aard

Helsinki is getting out of the “burning stuff to make electricity” business. It used to have coal power plants - last ones closed down in 2023 and 2024. There are some dedicated plants for district heating still, but also there’s the trend to move away from burning stuff.

The space used by the smallest solar charger I’ve seen on Amazon seems to be similar to 6 or more batteries in the format the N900 was taking - so if you look at space, slow charging from solar charger, and reliance on sun conditions taking individual batteries seems to be the better option for a few days hike. It’s also easier to stow individual batteries to wherever you still have space left.

With my N900 I used to travel with 6 to 10 charged batteries to have a few days of runtime. Things got better now with powerbanks - but for something like hiking just carrying a few spares would still be smaller and lighter.

There was the 386DX and significantly cheaper SX - first was full 32 bit, second just 32bit instruction set with smaller external busses.

Then you could add the math coprocessor. And of course RAM and disks were expensive. 16MB RAM was way above normal for that time.

Ukraine took hundreds of prisoners so far, and a fair share of that probably are conscripts. That already is a bit of a mess he’ll have to solve.

x230 with x220 keyboard also is pretty nice - but unfortunately no longer suitable as main notebook. As nothing useful came out of lenovo after that, others are even worse, nobody has a decent trackpoint and sensible amount of RAM only exist for macs I ended up with one of those for work few months ago.

Pretty much same here - I kept an x230 alive until I had to accept earlier this year that it just is bad for overall productivity, and ended up getting a macbook. None of the newer thinkpads are good - and they’re still one of the less bad manufacturers.

There’s also enough stuff I don’t like about the mac - but the current keyboard is one of the better notebook keyboards available right now, and if you want long battery life, lots of RAM and a lot of CPU power available in a compact device they’re the only manufacturer currently offering that.

I’m not super familiar with MacOS, but do you know if Gatekeeper or XProtect run at ring 0?

Gatekeeper does mainly signature checking. XProtect does signature checking on an applications first launch. Both of those things would be pretty stupid to implement in ring 0, so I’m pretty sure they are not.

If they do run at ring 0, would you consider that anticompetitive?

No, as they’re not doing any active monitoring. They’re pretty much the “you downloaded this file from the internet, do you really want to run it?” of MacOS.

I’m almost certain Apple will move or did move to depreciate kernel extensions. Which means it would be the same situation Microsoft wanted to force as you described.

That is indeed the case, but I’m not aware of any Apple products relying on being a kernel extension. Apple is facing action from the EU for locking down devices from device owners, though - mainly applying to phones/tablets. On Macs you can turn pretty much everything off and do whatever you want.

The other argument with Defender is you could at least have a choice to use it or not.

Without providing a proper API Defender (both the free one, and the paid one offering more features) would be able to provide more features than 3rd parties. Microsoft also wouldn’t have an incentive to fix the APIs, as bugs don’t impact them.

The correct way forward here is introducing an API, and moving Defender to it as well - and recent comments from Microsoft point in that direction. If they don’t they’ll probably be forced by the EU in the long run - back then it was just a decision on fair competition, without looking at the technical details: Typically those rulings are just “look, you need to give everybody the same access you have, but we’ll leave it up to you how to do it”. Now we have a lot of damage, so now another department will get active and say “you’ve proven that you can’t make the correct technical decision, so we’ll make it for you”.

A recent precedent for that would be the USB-C charger cable mandate - originally this was “guys, agree on something, we don’t care what”, which mostly worked - we first had pretty much everything micro USB, and then everything USB-C. But as Apple refused the EU went “look, you had a decade to sort it out, so now we’re just telling you that you have to use USB-C”

That’s bullshit. Microsoft wanted to force others to use an API, while keep using kernel level access for Defender (which for enterprise use is a paid product). That’s text book anti competitive. Nobody ever had a problem of Microsoft rolling out and enforcing an API for that if they restrict their own security products to that API as well.

It helps not having a computer with specs from a decade ago.

It should work - possible that it won’t let you create a one disk raid 0, but creating a one disk raid 1 and then converting it to a two disk raid 0 should word. It’s been years since I played with a pure raid 0 (don’t see much sense in them), but managed conversion back then.

If your install is using LVM (which anything installed over a bit more than a decade should be) you can set up the new second drive as a RAID with a missing device, add it as additional PV, use pvmove to move all PEs to the RAID, remove the old PV, and now add that disk to the RAID.

I did not sign with them after I had some issues with the contract provided, and the resulting interactions with my future manager. I’d say at least for someone from Europe the company culture is less than ideal from that encounter.

AMD keeps some older generations in production as their budget options - and as they had excellent CPUs for multiple generations now you also get pretty good computers out of that. Even better - with some planning you’ll be able to upgrade to another CPU later when checking chipset lifecycle.

AMD has established by now that they deliver what they promise - and intel couldn’t compete with them for a few generations over pretty much the complete product line - so they can afford now to have the bleeding edge hardware at higher prices. It’s still far away from what intel was charging when they were dominant 10 years ago - and if you need that performance for work well worth the money. For most private systems I’d always recommend getting last gen, though.

This doesn’t have anything to do with user control - modern windows versions need drivers to be WHQL signed to get that kind of access. Alternatively you’ll need to enable developer mode on your system, and install your own developer certificate into its keyring for running own code, which has its own drawbacks.

Crowdstrike is implemented as a device driver - but as there is no device Microsoft could’ve argued that this is abusing the APIs, and refused the WHQL certification. Microsofts own security solution (Defender) also is implemented as a device driver, though, and that’s what the EU ruling is about: Microsoft needs to provide the same access they’re using in their own products to competitors. Which is a good thing - but if Microsoft didn’t have Defender, or they’d have done it without that type of access it’d have been fully legal for them to deny the certification for Crowdstrike.

Both MacOS and Linux have the ability to run the type of thing that requires those privileges on Windows in an unprivileged process - and on newer Linux versions Crowdstrike is using that (older versions got broken by them the same way they now broke Windows). So Microsoft now trying to blame the EU can be seen as an attempt to keep people from questioning why Microsoft didn’t implement a low privilege API as well, which would’ve prevented this whole mess.

I have a 96 core one. While it’ll be fine as a desktop for compiling I’d stick with an AMD system.

The devkit has 6 memory channels, and you’ll want to fill them all - there’s a surprisingly high performance penalty if you don’t. Even then, compiling a code base which could be spread over hundreds of cores is still significantly slower on the ampere compared to my old 3970x.

The annoying aspect from somebody with decades of IT experience is - what should happen is that crowdstrike gets sued into oblivion, and people responsible for buying that shit should have an epihpany and properly look at how they are doing their infra.

But will happen is that they’ll just buy a new crwodstrike product that promises to mitigate the fallout of them fucking up again.

One thing I find very amusing about this is that AMD used to have a reputation for pulling too much power and running hot for years (before zen and bulldozer, when they had otherwise competetive CPUs). And now intel has been struggling with this for years - while AMD increases performance and power efficiency with each generation.

It’s already in the name - XDG stands for X Desktop Group (nowadays freedesktop), which works on interoperability for desktop environments. In a pure shell environment (or even if you’re not running a full desktop) none of the XDG variables are defined, and especially in shell environments the default fallbacks specified by XDG are not necessarily what the operator would expect.

Probably half the entries in that list are not GUI apps, and XDG doesn’t apply (though some still support it). For some others there (like emacs) XDG is used if it exists.