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  • MacStadium adds M4 Mac mini to its cloud-based virtual machines

    tht said:

    If you have ever been in a server room, you want to be in the back, where it would actually be a comfortable temperature. The front? Like 60 °F.


    Well 60F is not bad.  But this reminds me of my first job out of high school long long ago.  I had a summer job as a night operator for DEC at their main software engineering facility in S NH.  The job was midnight to 8am and mostly we spent our time in huge computer rooms with row and rows of VAX mini computers, big tape drives, and big rows of disk drives and my job was to do nightly backups, mostly to tape.   The rooms were heavily air conditioned and being a summer job the outside weather was 85-95F or hotter and usually 60-90% humidity.   Hardly sweater or hoodie weather.  But a good many of the night operators brought or wore sweaters or sweat shirts to work as the server rooms were very cold.  Especially late at night when you were tired and your body’s self defense mechanism not working well so you felt extra cold.    It was funny to see people coming in with shorts and t shirts and a sweater.  

    The rows of VAX mini computers were a double row back to back with cable trays up high in between the two rows of computers.   There was enough room to walk or even put an office chair on wheels in this space between the backs of the two rows of computers.  

    You often found me and other operators behind the computers while we were waiting for jobs to finish as the computers exhausted huge amounts of warm air out into the space.  
    d_2thtAlex1Ngregoriusmwatto_cobra
  • Microsoft blames European Commission for global CrowdStrike catastrophe

    Pema said:
    avon b7 said:
    Did the EU make Microsoft do this worldwide?

    The problem last week had nothing to do with the EU. It was sloppy coding, sloppy testing and with little to no resilience built into the whole process. 
    Absolutely spot on. 
    This is vintage Microsoft sloppiness going over 50 years now. Releasing substandard code, causing chaos first on the desktops, then when office networks became the norm and then the enterprise and now global. 
    Why we are still saddled with the worst o/s ever written I will never understand?

    Windows is basically a graphic interface bolted on to DOS. Anyone who has ever followed the path from DOS to Windows 2000, Windows XP and now the latest incarnation Windows 11 knows that it has never been a stable O/S. The only reason that it is still pervasive is because Gates licensed it for a small fee to any PC maker. The hardware was never a concern for Microsoft. You could install DOS/Windows on your toaster if you like. So long as you pay the $25 fee per box. You are good to go. 

    Apple, ever the company to maintain quality control, would not split the two. Well, ok, there was a brief period when the Pepsi Cola moron ran Apple that the company licensed the OS to a guy in Texas I believe who agreed to a very stringent hardware contract. But that arrangement fell apart after a year. And since then Apple, after Jobs came back from Next, has grown into a $3 Trillion company, always maintaining the highest standards. 

    We have the equivalent of DOS/Windows in the phone space. It's called Android. You build any junky phone and slap Android on it and you are good to go. 

    This particular outage had to do with Windows but also with the way Windows is managed from the cloud. A single component of CrowdStrike called Falcon was not thoroughly tested and it cascaded down to every Windows install out there. 

    And it will happen again. Get rid of Windows and you solve half the problem. 
    Tell me you did t read the article without telling me. 

    First, Windows has not been a GUI on top of DOS since NT came out.  Second, MS code was not the cause of this problem.  crowdstrike was allowed to push out an update affecting windows kernel without MS having any control.   Nothing to do with MS. 

    I’m not a MS cheerleader — I avoid MS in any form as much as possible and have no MS apps on my own computers out of principle.  (Work computers are a different situation).   But it’s not fair to MS to claim they have sloppy code that caused this.   This was crowdstrike code that MS seemingly had to allow access at kernel level without any coordination or vetting with/by MS
    9secondkox2badmonkwilliamlondonstompyglobbyctt_zhdewmeCheeseFreezekillroywatto_cobra
  • Microsoft China bans Android, demands staff use iPhones

    y2an said:
    ssfe11 said:
    Yup a Wall Gardened type of security does have its advantages. 
    As does being based on OS X which is based off Unix.
    “Based off Unix” is weird. OS X is built in the BSD flavour of Unix. Somewhat akin to a Linux distro from today’s viewpoint.
    No, it’s not.  OS X at its core only has a BSD based userland layer.   Very little if anything of actual BSD Unix (kernel etc) is in OS X.  OS X uses a hybrid Mach kernel (combining Mach 2 more monolithic and Mach 3 modular / micro kernels) and a whole host of Apple specific layers.  They adopted the BSD userland interface for utilities and lib access though you see more and more gnu style utility versions replacing traditional BSD versions (you can tell looking at the flags to commands for example).  

    I believe OS X has Unix certification.  Linux does not.  Linux was designed to be Unix compatible in concept and interface so that stuff works but it’s its own kernel and architecture. 

    They are both “Unix like”.  


    jony0
  • Apple Intelligence inches closer to Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator

    cg27 said:
    Um, interesting story, but go back to 1968 when 2001: A Space Odyssey blew everyone’s mind, on several levels, the tech depiction being just one.  HAL, tablets (albeit “laying” on a desk since they were 50 years ahead of the tech), etc etc

    Let’s not give Sculley any credit for this.
    So Elon Musk doesn’t get credit for usable EVs then as they had EVs roaming the streets a century ago.  Is that how we score it?


    williamlondon9secondkox2kurai_kagejony0
  • Three things Apple got wrong with the Vision Pro launch

    With the in-store availability of replacement HomePods etc. 

    remember that Tim Cook was a logistics expert.  We see this here as an example of “just in time” being off in time.  

    Separately: Apple Stores used to be able to make local decisions to help customers around problems, even if a policy was in the way.  I’m the distant past I received a replacement iPhone for a problem that was technically against policy and I also had a tech fix my camera module in an iPhone that was 1 day out of warranty (due to being out of town and miscounting days on my part).  

    Now it seems in my experience and in the experience of others I know the Apple Store folks have to stick to policy and a manager has less leeway to fix problems for customers in a way that furthers the customer /Apple relationship.  (I’m not talking blatant gaming of the system by customers or unreasonable demands). 
    dewmemuthuk_vanalingamwilliamlondonwatto_cobra