So probably there will be some systems other than Linux that do use Rust

There’s one called Redox that is entirely written in Rust. Still in fairly early stages, though. https://www.redox-os.org/

In theory, phones would be cheaper if they had longer shelf life.

Similarly, we don’t need new cars every year, but the beast must be fed, right? Right?!

We’re comparing it to gen 1 to emphasize how far it is from being competitive.

Not really new; this has been the case with all the Tensor chips. I kind of assumed Google was going to step up their game at some point, but I don’t think Samsung can produce chips on par with TSMC. Google is switching to TSMC for next year’s Tensor 5, so maybe we’ll see a big jump then.

That said, I don’t think it’s a deal-breaker. I’m running a Pixel 7 and it’s “fine”. The Pixel 6 had bad throttling/overheating problems, but the 7 and 8 are better. We’ll see what the Big Problem is with the 9 series. There’s always something.

Installing Linux after Windows should be fine without disconnecting drives.

The reverse is troublesome. Microsoft’s installer is all too happy to shit on your drives, even the ones you’re not using for installation. But Linux installers are much more friendly to dual-booting and all kinds of complex setups.

What part of this is misinformation, exactly? Seems pretty well-supported.

I keep seeing this claim, but never with any independent verification or technical explanation.

What exactly is listening to you? How? When?

Android and iOS both make it visible to the user when an app accesses the microphone, and they require that the user grant microphone permission to the app. It’s not supposed to be possible for apps to surreptitiously record you. This would require exploiting an unpatched security vulnerability and would surely violate the App Store and Play Store policies.

If you can prove this is happening, then please do so. Both Apple and Google have a vested interest in stopping this; they do not want their competitors to have this data, and they would be happy to smack down a clear violation of policy.

I agree completely.

I understand the motivation here — apps that lack location permission shouldn’t be able to get backdoor access to your location via your camera roll. That makes sense, because you know damn well every spyware social media company would be doing that if they could.

But the reverse is also true: apps that legitimately need to read photos and access all their metadata shouldn’t need to be granted full location access.

I have a different Boox product, the low-end Poke Lite (I think version 4?).

Pros:

• E-paper display is easy on the eyes
• Customizable backlight temperature and brightness
• Runs arbitrary Android apps
• Battery for days
• Can install open-source reading apps like Librera
• Still receiving software updates after a few years

Cons:

• Only runs Android 11
• Installing Google Play requires jumping through some weird hoops, because it’s not Google certified. I recommend using F-Droid instead, or using a throwaway google account to avoid this security liability.
• Built-in apps kind of suck in general
• Home screen strongly pushes their own ecosystem, shoving regular Android apps into a different section
• Most apps look like ass on a B&W display
• Most apps look like ass on a 4:3 display (not applicable to the Palma)
• The various display refresh modes are unintuitive

The newer models, from what I understand, use faster-refreshing display tech, and some even support color.

This is why I refuse to buy e-books with DRM. Amazon should have no say in how, where, or when I read my books.

ebooks.com has a searchable DRM-free section, so that’s my go-to: https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/drm-free

For anything not available without DRM, I will pirate it without a second thought.

Yeah, I had to disconnect all my SATA HDs to stop the Windows installer from shitting all over them.

I’d be worried about Windows updates doing the same thing now, after the the recent glitch that broke bootloaders.

F-Droid link for the lazy: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.junkfood.seal/

Definitely going to check this out. I’ve been using yt-dlp via command line in Termux but that experience is less than ideal.

It was bought out and cleaned up a few years ago. It’s legit again now, though I don’t think it’ll ever really recover from that fiasco.

Totally agree. Their product line was an absolute mess back then. Their current lineup is getting a little bloated too. I don’t know why they bother having two laptop product lines anymore when they are so similar.

Apple tried to allow clones, but ran into the same problem because the clone makers could make cheaper machines by slapping together parts.

