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Comment Re:Wozniak - the real reason for Apple (Score 5, Informative) 44

Jobs gets all the accolades and fame but he was just a pushy sociopath in a suit, plenty of others could have done what he did. VERY few could have done what Wozniak did and its a damn shame that not many people outside of the tech world have heard of him.

That is false. Jobs and Wozniak actually are the yin and yang of Apple. Wozniak by himself, left to his own devices, would still be working at HP. Jobs by himself, would have been a has-been engineer. Jobs was actually competent as an engineer (unlike say, other "engineers" like Musk).

Jobs though, was more tuned into the business side of things than the engineering side of things, while Woz was the opposite.

Woz and Jobs got started by making a blue box - Jobs had read about them in the Esquire article, and Woz built one of the first digital blue boxes. Both of them went around Berkeley selling them to college students for $150 or so and they made a few thousand.

Jobs knew about computers, Woz built a computer. Woz was basically giving the Apple I away at the Homebrew Computer Club and it was one among dozens of others doing the same. Jobs had the business acumen to recognize he could do one better and sold it to a computer store and get the production of it going (requiring Woz to sell his HP-35 calculator). They'd build 10 (all they could afford), sell them and use the money to build 20 and so on.

Wpz designed the hardware. Jobs saw the potential and could leverage the confidence he had to not just sell it, but to get it produced - arranging the suppliers to give them 30 days credit.

These days it's a lot easier since if you want something built, China can handle the production if you meet the minimum order quantity. But back then, it's not like there was a huge electronics supply chain, production lines, or anything else.

Both Jobs and Woz were soldering Apple Is in that garage too - like I said, Jobs was an OK engineer, but he knew talent. Woz was an excellent engineer, but was happy at HP and didn't really have the desire to start his own company.

It's Yin and Yang - you need both, which is how Apple got started. Woz would likely have kept this computer as a nifty prototype then bought a Commodore when they came out a few years later whilst still at HP. Jobs would likely have drifted among various electronics companies (he was at Atari) once the crash happened.

You have to remember Jobs went and found NeXT after Macintosh got the Apple board to oust him. He sold his Apple stock and basically created NeXT. He used the earnings at NeXT to basically backstop Pixar (who was struggling and about to go under) and eventually fund Toy Story.

And he brought the second coming to Apple, recognizing talent in Jony Ives to design a computer so unique everyone knew what it was.

Doesn't excuse Jobs being an asshole, though. The only redeeming personal quality Jobs had is that he managed his RDF (reality distortion field) to push the people who work for him to do their best work. He was a pain to work for, but if you actually do good, he did reward you to encourage you to do more great work.

Comment Re:Early prototypes funded by HP policy (Score 3, Informative) 44

I didn't know about that before.

That's always a big factor in early experimenting. Who pays for all the components and test equipment? Even when the labour is free, if you don't have the R&D resources you're forever dead in the water.

It's odd because it's a pretty well known story. Wozniak loved experimenting and HP had a policy that lets engineers have access to HP's parts to produce a product. The only restriction was that HP had the right to your invention if they wanted it.

Wozniak presented HP management with the then Apple I computer, but they rejected it because they couldn't believe anything using a standard TV would meet HP's quality. The reason being that TVs from random manufacturers will have different visual quality and there was no way to control it.

Comment Re:Worth reading the book than seeing it (Score 1) 63

I found the book underwhelming. The Martian was a great book, and I read it long before I heard of the movie. Project Hail Mary I found was much more formulaic book and much less compelling a read than The Martian. I haven't read Artemis - in fact, I didn't know of it until recently.

It was my friend who introduced me to Project Hail Mary and said it wasn't as good. After getting my own copy at a local indie bookstore and reading it, I have to agree. It's a nice book, but honestly it lacked a lot of the surprise and wonder of The Martian.

Still, doesn't mean I don't want to see the movie, but i probably would get it on disc since I can't really justify seeing it in IMAX. Unless it was in 3D I suppose. 3D at home is basically dead which makes it impossible to see anything in 3D outside of theatres.

Comment Re:It's a start (Score 1) 55

I can imagine Apple later removing the "paste anyway" option and requiring you to go to Settings > Privacy to confirm the action, like how they've done with running apps downloaded off of the internet

It's a function implemented in the shipped terminal.app. If you use a third party terminal app, it won't have the protection. Chances are if you're using a third party terminal you're probably sophisticated enough to not blindly run shell commands

Comment Re:Use an Age-verified flag (Score 1) 192

Why is it the business of my OS vendor how old I am?

Because it's an alternative to websites asking your age.

