since the first release (originally Arch, later Fedora), I can confidently say that I could care less. By running the software I want to run far faster than macOS could on the same hardware, Asahi has saved me countless hours and made me far more productive. And I'm incredibly grateful for this tangible benefit, regardless of what happens in the future.

The *nix world is full of dark-but-fun terminology. Daemons run the system. New files get 666 (before the umask takes away unnecessary permissions). Parents kill their children before killing themselves. And sometimes you have to kill zombies.

I first played Crokinole when I was 9 years old at my grandmother's house with my cousins and was immediately hooked. That same day I remember telling my sister that it was a time machine - we started playing it at noon, and an hour later it was suddenly 6pm.

That makes sense, thank you.

The most interesting bit for me was "I won’t discuss the Apple case more than this brief outline since I’m ethically bound." This included a link to: https://www.theverge.com/authors/sean-hollister/archives/38

Did his wife sign an Apple NDA that applies to family members? Or does he not want to anger Apple out of fear of retaliation towards his wife? Either way, I don't see how the word "ethics" applies to either situation.

Ditto here. I loved their hardware from that era up until the early 2000s. I still have a few dozen systems from those years in my basement. I tried getting rid of them years ago using the Marie Kondo method, but they all SPARC joy...

It was nice to see the bit in the video about the Tadpole SPARCbook 3000XT. They are incredibly rare compared to Sun desktop workstations, but a lot of fun. I wrote about the 3000ST model: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coo...

It looks like Jeff Geerling is one of the few lucky people who actually got one so far (if others did, they aren't bragging about it on the Internet).

I ordered one the same day as Jeff back in July, but Arrow just sent me an update indicating that it will likely be several more weeks before it ships:

We are excited to have received some supply of the Snapdragon Development Kit for Windows from Qualcomm/Thundercomm and we know they are working hard to provide additional units as soon as possible. At this time, we expect more units to arrive in the coming weeks and will fulfill your order as soon as units become available.

As a reminder, initial orders had the purchase price reduced by 10%. If you still wish to receive these units as ordered, you need to do nothing.

If you would like to modify shipping terms, or even cancel your order based upon these changes contact us at websupport@arrow.com. Cancellations or shipping changes will receive a full refund, if applicable. To ensure timely processing, please include your original order number when contacting our customer support team.

I actually own one of these early Mac128k systems from Drexel: https://triosdevelopers.com/~jason.eckert/stuff/Mac128.JPG

From the serial, it was manufactured in February 1984, so Drexel must have planned this with Apple long before the January 1984 launch as noted in the article. The D is actually dyed into the case plastic itself and not painted on (I can see it from the inside too).

I bought it on eBay in 2006 for $50 new in box, never used (and it worked like new when I booted it up for the first time). The seller said she received it as part of her tuition, but was afraid of computers and never took it out of the box or turned it on. So it was likely that Drexel automatically added or included the $1000 cost to all tuition to make it mandatory as the article abstract suggests.

If there is such a thing as passing the BOFH torch, this is it. I'm sure someone here will thank you for mentioning this!

5400rpm laptop hard drives were notoriously sensitive to external force because of their thin metal construction and low power motor.

I remember having a MacBook Pro with a Toshiba 5400rpm hard drive that failed shortly after I rested it on an HVAC unit in our server closet (the HVAC unit happened to be the perfect height off the floor for doing work while standing). Just to be sure that was the cause, I had the drive replaced under warranty, did the same thing again and it died again after only a short while of using it on that HVAC unit.

After Apple replaced the drive a second time, I instead used a crash cart as a laptop desk and put a sign on the HVAC unit that read "Don't put laptops on here."

My dog (who recently passed away at the age of 13) used to do something similar. When she was a puppy, she spilled her food bowl and I swept it up with a broom. And since then, whenever we wanted her to eat her food, we'd just bring out the broom and start sweeping the kitchen floor - she'd immediately start eating her food, watching the broom nervously, because she's seen it eat her food before.

I think the main argument the author is making about why you should learn Linux is to better understand how your software is hosted in the cloud on Linux servers.

This is also why the Mobile Web Developer program at my college teaches Linux and Linux Web Hosting (including Apache and Wordpress) early on. We find this also helps students feel comfortable working within the macOS Terminal during all later courses, as well as with git commands.

