jasoneckert

I ran Windows 2000 Beta for years on my DEC Alphastations (4 Miatas and 4 Digital Ultimate Workstations). It ran flawlessly, and so did Office 97 for Alpha.

CD-ROMs for both Windows 2000 Beta and Office 97 (for Alpha systems) came in our monthly TechNet subscription packages.

This comment made me smile, as my preference is opposite - I prefer RPM-based distros and primarily use Fedora on everything (including Fedora Asahi Remix on an M1 Ultra Mac Studio), but occasionally use Ubuntu and Debian on some of my cloud instances.

As a result, I understand the desire to stick with a particular distribution that we're already familiar with - it's less work, and less having to remember subtle differences in structure. But when there is a time where I'm forced to use a new distro (e.g., when Asahi was first released exclusively as an Arch Linux ARM distro), I never regret the small learning experiences involved :-)

The height of hackathons was back in the early to mid 2010s in my opinion. That was the height of the indie game scene and mobile app goldrush - and there were plenty of sponsors willing to contribute real $$, prizes, and swag - all of which were necessary to build the excitement around the event.

I ran a plethora of these events at my college for developer and game developer students (Great Canadian Appathon, Global Game Jam, and numerous Microsoft-centric hackathons for WinPhone7 and Win10). The sponsorship, prizes, catering (massive food budget!), and swag was insane. All the college really contributed was the space and staff to run the 48-hour weekend events, caffeinated soap for the washrooms, and the occasional medical attention (we had a few NOS-induced nosebleeds the year Coca-Cola was one of the sponsors).

But what was developed during these intense hackathons was nothing short of spectacular, and the collaborative skill-building was massive. I still hear from former students who attended them during that time that they consider them as one of the best experiences of their lives.

I lived through this timeline, and with ThinkPads from different eras. Throughout, they were always considered in my science and computer science circles as "premium" laptops with excellent build quality, keyboards, and performance. The performance of my latest one (a P-series) always surprised me given the hardware specs.

I've used vi (and later vim and neovim) since the 1980s, and really enjoyed reading this site. I had no idea there were so many vi-able alternatives!

Several organizations in my area of Canada (including ours) have this as a directive right now too, and are actively exploring options for ensuring data is hosted in Canada or Europe (or have already begun or completed their migrations).

Love the confidence of launching a teaser page with zero specs. I’m not emotionally prepared to be marketed to before I know how much RAM it has.

Google basically said “here’s a mysterious glowing rectangle” and expected us spec junkies not to immediately start clawing at the walls for a datasheet, and losing sleep for weeks on end until we get them.

I'm reminded of a speech Barack Obama gave many years ago about the difficulty and necessity of finding a "happy medium" between protecting individual liberties and providing law enforcement with the abilities to provide security in a digital world.

I think the topic itself is difficult for everyone involved - there will likely be a lot of uproar for many years as we get closer to finding this happy medium.

Both Windows 11 systems are configured with the “High performance” power plan, as are the two Windows Server VMs. In hindsight, I should have included this detail explicitly in the original post instead of only alluding to it.

Both systems have DDR5 soldered to the mainboard and NVMe SSDs (the Intel system has a faster Samsung model compared to the Foresee model in the Snapdragon system).

I intentionally left out screenshots of the output for a couple of reasons:

1) They’d distract from the main point (I wasn’t aiming to write a benchmarking post), and

2) They can be misleading, since results will vary across ARM hardware and even between Snapdragon X Elite variants.

Instead, I included the PowerShell snippets so anyone interested can reproduce the results themselves.

For a rough sense of the outcome: the Snapdragon VM outperformed the Intel VM by ~20–80%, depending on the test (DNS ~20%, IIS ~50%, all others closer to ~80%).

I think we'll see this happen over time in all tools - individual AI brands replaced by generic AI icons.

The real question is this: While the floppy disk became the standard "Save" icon, what will eventually become the standard "AI functionality" icon?

Thanks for this interesting post - I've been showing it to co-workers to get their reactions, which was incredibly entertaining for me!

Co-worker 1: Interesting. I wonder if that voids the warranty. It's Apple you know.

Co-worker 2: May Jobs have mercy on their soul...

Co-worker 3: Not a bad idea. But not sure if that would cause problems with structural integrity of the laptop, like if you drop it or something.

Co-worker 4: The only downside I see is that you can no longer say "Hey, that's a sharp-looking laptop!"

Of course I don't mind - please do! :-)

This is great, thanks! It sort of feels like browsing for gems in a used bookstore and stumbling onto authentic, personal writing. I'm always up for that, and plan on spending plenty of time exploring the list.

I’ve submitted mine as well - cheers!

It's a nice animation, but for such a significant anniversary - and from a company like Apple - I expected a lot more hoopla and content. This could indicate that there wasn't a lot of planning involved, that it wasn't a high-priority item, or that Apple had enough people with time to focus on it.

It's almost as if someone near the end of a meeting said "Oh crud, we've got to do something to acknowledge our 50th anniversary - can someone put something together, and quick?"

For me, drawing the line as to when you will leverage AI and when you won't comes down to a quote from Kurt Vonnegut: "Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."