The option is the website could verify your age. Or it could hand it off to the OS to handle that part. (Its not like there isn't precedent - things like passkeys and video decoding are passed from the browser to the OS).

If the OS handles it, great. The age verification gate is passed and you can do whatever you're allowed to.

Else, well, you then need to submit 2 pieces of ID to the website to prove your age where that personal information will be stored for an indefinite period of time on an insecure server waiting for someone to hack it.

OSes from Apple, Microsoft and Google pretty much know your age. This lets sites do the age verification check without you have to lift a finger. Of course, a certain other popular OS is not mentioned. For those wanting to "fight the system", chances are you'll just be like those using a VPN hitting CloudFlare protected sites. Either having to submit ID, or the site refusing you entry because they don't want to hold onto people's ID.

Of course, the better idea is to fix the legislation but that would likely push age verification back to the site and ID submissions. So maybe the better solution is to fix the legislation so sites don't have to check ages and just not do dark pattern stuff.

Comment Re:IBM: The eternal punching bag of Big Tech (Score 2) 17

You also forgot things like virtual memory - both in separating process address spaces and in using disk as memory, protected memory, memory management, and all leading up to virtual machines (partitions) letting you run multiple OSes on the same machine.

Some of IBM's latest mainframes are just wild in their I/O and interconnects. Even the CPU specs are just strange and off the charts.

About the most annoying this about IBM is that their names for stuff like this doesn't match what most people would call the technology today - they have a totally different set of jargon for computing that's basically completely different from what people who didn't grow up with IBM computing had. I know at least one difference that tripped people up - bit 0 is the LSB in basically all of modern computing. Escept it's the MSB for IBM CPUs, and it tripped up people when it made it to consumer stuff like PowerPC. I know the first few PowerPC boards we had needed a re-spin because the hardware engineer messed up the bit orders.

Comment Re:Damn⦠(Score 1) 45

Well no Switch 2 or PS5 for me. Going to stick with my Switch 1 until things settle down.

The Switch 2 is probably one you might want to get sooner rather than later (i.e., before Nintendo jacks up the price - they haven't yet).

Even if all you do with it is play Switch 1 games as memory bandwidth problems with the Switch 1 meant many games were stuck at sub-30 FPS and basically unplayable. The Switch 2 runs them at a buttery smooth 60 FPS locked which turns your games into something actually fun to play.

It's not just that the Switch 2 is faster, it's that the Switch 2 fixed a number of bottlenecks with the Tegra chip so Switch 1 games no longer ended up with sub 30 FPS or such.

The PS5 can be held off especially if you have a PS4 as there's nothing really that's PS5 only that isn't already on PS4.

But going from the Switch 1 to the Switch 2 is well worth the upgrade price especially as later games just couldn't do 30 FPS.

Comment Re:Chipped Aminals (Score 2) 35

Chips aren't magic. In fact, they're one of the worst things in the world, because they're extremely proprietary. As in each vet has to have a scanner capable of reading each manufacturer's chip

They can detect the presence of a chip, but if they don't have the right reader, it doesn't read. And that gets you an ID number, it has to be looked up in the manufacturer's database.

That's why when that chip manufacturer went bankrupt, they told everyone they had to get their pets re-chipped with a new one, because their chip will no longer have the database backing it up.

Also, if you move, you need to update the manufacturer with your new details - how many pets have chips but their details were not updated so it was not possible to contact the original owner.

Or even worse, because chips are proprietary, they simply couldn't read the chip at all. Each reader is for one manufacturer so vets typically only carry a couple of readers.

Chips do help, as do tattoos. But also make sure they have ID tags on their collars - dog licenses, rabies tags, and AirTags can all ID your pet provided they aren't separated from their collars. (Yeah, yeah, but it's possible to collar train your dog so they always wear them, and many of the nicer ones have built in AirTag pockets). They do make GPS trackers as well, but they're kind of large so it's only suitable for larger dogs.

There's plenty of ways to ID your pet. Use all of them - the dog license and rabies tags offer very up to date information on the owner since they're renewed annually. The AirTag can both let you leave contact information as well as help you track your pet. The chip and tattoo are there in case your pet manages to take off their collar (which they usually shouldn't if properly trained).

Comment Re:No wonder (Score 1) 79

Extremely unsafe reputationally, and extremely dubious in terms of profits.

Especially for an administration who's priority is to eliminate pornography as an evil to society and why the US isn't having more babies and getting divorced way too often.

It's in the book. Everything Trump has done has followed Project 2025 (and now Project 2026) book. Getting rid of pornographic materials is pretty much the first chapter.

Comment Re:Wine 11 (Score 1) 55

Well at least someone can get their 11th version of something running correctly.

