butchlugrod

I work at a large corporation, but one that only has 6% of Apple’s annual revenue. Even the emails we send to end users get a review from the legal team prior to us hitting send.

Yeah, there are some assumptions which can be made about licenses and their suitability for our purposes, but no serious organization is touching that code until there has been a full audit of those license terms and the origin of every commit to the repository.

Really satisfied with Ice. I've been a long-time Bartender user, but have thought that version 5 is a little slow and buggy. Ice does what I need it to do (hide/show icons) and it does it faster than Bartender. Not as many features, but my own needs are pretty simple.

I use the Inkplate 6Color for some similar projects. Built-in ESP32 controller, so no Pi required. Can be fully battery-powered, so if you make intelligent use of the deep-sleep/wake schedule, you can stretch that battery charge for a couple of weeks. My favorite one is a red "On Air" sign that hangs on my office door (used for meetings and recordings.) I just trigger a shortcut on my Mac and it automagically updates my status and mutes my devices. They have example open source projects for weather displays, news, Google Calendars...

https://soldered.com/product/inkplate-6color-color-e-paper-b...

Cheap e-ink projects are super fun and useful.

I know! I have read every piece on the site, and they really go into some fantastic detail about old Apple stuff. No idea who this person it, and they have not posted in a few years, but would love to know more about their background. Almost certainly a developer inside Apple in the 80s and 90s.

Great write-up here about what it takes to build the app from this source code: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...

There are definitely gains with the on-package memory, but that's only the tip of the spear. The tight integration of hardware and software is also an advantage -- look at how Apple Silicon is optimized for faster retain/release of NSObjects, with less memory overhead. This is a function performed by every piece of software on the system, but executed several orders of magnitude faster than on x64 because Apple can customize the hardware to fit their model of computing. Earlier discussion of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25203924

The only other designer of ARM chips at this scale is Qualcomm, and they stick to creating very general purpose designs (chips that conform to known designs and can be decent for all of their customers.) The exception being some minor one-off tweaks for Microsoft's ARM laptop. Intel and AMD are in the same boat -- they can do new and innovative things in hardware, but it doesn't really mean anything unless software is optimized for it. And if software is never optimized for it, was it worth the engineering investment?

Of course Apple is also offloading a lot of stuff from the CPU cores into specialized on-die units for machine learning, video CODECs, etc. Along with very decent GPUs. No, it's not all strictly CPU stuff, but it does all matter in the end.

Not all of what Apple is doing is everyone's cup of tea, and no it's not "the best performance in the world", but it's hard to find better performance in the same power envelope.

Quincy, like The Dalles, is located near the Columbia River, and is an hour drive to the Grand Coulee, Chief Joseph, Wanapum, Rock Island, and Rocky Reach hydroelectric dams. Electricity in central Washington is very inexpensive. Since that article was written, Dell, Yahoo, Vantage, and Sabey have all constructed data centers in the Quincy area.

I will probably start deploying new servers to this in about six months, once the community has explored any package quirks.

Just installed it into a VM. No issues, very slick. The UI scaling stuff is a neat addition. Haven't tried the Server edition yet, but I imagine I'll start deploying that in six months or so. Precise Pangolin has been my bread and butter for servers.

But why does it still have a "Floppy Disk" icon in the launcher? This is 2014 right? I feel like that is even more absurd than using a floppy disk icon for save buttons in documents. My desktops and laptops don't even have optical drives anymore, much less floppies.