chelgrian

The Massimo board approved spinning Sound United back out again in April but there has been no more announcements about what that might look like.

It’s an almost certainty it couldn’t be open sourced code bases this age tend to have all sorts of copyright issues and rights holders involved and it can be next to impossible track down all the right holders and to get the license changes needed. There are two relatively successful instances I know of which are Blender and Staroffice (which became open/libreoffice) I can’t think of any other successes.

For similar reasons it may be impossible to release a ‘sunset’ edition it’s very probable that they have third party licensed code or libraries which require periodic fees.

It’s very stupid but copyright law can make it prohibitively expensive or far too hard to allow software like Finale to continue vs forcing a hard end date.

The people who consider the Mac Pro a massive fumble are not the target market and do not understand why the machine exists at all. Apple was never going to make a direct replacement for the x86 Mac Pro.

The current Mac Pro exists only to host Avid HDX cards for ProTools and to host 8K video acquisition cards from AJA or Blackmagic Design.

The instant that neither of those applications need an internal PCI-E slot then the Mac Pro goes away for good.

I very much doubt Apple will 'pick up the phone' that would result in having to pay a license fee in the US, possibly retroactive royalties for product already shipped and set a precedent for action in the rest of the world.

They will presumably rev the hardware to remove the feature at least for the US market and bring it back the moment the patent expires.

For example it's speculated that the real reason MagSafe went away and came back again was a 3rd party patent claim on elements of it.

appleinsideruser said:

Not contradicting your post 22, but passkeys make me uneasy. Give me a password that is strong that I store in keychain and I’m in charge of my own destiny (and access to the resource). 

Loose a device or an invisible crypto passkey and you’re buggered. #luddite  🤷‍♂️ 

Stored the way Apple, Google and MS have implemented it I agree you essentially never have direct access to the private key. I can see why they designed it like this essentially to stop people handing over their credentials to all and sundry like they do with passwords.

In the Apple world at least you don't have to use iCloud Keychain you can store the passkey in anything which implements the correct bits of the autofill API. Right now I know that Strongbox can do this and store the passkey in a Keepass kdbx file. That at least you can access directly and store and more importantly backup wherever you like.

At that point the usage of the passkey is similar to a sequence of the same entropy stored in keepass except with the advantage that because the passkey relies on a cryptographic transaction it's secure against a bunch of attacks the password isn't.