Well, we technically skilled Windows 9 (the version after Windows 8 was Windows 10), so...

Then again, if you want to toss in the fact that the Windows NT line started at 3.5, or add in the various versions of Windows from MS-DOS and NT....

Comment Re:Wine 11 (Score 2) 55

MacOS was insanely brittle to write software for too, even by MS-DOS standards. The popular MS-DOS compilers had enough checks built-in to debug builds that if you had a pointer problem your program would just crash into the debugger, it was remarkable. 16-bit windows was pretty resilient too - if you had an out of bounds error and you had used GlobalAlloc your program would again just crash (allocations were rounded up to the next 16 bytes, so you might have a silent bug ... but the OS would not crash). On MacOS before Yellow Box your whole-ass computer would crash when you had a pointer problem.

Now, 16-bit Windows was nowhere near as bulletproof as 32-bit Windows, that is for sure. Resource leaks were not cleaned up for you and there wasn't a whole lot of sanity checking on structures passed to the OS. But it was far more bulletproof than MacOS that is for sure.

Win16 was resilient only because of the 386 which had a built in MMU. Classic MacOS ran without an MMU and didn't assume you had one. There were some features that required an MMU but the OS was written to not expect one. Heck, MacOS didn't really have the usermode-kernel mode functinality because that was broken in the 68000 (fixed in the 68010 - several instructions were not marked privileged when they should be)

Win16 in 386 enhanced mode had a whole pile of protections inherent in the 386 CPU which meant you could get some protections out there, though the dreaded "General Protection Fault" wasn't that far away.

Classic MacOS had none of that - no MMU, no userspace-kernel space separation (it ran in supervisor mode only). So a wild pointer can easily corrupt things.

It's why Apple had so many "next OS" projects from MkLinux (Mach kernel core with Linux around it - because at the time Linux didn't have a PowerPC port), Copland and others. It took them inheriting NextStep for them to actually move to something more robust, which was a Mach kernel with BSD.

The only reason MS-DOS was reliable was the damned segmentation of the 8086 meant your segment pointers had to be good and MS-DOS could be somewhat protected because of it. Anyone dealing with the memory map had a lot of fun with that. But it also meant a wild ass DS pointer would be more likely to corrupt your data segment than it would something MS-DOS needed. 68000 was a flat address space so a wild pointer could easily access anything. (Even worse were bad programming habits - the index registers were 32 bit, but only the lower 24 bits made it onto the address bus as the 68000 only had 24 address lines. Thus, people would use the upper 8 bits to store data with, including the Mac ROMs. That's what the "32-bit clean" meant in the MacOS days - none of the code you used would actually use the upper 8 bits of the index registers to store data so they could refer to a proper 32 bit address).

The amazing thing would be that Classic MacOS actually managed to run like that in 1999 and beyond (it took until OS X 10.2 or 10.3 when Apple stopped supporting dual booting back into Classic)

Comment Re:is the "lesson" (Score 3, Informative) 47

Kubermetes is like Docker. They're container systems. Basically they use Linux namespaces to let you run an independent userspace to your current userspace. This can have valuable benefits - like needing to run an ancient userspace for some tool on modern hardware (e.g., if you need an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS environment for some reason, it's basically impossible to run it on modern hardware without building your own kernel and stuff).

All Linux is doing is standard app level virtualization - you know the same protections that keep your web browser from interfering with your word processor.

Containers have their uses, and are far more lightweight than VMs since it's just a few additional Linux processes in the end (they all run on the host kernel natively). They are still vulnerable to the same inter-process attacks because to Linux, they're just another process running on the same machine. Kubernetes and Docker just are applications that help manage the Linux namespaces and virtual file systems

Comment Re:Next time... (Score 1) 117

Yeah but still fuck all the companies that make these things.
I've never had one and don't drink and drive but they're the same as the scammy prison phone companies and stuff.
"You deserve it" isn't some excuse to enrich a "private public partnership"

Well, you don't HAVE to get an interlock installed. The judge can easily just say you're not allowed to drive at all as the alternative.

It's an option to being forced to use Uber/Lyft or public transit.

I mean, sometimes the alternative is preferable - maybe you own a rare car and don't want some mechanic shove an interlock into it in the crudest way possible.

Judge has a lot of discretion. They could toss you in jail. They could revoke your driving privileges. They could let you drive but with an interlock. You often get to choose. They can't force an interlock on you (e.g., you don't want someone to modify your pride and joy), but you'll be stuck with the other options.

Quite a bit different from prison phones - you have no choice when using a prison phone. But you do have a choice if you want an interlock installed or to choose other options.

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