Art is where I choose to draw the line, for both ideation and content generation. That work report I leveraged AI to help flush out isn't art, but my personal blog is, as is anything I must internalize (that is thoroughly understand and remember). This is why I have the following disclaimer on my blog (and yes, the typo on this page is purposeful!): https://jasoneckert.github.io/site/about-this-site/

As someone who came from the SGI O2/Octane era when high-end workstations were compact, distinctive, and sexy, I’ve never really understood the allure of the Mac Pro, with the exception of the 2013 Mac Pro tube, which I owned (small footprint, quiet, and powerful).

For me, aesthetics and size are important. That workstation on your desk should justify its presence, not just exist as some hulking box.

When Apple released the Mac Studio, it made perfect sense from a form-factor point-of-view. The internal expansion slots in the M2 Mac Pro didn't make any sense. It was like a bag of potato chips - mostly air. And far too big and ugly to be part of my work area! I'm surprised that Apple didn't discontinue it sooner.

This was exactly my first thought when I saw the title. And after reading the contents of the blog, it's pretty clear that ARM is laser focused on getting a piece of their customer's cake by competing with them. This is likely why they are riding the AI hype train hard with their ill-suited name (AGI).

Unfortunately for them, I think hardware vendors will see past the hype. They'll only buy the platform if it is very competitively priced (i.e., much cheaper) since fortune favours long-lived platforms and organizations like Apple and Qualcomm.

In short, this reads like a mix of valid historical pain points and outdated assumptions.

The post frames Wayland security as “you can’t do anything,” but that’s a misunderstanding. Even under X11, any app can log keystrokes, read window contents, and inject input into other apps. Wayland flips this to isolation-by-default: explicit portals/APIs for screen capture, input, etc.

Moreover, the performance argument is weak and somewhat contradictory. The author claims there is no clear performance win, and that it's sometimes slower and hardware improvements make it irrelevant. But Wayland reduces copies and avoids X11 roundtrips (architectural win). Actual performance depends heavily on compositor + drivers, and I've found that modern hardware has HUGE performance improvements (especially Intel, AMD, and Apple Silicon via the Asahi driver).

The NVIDIA argument is also dated. Sure, support was historically bad due to EGLStreams vs GBM, but this has improved significantly in recent driver releases.

Many cited issues are outdated too. OBS, clipboard, and screen sharing issues are now mostly (if not entirely) solved in the latest GNOME/KDE.

I've been using Wayland exclusively on Fedora and Fedora Asahi Remix systems for many years alongside Sway (and occasionally GNOME and KDE). Adoption has accelerated in many distros, and XWayland for legacy apps is excellent (although I believe using the word "legacy" here would be a trigger word for the author ;-).

There's no stagnation here... what we're looking at is a slow migration of a foundational layer, which historically always takes a decade or more in the Linux world.

I actually do something similar on my personal site using this note that includes a purposeful typo: https://jasoneckert.github.io/site/about-this-site/

I'm hoping people catch that typo after reading "every single word, phrase, and typo (purposeful or not)" and smiled every time I've had someone post a PR with a fix for it (that I subsequently reject ;-)

God that machine was terrible - underpowered and undercooled, which led to frequent overheating and component failures. When I first started at Sun, they put one of those on my desk as a joke on my first day (it was quickly replaced so that I could get some real work done).

Certain companies are well-known for their legal teams. Qualcomm is one (often described as a legal company that employs some engineers). Nintendo is the other.

As a result, Nintendo's legal team is far more likely to ensure they get refunded, and quickly. They could provide a template for others to follow.

macOS is a capable UNIX, but it's not Linux - which has since become the standard platform for most cloud/web/ML development.

As a developer myself who uses Fedora Asahi Remix as my daily driver, I can also tell you that Linux runs 2x faster (often much more) for everything compared to macOS - on the same hardware! And that performance gain is also important for my work :-)

ARM's failed lawsuit with Qualcomm revealed these same ambitions, albeit in a much more negative light: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42475228

After following that drama, it's difficult to see ARM as anything but a greedy profiteer.

Imagine if Fedora locked you out of vi because your Red Hat account had an issue.

The unsettling part of stories like this isn’t “Microsoft bad,” it’s the growing assumption that local tools should be downstream of remote identity systems. A text editor is about as offline and fundamental as software gets, yet it’s now possible for account state, sync bugs, or policy enforcement to make it inaccessible on your own machine.

This is where non-macOS UNIX and Linux systems draw the line - if it’s installed locally and you have permission, it runs. Cloud services can enhance that experience (backups, sync, collaboration) but they don’t get veto power over whether vi opens.

When that boundary erodes, we start to see our systems as thin clients, instead of full local OSes, as the author mentions.

If Linux had a revenue stream and model, this would make sense. But the style of open-source is to make good software, and let others gravitate to you as a result.

This is great!

I did something similar, but with GitHub Discussions because my blog is hosted on GitHub Pages and composited with Hugo, and I wanted all components to run as close as possible to one another: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/github-discussions-blog...

I don't think that's inconsistent - all but one member of NATO share the same values currently, and it's important they work together to resolve the current annexation threats from the US. That particular sign can be taken off later, if necessary.

With WSL2, Windows can run a real Linux kernel and Linux apps with tight integration into the graphical, network, and storage subsystems.

In that configuration, I guess you could say it's already a Linux distribution.