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Comment Well yes, obviously (Score 1) 108

Linux does typically require more RAM than Windows. I mean Linux is a full operating system including network stack and multitasking, while Windows essentially is a shell for DOS... with some added benefits like having a GUI-Toolkit that supports multiple applications running at once due to cooperative multitasking.

So while your typical Windows system was sold with 4 Megs of RAM, a Linux system typically isn't usable with less than 8 Megs of RAM.

Of course this is now largely irrelevant as RAM is fairly cheap. You can literally have a machine with multiple Gigabytes of RAM, way more than himem.sys would support. (the limit is at 1 Gig, BTW)

Comment Are you sure that is true? (Score 0) 47

It seems to me that many people confuse "Apple Computer" with "Apple" since they have a similar logo, one with a rainbow apple, one with a plain apple, and worked in tangential areas, one sold computers, the other one sold computerized consumer products.

I mean "Apple Computer" had an excellent reputation as treating their customers as equal, providing them with all necessary documentation for fixing and modifying their computers in any way. In contrast "Apple" today doesn't even let you run non-approved software without going through their hoops.

You might as well say that we are at 58 years of Apple, since Apple Records was founded in 1968. They too have an apple as their logo.

Comment That would be extremely stupid (Score 1) 23

Both Intel and AMD need each other. They both sell the CPUs for virtually the only open computing architecture there is the "IBM-PC"-derived "PC". That architecture is what's running all serious workloads as it is currently the only standardized architecture. For ARM you need to port every operating system to every SoC individually. on "PC" you just pop in your USB-stick and can run the same OS image, regardless who made it. There are only minor incompatibilities which can be resolved by checking the PCI bus for what hardware you have there.

This is an important market. If the number of companies making those CPUs went down to 1, there would surely be governmental interventions. Either in making sure this company works, or by moving away from them. That's why Intel needs AMD and AMD needs Intel. If one of them falls, the other one will get big problems.
Yes, such interventions are not that likely, but just think about Microsoft, they sold BASIC interpreters and PC operating systems for a while and had a fairly big market share. Even though that was nowhere near an important monopoly, there were serious considerations of splitting up the company.

Comment We have all seen Mozilla (Score 3, Interesting) 97

Giving a project top much money is a fairly easy way to kill it. Look at Mozilla, for example.

For years it swam in insane amounts of money. Since they cannot simply put that much money onto a bank-account, they reasonably did all kinds of non-browser related things with it. Since software development kinda doesn't need much classical management, the managers focused on those areas. A Mozilla manager didn't need to care for the browser, as that is managed by technical people.
However once that source of money has dried up, you still have the management, which will, obviously, first cut funding for the browser part... eliminating the path to more sustainable ways of funding.

If instead Firefox was a true "Free Software" project, this would have gone differently. Whatever money they needed would have come in by lots of small donations. They would have had limited developer resources which may have helped keeping web standards less complex. Maybe we would even have had a better web where things like Passkeys wouldn't rely on Javascript.

Comment Really great book (Score 2) 39

It combines 2 things, very good portraits of the people designing computers, and very good "bird's eye views" of how computers work. Particularly the later is great as the author managed to distill the core of each concept into something even a lay-person can swallow and understand. It's didactical simplification to the point and not beyond it. So what he says is stays correct, only ignoring things that are not important.

Comment It could get much worse (Score 1) 159

Considering text generators mostly work for things you'd have "copied of StackOverflow" before, I fear that this might lead to more and more boilerplate code. We already saw this with advanced development systems in languages like Java, where you often have more boilerplate than actual code.

I mean we keep seeing more and more effort being put into the same trivial code we've written for many decades now. Generative AI will likely only make that problem worse. Probably good programmers, now called 10x engineers, who just write short and efficient code, will be called 100x or 1000x engineers, since all the rest might have gotten even less efficient.

Comment It's not like they need to justify their choices (Score 0) 17

I mean, it's been clear for many years now that app stores do not care about malware. You can find many kinds of software that, even by the definitions of the 1990s, would be classified as malware. App stores contain anything from adware via DRM, and third party tracking to software dedicated to stealing your attention.

Comment Well not really (Score 1) 226

I mean for the Windows world the bigger "shock" probably is the declining quality of Windows. Apple hasn't exactly been in the "premium" segment for decades, for example in the 1990s when the "Desktop Publishing" revolution arrived the main claim was that a Macintosh was much cheaper than "something proper".

Now that Laptop from Apple isn't even particularly cheap. It's stripped and locked down almost to the point of a Chromebook. It still cost more than a regular refurbished laptop with better specs.

Comment Re:This constant assumption that dark matter is ri (Score 1) 71

Most of it is aliens flying around in stealth spaceships. We can't spot them, except that they haven't figured out a way to hide their mass.

So galaxies with more DM are more technologically developed than the others. In this all-DM galaxy they must have used up almost everything else to build ships.

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