Yeah, this is exactly what happened, although some of the clone brands were perfectly high-quality (Power Computing in particular made great machines, usually the fastest on the market). In the Mac community at the time, a lot of people (myself included) wished Apple would just exit the hardware business and focus on what they were good at: software.

Then Steve Jobs came back and did exactly the opposite of that. First order of business was to kill cloning. Then came the iPod.

To be fair, the next generation of Power Macs after that were about half the price of the previous gen.

Most of Apple’s history, actually.

Macs have a reputation for being expensive because people compare the cheapest Mac to the cheapest PC, or to a custom-built PC. That’s reasonable if the cheapest PC meets your needs or if you’re into building your own PC, but if you compare a similarly-equipped name-brand PC, the numbers shift a LOT.

From the G3-G5 era ('97-2006) through most of the Intel era (2006-2020), if you went to Dell or HP and configured a machine to match Apple’s specs as closely as possible, you’d find the Macs were almost never much more expensive, and often cheaper. I say this as someone who routinely did such comparisons as part of their job. There were some notable exceptions, like most of the Intel MacBook Air models (they ranged from “okay” to “so bad it feels like a personal insult”), but that was never the rule. Even in the early-mid 90s, while Apple’s own hardware was grossly overpriced, you could by Mac clones for much cheaper (clones were licensed third-parties who made Macs, and they were far and away the best value in the pre-G3 PowerPC era).

Macs also historically have a lower total cost of ownership, factoring in lifespan (cheap PCs fail frequently), support costs, etc. One of the most recent and extensive analyses of this I know if comes from IBM. See https://www.computerworld.com/article/1666267/ibm-mac-users-are-happier-and-more-productive.html

Toward the tail end of the Intel era, let’s say around 2016-2020, Apple put out some real garbage. e.g. butterfly keyboards and the aforementioned craptastic Airs. But historically those are the exceptions, not the rule.

As for the “does more”, well, that’s debatable. Considering this is using Apple’s 90s logo, I think it’s pretty fair. Compare System 7 (released in '91) to Windows 3.1 (released in '92), and there is no contest. Windows was shit. This was generally true up until the 2000s, when the first few versions of OS X were half-baked and Apple was only just exiting its “beleaguered” period, and the mainstream press kept ringing the death knell. Windows lagged behind its competition by at least a few years up until Microsoft successfully killed or sufficiently hampered all that competition. I don’t think you can make an honest argument in favor of Windows compared to any of its contemporaries in the 90s (e.g. Macintosh, OS/2, BeOS) that doesn’t boil down to “we’re used to it” or “we’re locked in”.

Chromium itself will. Other Chromium-based browser vendors have confirmed that they will maintain v2 support for as long as they can. So perhaps try something like Vivaldi. I haven’t tried PWAs in Vivaldi myself, but it supports them according to the docs.

Debian still supports Pentium IIs. They axed support for the i586 architecture (original Pentium) a few years back, but Debian 12 (current stable, AKA Bookworm) still supports i686 chips like the P2.

Not sure how the rest of the hardware in that Compaq will work.

See: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch02s01.en.html

Some vegan leather is made of mushrooms or vegetables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant-based_leather#Mushroom_leather

Personally I find it odd to call polyurethane “vegan leather”. Seems like a marketing ploy to make it sound new. I’ve always known it as “pleather” or “faux leather”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_leather

Probably ~15TB through file-level syncing tools (rsync or similar; I forget exactly what I used), just copying my internal RAID array to an external HDD. I’ve done this a few times, either for backup purposes or to prepare to reformat my array. I originally used ZFS on the array, but converted it to something with built-in kernel support a while back because it got troublesome when switching distros. Might switch it to bcachefs at some point.

With dd specifically, maybe 1TB? I’ve used it to temporarily back up my boot drive on occasion, on the assumption that restoring my entire system that way would be simpler in case whatever I was planning blew up in my face. Fortunately never needed to restore it that way.

For sure. It’ll never be enforced completely, but it gives teeth to go after some big offenders.