I echo your sentiment in these regards. It is much easier to do certain tasks in Control Panel (Networking and Power Options being the two biggest examples of this in my opinion), while other things are easier in Settings.

I think the real problem is that Microsoft hasn't place enough focus on getting the Settings app correct from a UI/UX perspective like Apple did with their Settings app. There's nothing technical preventing them from offering a streamlined experience in Settings that allows you to easily configure advanced settings when necessary. It's just design effort on their part.

If they can get their Settings app to the point where nobody wants to use Control Panel anymore, then that's the right time to deprecate it.

At 46:10, David is showing an article on AI and UNIX from UnixWorld magazine in 1984 and subtly comments "Nothing new there..."

I explored Zed on macOS when it was posted here previously, and my impression was that it was a fast and fully-featured editor.

However, it's not as ubiquitous on *nix systems as editors such as vi/vim. And for those of us who work with various infrastructures and deployment constraints, it's much easier to focus our efforts on an editor that is also ubiquitous. And vi/vim fits that mould.

In other words, while Zed is a vi-able alternative, I doubt most vi/vim users will switch to it exclusively.

NetWare proliferated very rapidly during the late 80s and was common on most networks I used into the mid 1990s. Their file server product was stable and easy to configure, and worked very well with nearly every client out there using the fast IPX/SPX protocol.

However, by the mid 1990s it was clear that Windows NT and the TCP/IP protocol of the Internet would soon make Novell and NetWare fade into the sunset.

Fun fact: After selling out in the US, Colonel Sanders moved to Mississauga, Ontario, Canada to oversee the Canadian operations to ensure that the quality was of his liking.

When I grew up in the 80s in Canada, KFC was incredible, as were all of their items. At age 12, I scored a job working there too. During that time was when they announced their crispy chicken variant in Canada and "new taste" - but what we saw were new flour bags (we had to throw out the original flour bags), new oil in the cookers, new processes (no more soaking the chicken for 15 min before frying), and gravy that was made from a soup packet.

And while the chicken tasted the same, it was far more greasy and disgusting to handle compared to beforehand - and everyone noticed. I remember our manager telling us "Well I guess we now have to make it US style. But our prepared cost went from 11 cents per piece to 8 cents per piece after all bills are paid."

It's really hard for a company to die once they reach a certain size because they have the resources to pivot, even if the pivot seems a bit late.

The two most extreme examples of this are RIM (now BlackBerry) of the mid-2010s when it was clear the smartphone market was no longer viable for them, and Apple of the 1990s before the return of Steve Jobs and acquisition of NeXT. When asked what he'd do with Apple in 1997, Michael Dell famously said "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

But both companies are still alive today (Apple more than BlackBerry) because they were large enough before they had to pivot.

Other big tech companies like Microsoft were never close to death at any time. Sure, they had periods of stagnation where they had to pivot (as mentioned in this blog post), but it was more like a cold than a life threatening illness.

As someone who has lived in Git for the past decade, I also fail to see why Git is a crappy design. It's easy to distribute, works well, and there's nothing wrong with a tarball server.

There's also a great book on it too: https://www.amazon.ca/Losing-Signal-Spectacular-Rise-BlackBe...

They may have been powerful enough in size and monetary resources, but not in process, structure, or vision. RIM (later BlackBerry) was a tech company that wasn't really run like a tech company - it was run like an insurance company, with a full fledged bureaucracy governed by their legal department. And as a result, when competition from Apple and Google came, they couldn't pivot to compete beyond a snail's pace and faded into the sunset very quickly.

These features are all sage advice for any blog in my opinion, and this blog is a good example of one that is easy to follow as a result.

Regarding the Table of Contents feature, however, I believe this makes a big difference in larger blogs, but for medium sized or smaller blogs, it can be a distractor. I use Hugo as well for compositing my site, and find that using ample first level headings (e.g., # Heading name) for major components alongside a solid flow that contains visual graphics placed shortly after the heading offers an attractive and easy-to-navigate browsing experience.

This is incredibly impressive. I've always hoped that a powerful ARM-based BSD laptop would be a reality one day, but never thought it would happen.

Having a standard platform with support/documentation from the vendor could mean that Snapdragon Elite X could be a solid choice that is easy to support from an OS maintainer point of view.