I rarely use the power button. Maybe after a power outage and I shut down the machine before the UPS dies, doing a DFU restore, or when adding an Apple Keyboard which requires tapping the power button as part of the authentication process. Or, if there is a hard shutdown for any reason, I hold the power button to go into recovery mode, and then go through each attached disk and run a fsck on it. (Technically isn't needed, since APFS is a COW filesystem, but it gives me peace of mind to know that there isn't any weird damage somewhere, and in the rare cases there is damage that can't be fixed, evacuate all data from that drive, format it, and move it back.)

For me, it doesn't really matter. Plus, how small the new Mac Mini is, it isn't too difficult to reach and hold it for the times it is needed.

This is where being able to turn CO2 into a fuel comes in handy. If one can collect more fuel than batteries, even with a 30% loss, this is a lot better than just having the electricity not be used.

However, I wish there were a better fuel than methane. Methane is corrosive, and not good for mechanical parts. It would be nice if it would be turned into something like propane, isopropyl alcohol, gasoline, or diesel, which are being done, and VW/Audi already has synthetic gasoline being worked on. Synthetic gasoline would go a long way in taking off the pressure of oil supply lines, and keep availability up. Since there is no sulfur in CO2, making diesel from that would get a pure fuel that wouldn't need as much complex and fail-prone emissions.

Even hydrogen comes to mind, but ideally, a fuel that is easily transported. Propane, isopropyl alcohol, even ethanol are easy to transport and store.

QubesOS is a good implementation on how it should be done on the desktop.

I'd like to see iOS do this as well. What would be really nice is a total separation of profiles, where I can have one profile for work stuff, one for general social media, one for private items (banking), and so on. This way, each VM would not just be separate, but could be encrypted separately, so if someone is on their home profile, and their phone gets stolen, it won't affect their work or other profiles, as those would be using a different fscrypt key for each.

Perhaps, at the end of life, all stuff about the NAS should be made open source, with a path to unlock the bootloader and install unsigned or custom signed firmware, so the NAS can still be in service? Maybe something like that would be reasonable.

Since the last rev of the Intel Mac Pro... no, not the trashcan, but the one after that with the cheese grater case and the wheels, Apple has used a configuration with the SSD controller on the motherboard and the NAND chips separate. This works with Apple Silicon, and has helped as a relatively fast way to evacuate RAM pages to disk.

You could replace the SSDs on the cheese grater Mac Pro, but it took a DFU restore to do so. Mainly because the SepOS Secure Enclave is a part of the SSD controller, and replacing the NAND board means the encryption keys stay on the machine. One DFU restore later which will generate new keys, TRIM and format the NAND chips, and they are working, although this means the data on the old SSDs will never be readable again [1].

Maybe this is a good thing, because moving to a decent amount of fast internal storage on the Mini is expensive [2]... the most expensive part of the machine, and perhaps Apple will offer upgrades, so one can go in at 1-2 TB, then after a year or two, go for a storage upgrade. The razor and blade school of marketing does work, and even though Apple has had success with forcing people to pay up front for the high end stuff, in a recession, people can't afford that, but they can generally afford to expand a machine over time. I'd probably guess that if Apple offered CPU/RAM/DASD/GPU upgrades, they probably would make more money than forcing people to buy new hardware.

Guessing, I'd probably say Apple's separation of the drive controller and NAND flash is more about getting speed to flush RAM to disk, with FDE encryption built in.

Overall, I hope Apple keeps the NAND chips on a removable card. This way, when it comes time to decommission machines in commercial and government, one just needs to toss that board into the shredder, as opposed to the entire machine, to comply with data destruction requirements.

[1]: Wish Apple could provide some type of adapter and controller so removed SSD modules can be used as an external, Thunderbolt SSD, just so they don't go to waste.

[2]: Of course, if one is willing to sacrifice 1/2 to 1/3 of the performance, there is always using a TB3/TB5 SSD and boot from that, or for lightweight tasks, maybe even a USB 3.2 SSD would be okay.

The ironic thing is that in the past, iMacs had a display passthrough mode. It would be nice if one could use iMacs with this, so they can be used by another PC as monitors. Maybe even expose the GPU, so it can be used as an eGPU as well.

USB-C has sort of standardized things, but as many people mention, color coding cables is a must. However, the big issue with USB-C is that it can only deliver so many amps through those little wires, even going to 48 volts. With how much wattage laptops are demanding, we are going to need more than 240 watts of power coming in, so even at 48 volts and five amps, that is still not enough.

The next USB connector likely will need either more wires, a heavier gauge, or both. Maybe even some way of telling if the integrity of the wire has been violated so if a dog chews on the wire, they won't get zapped if voltages are pushed past 48 volts.

Alternatively, we may need a connector similar to USB Micro B which expands the connector and adds more power leads. Or maybe a standardized (hah) barrel or other connector that can handle a high amount of insertion/removal cycles in addition to USB.

One university I went to had multiple water chilling plants. They pumped in chilled water, and the HVAC systems in the buildings used heat exchangers.

