I ran Windows 2000 Beta for years on my DEC Alphastations (4 Miatas and 4 Digital Ultimate Workstations). It ran flawlessly, and so did Office 97 for Alpha.
CD-ROMs for both Windows 2000 Beta and Office 97 (for Alpha systems) came in our monthly TechNet subscription packages.
This comment made me smile, as my preference is opposite - I prefer RPM-based distros and primarily use Fedora on everything (including Fedora Asahi Remix on an M1 Ultra Mac Studio), but occasionally use Ubuntu and Debian on some of my cloud instances.
As a result, I understand the desire to stick with a particular distribution that we're already familiar with - it's less work, and less having to remember subtle differences in structure. But when there is a time where I'm forced to use a new distro (e.g., when Asahi was first released exclusively as an Arch Linux ARM distro), I never regret the small learning experiences involved :-)
The height of hackathons was back in the early to mid 2010s in my opinion. That was the height of the indie game scene and mobile app goldrush - and there were plenty of sponsors willing to contribute real $$, prizes, and swag - all of which were necessary to build the excitement around the event.
I ran a plethora of these events at my college for developer and game developer students (Great Canadian Appathon, Global Game Jam, and numerous Microsoft-centric hackathons for WinPhone7 and Win10). The sponsorship, prizes, catering (massive food budget!), and swag was insane. All the college really contributed was the space and staff to run the 48-hour weekend events, caffeinated soap for the washrooms, and the occasional medical attention (we had a few NOS-induced nosebleeds the year Coca-Cola was one of the sponsors).
But what was developed during these intense hackathons was nothing short of spectacular, and the collaborative skill-building was massive. I still hear from former students who attended them during that time that they consider them as one of the best experiences of their lives.
I lived through this timeline, and with ThinkPads from different eras. Throughout, they were always considered in my science and computer science circles as "premium" laptops with excellent build quality, keyboards, and performance. The performance of my latest one (a P-series) always surprised me given the hardware specs.
Several organizations in my area of Canada (including ours) have this as a directive right now too, and are actively exploring options for ensuring data is hosted in Canada or Europe (or have already begun or completed their migrations).
Love the confidence of launching a teaser page with zero specs. I’m not emotionally prepared to be marketed to before I know how much RAM it has.
Google basically said “here’s a mysterious glowing rectangle” and expected us spec junkies not to immediately start clawing at the walls for a datasheet, and losing sleep for weeks on end until we get them.
I'm reminded of a speech Barack Obama gave many years ago about the difficulty and necessity of finding a "happy medium" between protecting individual liberties and providing law enforcement with the abilities to provide security in a digital world.
I think the topic itself is difficult for everyone involved - there will likely be a lot of uproar for many years as we get closer to finding this happy medium.
Both Windows 11 systems are configured with the “High performance” power plan, as are the two Windows Server VMs. In hindsight, I should have included this detail explicitly in the original post instead of only alluding to it.
Both systems have DDR5 soldered to the mainboard and NVMe SSDs (the Intel system has a faster Samsung model compared to the Foresee model in the Snapdragon system).
I intentionally left out screenshots of the output for a couple of reasons:
1) They’d distract from the main point (I wasn’t aiming to write a benchmarking post), and
2) They can be misleading, since results will vary across ARM hardware and even between Snapdragon X Elite variants.
Instead, I included the PowerShell snippets so anyone interested can reproduce the results themselves.
For a rough sense of the outcome: the Snapdragon VM outperformed the Intel VM by ~20–80%, depending on the test (DNS ~20%, IIS ~50%, all others closer to ~80%).
This is great, thanks! It sort of feels like browsing for gems in a used bookstore and stumbling onto authentic, personal writing. I'm always up for that, and plan on spending plenty of time exploring the list.
It's a nice animation, but for such a significant anniversary - and from a company like Apple - I expected a lot more hoopla and content. This could indicate that there wasn't a lot of planning involved, that it wasn't a high-priority item, or that Apple had enough people with time to focus on it.
It's almost as if someone near the end of a meeting said "Oh crud, we've got to do something to acknowledge our 50th anniversary - can someone put something together, and quick?"
For me, drawing the line as to when you will leverage AI and when you won't comes down to a quote from Kurt Vonnegut: "Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."
Art is where I choose to draw the line, for both ideation and content generation. That work report I leveraged AI to help flush out isn't art, but my personal blog is, as is anything I must internalize (that is thoroughly understand and remember). This is why I have the following disclaimer on my blog (and yes, the typo on this page is purposeful!): https://jasoneckert.github.io/site/about-this-site/
As someone who came from the SGI O2/Octane era when high-end workstations were compact, distinctive, and sexy, I’ve never really understood the allure of the Mac Pro, with the exception of the 2013 Mac Pro tube, which I owned (small footprint, quiet, and powerful).
For me, aesthetics and size are important. That workstation on your desk should justify its presence, not just exist as some hulking box.
When Apple released the Mac Studio, it made perfect sense from a form-factor point-of-view. The internal expansion slots in the M2 Mac Pro didn't make any sense. It was like a bag of potato chips - mostly air. And far too big and ugly to be part of my work area! I'm surprised that Apple didn't discontinue it sooner.
This was exactly my first thought when I saw the title. And after reading the contents of the blog, it's pretty clear that ARM is laser focused on getting a piece of their customer's cake by competing with them. This is likely why they are riding the AI hype train hard with their ill-suited name (AGI).
Unfortunately for them, I think hardware vendors will see past the hype. They'll only buy the platform if it is very competitively priced (i.e., much cheaper) since fortune favours long-lived platforms and organizations like Apple and Qualcomm.
In short, this reads like a mix of valid historical pain points and outdated assumptions.
The post frames Wayland security as “you can’t do anything,” but that’s a misunderstanding. Even under X11, any app can log keystrokes, read window contents, and inject input into other apps. Wayland flips this to isolation-by-default: explicit portals/APIs for screen capture, input, etc.
Moreover, the performance argument is weak and somewhat contradictory. The author claims there is no clear performance win, and that it's sometimes slower and hardware improvements make it irrelevant. But Wayland reduces copies and avoids X11 roundtrips (architectural win). Actual performance depends heavily on compositor + drivers, and I've found that modern hardware has HUGE performance improvements (especially Intel, AMD, and Apple Silicon via the Asahi driver).
The NVIDIA argument is also dated. Sure, support was historically bad due to EGLStreams vs GBM, but this has improved significantly in recent driver releases.
Many cited issues are outdated too. OBS, clipboard, and screen sharing issues are now mostly (if not entirely) solved in the latest GNOME/KDE.
I've been using Wayland exclusively on Fedora and Fedora Asahi Remix systems for many years alongside Sway (and occasionally GNOME and KDE). Adoption has accelerated in many distros, and XWayland for legacy apps is excellent (although I believe using the word "legacy" here would be a trigger word for the author ;-).
There's no stagnation here... what we're looking at is a slow migration of a foundational layer, which historically always takes a decade or more in the Linux world.