Right now it looks like MS has managed to steal a march on Apple in this area, but that Apple knows this and is working on it. Interesting times.
I wish Apple would actually natively support containers, rather than supporting containers via a linux VM.
WSL 1 chose the first approach so the container thought it was running against a Linux kernel but it was actually a windows kernel plus a syscall shim. That's all fine and dandy in theory, but not running against real Linux means there was always the risk of different behaviour on Windows versus on the Linux deployment host. In WSL 2 Microsoft switched to running a real linux kernel in a hypervisor, which is basically the same approach as on the Mac.
> In contrast, Docker for linux runs using a native container mechanism without using a VM at all
Thanks for pointing this out. As I'm slowly getting familiar with container-based workflows and underlying technology, your statement helped clear up my confusion about the essential differences between containers and VMs.
I found an informative table in Microsoft's documentation for "Containers on Windows", that compares and contrasts the two approaches:
Containers vs. virtual machines - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowsconta...
This helped me understand how Docker for Mac using xHyve is different from Docker on Linux with native containers as a much thinner layer with a shared kernel.
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According to this article:
Beating some performance into Docker for Mac - https://medium.com/homullus/beating-some-performance-into-do... (July 2020)
Aside from the container/VM architecture, a performance bottleneck of Docker for Mac is (apparently) how mounted volumes work, on the file system level.
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> macOS doesn't support containers, but it could
According to a random Reddit thread (so, with a grain of salt) I found on this topic:
Docker on the new Mac Big Sur - https://www.reddit.com/r/docker/comments/he0v5c/docker_on_th...
> Using a shared kernel container (via cgroups, for example) isn't feasible with macOS because of licensing restrictions and because the Linux syscall interface isn't compatible with macOS.
Which seems to imply that there's some fundamental reason why Docker for Mac must rely on VMs, that macOS is not (yet?) capable of providing containers that are as native as on Linux.
They also mention how the file system on macOS has design limitations that make containers more difficult.
> The net result is that performance is probably going to be near-native for light workloads, but macOS depends on other fundamental technologies like APFS which aren't designed for datacenter type workloads.
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EDIT: Aah, right, this is why a comment higher up mentioned:
> Apple said they were working with Docker to make sure MacOS on ARM is a first class host for Linux Docker containers.
But then maybe that's actually for the best. A single unified consolidated news publishing platform could have awful consequences for diversity of representation.
Perhaps such a model could co-exist with a commercial element. Access to premium services, to keep my proposal vague and aspirational.
It's also a huge political football. It does lean slightly to the left but it doesn't matter which political party you ask they always complain it's biased against them. The current government has been waging was on the BBC for 10 years now. If they thought they could they would shut it down in an instance.
What we really need is something funded centrally but they don't have the option of interfering with.
There’s no voucher, it’s just a monthly fee, but I have no doubt that which paywalled stories you click on determine where your monthly fee goes.
Whenever someone touches on market failures, I'm reminded of how the USA government saved the domestic oil producers from themselves. TLDR: Govt imposed regulation and predictability onto the wildcatters, thereby protecting investors and insuring stable supply for consumers.
I don't yet know what future marketplaces for journalism will look like.
I do know that markets don't just magically appear. Efficient open markets require laws and regulations, to create and then protect those markets.
I feel this is also a problem with music. The last 10 years you can just dump whatever you want on Soundcloud or go private release on Spotify.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I do not celebrate the label system at all, and maybe that freedom of getting your music out there is worth the cultural cost we pay, but for example what East Coast Hip-Hop had with Stretch & Bobbito, that kind of curation is sorely needed. These days for curators it’s all about hype and whatever gets you a buck, but as was said in Stretch & Bobbito’s documentary “we’d play stuff that probably only appealed to like a hundred people out there. But it was dope, and dope deserves to be heard”.
I’ve discovered far more songs and bands through Spotify than I would have in the pre-Spotify era. And many of these songs are ones with just a few thousand views, as alluded to in your comment.
The modern music industry allows for the best of both worlds.
The vast majority of my music recommendations come from friends and acquaintances who share tracks in FB groups, chat, amateur Bluetooth speaker "DJing" at gatherings and so on.
"Hey man, you gotta hear this one" is alive and very well.
Scenes exist on social media, but they're much more diffuse and for some reason are more likely to tinged with irony and/or nostalgia. So they seem to be less effective and - ironically - less experimental and creatively diverse.