Maybe this would be an option. A water chilling plant is probably a lot better in terms of scale for removing heat than a ton of compressors, similar to how a power grid is a lot better at economies of scale than everyone running a portable generator for their main source of power.

What would be ideal is a system that had heat pump for the home, and could do the job by itself, but in general, the main cooling would be done via the water chillers. This way, if something failed, it wouldn't cause everyone in the neighborhood to have uninhabitable homes in the heat, but allowing the water chiller to do its job. Same reason why people have generators on standby.

For heating, same thing, except heated water pipes.

Thanks. Argon2 is, IIRC, the default for KeePass now, and is pretty simple to use:

echo -n "hashthis" | argon2 "usethisassalt" -l 32 -t 1000

Now the issue becomes how many iterations, the -t option. the above completes in about two seconds on my rickety old ARM CPU.

This sure beats doing a FOR or WHILE loop running a bunch of sha512 rounds.

The fact that bcrypt, which is generally held in high regards, has this issue is not a good one. The limit is 72 characters, so the quick and dirty workaround would be to hash the username+password using sha256 or even better, SHA-512, and use something other than hex to allow more than four bits per character. From there, use the bcrypt algorithm as usual.

However, going to pbkdf2, argon, or yescrypt just seems like the best solution overall... algorithms that don't have this issue. However using a hash function to guarentee that the input will always be a certain length no matter what might be a good idea, preferably sha512, if not sha256.

Sorry, but voice activation is not a new thing. My ride has it. It takes far longer to tell it to call someone than it does to just twist the "recent caller" dial, and hit the OK button. Even then, I'm not often calling people from the car.

Sorry, but I don't want to have to beg my car repeatedly to do a function by voice, like it is a toddler about to have a tantrum. There is a reason why car UI/UX design exists, and part of it is to be able to set something, and ensure that whatever is set works right.

Just when you think car makers can't get any worse than 100% touchscreens that force you to look away from the road in order to do something basic, someone has to come to the table and one-up it. At least some car makers are getting back to buttons and dials.

Why not just give people what is desired -- buttons and dials, then throw the voice control in. Best of all worlds.

I'd say it depends on what is agreed on beforehand. Both states suck, either a firewall running unpatched, or a firewall rendered inoperative because of that.

The solution, after the firewall goes EOL, open source everything. This way, at least either the client, or someone can maintain the older devices so they have some semblance of use.

However, in some cases security is critical over functionality, but, IMHO, part of the agreement might be having the service and update plan also covers replacement equipment. When the firewall nears EOL, the company ships new hardware and an easy migration path, has an app that loads on the old firewall to make a copy of all config data, and if the new firewall has new configurations, ask the admin what should be turned on, copy the config data to a SD card, then from there, unrack the old firewall, stuff in the new one, insert the SD card, boot the new one, it it would load the old config and be running exactly where the old one left off, and if there are new features that were not configured, they would be disabled. Because part of the migration is configuring the new stuff on the old firewall, it ensures that if the new firewall has support for something, it is dealt with before the new firewall ever comes online. If a company buys Pure Storage, this is pretty much what happens there. Every few years, Pure sends replacement hardware, and one adds nodes, waits for them to sync, removes the old nodes, ensuring that the Pure Storage array always is kept in a recent, non-obsolete state.

Even with drones, there are advances like the metal "tents" being welded onto the top which are helping to mitigate blasts from drones, which are having some effect. Eventually, as laser weaponry catches up, tanks will have some defense against drones, if not perhaps having their own drone swarm themselves in the air to automatically intercept anything coming their way.

Tanks are not going anywhere. Yes, drones used to have the upper hand for a brief bit, but that combat advantage is narrowing. Armies and divisions learn fast, and it likely will level off, especially when tanks start getting more sophisticated and real autonomous AI hits the battlefield to control drone swarms, and other autonomous defensive mechanisms, perhaps including decoy tanks.

I have been at companies/orgs looking to get away from VMWare for about a decade now. What VMWare brings to the table is the best control plane out there, solid scalability, ease of use for their clustered filesystem (VMFS is a heck of a lot easier to deal with than GlusterFS), and a number of features, like fault tolerance where a VM can keep going even if the hardware it is running on falls over, as another shadow VM took over.

I'm seeing people move to Hyper-V, Proxmox, and XCP-NG. Some are moving to Nutanix, but that is more of a hardware and software stack than a virtualization platform.

Proxmox is getting there. It has been hamstrung for years by lack of third party development, but Veeam, Nakivo, and other backup program makers are supporting it, so it is starting to emerge as a solid rival to VMWare on some fronts.

We really don't need to stick children back in the mines, or humans for that matter, especially as most mining is done via robot. Lose a mining robot in a mine? Insurance claim. Lose a group of workers? The PR may hit world news. We really can't go backwards, and start "creating" jobs by having laborers come in and toil over crops in the field when a combine already does the work. All what will happen is that when companies are forced to hire people like this, offshore companies that are not burdened will win out, causing things to get even worse.

I'm generally not a fan of mindless capitalism, but in this case, getting the kids out of the coal mines and leaving dangerous and deadly jobs up to robots has been a good thing overall.