You can find such thing now as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23717756
You'll see this same thing in so many different places. People will say "It's not the same now. Back then it was like X". Most commonly, it's more like X than it is different, but the person saying it has changed.
A reaction or evolution from that is that many who were curators or DJ's get into music production, which means that they hang out in music studios of some kind, forming different social connections (e.g. with musicians). It creates a social divide between the people who just consume from algorithms and those who create.
>You'll see this same thing in so many different places.
Because it's an inherent feat of technology. Groups also form because different people bring different things to the table. One might be into music, the other one into cooking etc.
But cooking isn't enough, it has to be keto & vegan. People move up one level which changes the composition of their social circle.
>People will say "It's not the same now. Back then it was like X". Most commonly, it's more like X than it is different, but the person saying it has changed.
I wish it were like that because I'm a tech geek myself, but thinking more deeply about the topic and the composition of groups has changed my mind. The divide created by technology is real imo because it isolates groups.
The divide is real when it's blindly applied without thinking about social disruption is what I wanted to say.
The Day Steve Jobs Dissed Me In A Keynote https://sivers.org/itunes
A performer, no matter how more talented that person is, will deliver a worse performance if they are trying to aim more broadly.
Whereas with news the issue is that news died when they optimized for ads/engagement, but that is fundamentally why Facebook, Twitter etc are all terrible. The interests of the user and the interests of the creator are mismatched.
And I'm thankful every day that he was so wrong. Even though there are bad faith actors encircling the world of electronics and software attempting to turn everything into a walled garden (and succeeding in many cases), the PC lives. Hurrah.
On top of that his analogy makes no sense. By no means were all early cars trucks. Automobiles in cities didn't even really exist in any considerable number until after WWII and the suburban housing boom enabled by exclusionary FHA housing subsidies.
Before cars we all rode the streetcar and train. Open systems that allowed mobility without placing a premium on using your own two feet.
People are doing all kinds of things on their phones, including applying for jobs and getting government services.
The only thing I think Jobs might have been wrong on is the mix. The smartphone has become so powerful that the mix of smartphones to tablets is probably not what be predicted.
I have two young kids at home, so I am doing stuff all the time on my phone. I can use my iPhone to check in on work while giving them a bath or watching them play outside and can give feedback to my team. Our mobile tools have become so powerful that you can get a lot done on them. I have a 5K iMac with 72 GB of ram, but I spend most of my days on a phone or a tablet.
There are now closing in to 4B Smartphone users, and about 1B Tablet users.
PC usage isn't really shrinking, Office, Gaming and Productivity are still holding up. But most "consumer" usage has definitely shifted to Post PC.
Years later, the same kind of slowdown happened with tablets (especially Android tablets which are basically dead, but iPad wasn't completely spared either), and will eventually happen with smartphones as well.
The "we are now in a post-PC era" hype of 2010 (after the iPad's release) has eventually led to many "tablets are dead" articles by 2016.
I don't know how long I'll be able to run that server for before needing to upgrade something, but I suspect its lifetime is until something catastrophically fails.
For Web browsing and office work it works flawlessly. One day I'll throw in a cheap SATA SSD that I'll find on sale as the OS drive and it'll be good for even more years.
The only exception that I can come up with right away is drawing, but even taking pictures, well my phone doesn't hold a candle to my DLSR.
I guess it didn't quite work out that way.
And of course they're crap on PC (Electron).
Price of progress I suppose.
Just take a look at countries like Africa or Cambodia: Most of the people (if not all) own a smartphone and there is a lot of places where you will have a hard time finding a computer.
I tried to use a tablet for work when traveling but it did not take long to spot the drawbacks and buy a real computer to do serious work.
The mobile ecosystems force us to do this because they stop us from unleashing the full potential of these tiny computers.
Imagine something like an iPad that would allow the user to just install any software that this tiny computer can run. Also you should be able to copy and access files from/to any other location on the filesystem. I could use it for most of my daily tasks at work if iOS/iPadOS would not prevent me from using the tablet in that way.
He said PCs would still be there for work, but most consumers won't own one, just like all vehicles used to be trucks, until people moved to cities and switched to cars, and now some people use trucks but most people use cars.
The other really interesting part was when he talked about the need for paid journalism, and how he "doesn't want to live in a society that's just bloggers". Even a decade ago he could see the danger in most people getting their news from un-curated, un-vetted content.