Viewing profile — mindajar

Terminal.app seems in no hurry to add truecolor support, which is really nice for editor color schemes and other things once you’ve gotten used to it.

bzr lost because it was poorly-architected, infuriatingly slow, and kept changing its repository storage format trying (and failing) to narrow the gap with Mercurial and Git perfor…

I don't think it's a hardware problem. After a few days/weeks of uptime, coreaudiod sometimes gets into a state where, regardless of output volume, it glitches and pops periodicall…

Yeah. To me it looks like macOS goes so deep into sleep it disconnects the external display. On wake, the system rediscovers the external and resizes the desktop across both displa…

The original Rosetta was also a licensed technology that (presumably) cost Apple a pretty penny. If Rosetta 2 is all in-house tech, that probably bodes well for sticking around lon…

In clamshell mode it only has to drive one display, so it demands a lower baseline of memory, CPU, GPU, ...

Which means Reddit is almost certainly going to break all of them, eventually.

It already does, in the T2. It seems to me like future T* chips will run more and more of the system, leaving the x86 to become something like the MBP’s discrete GPU option. And th…

If TM detects an I/O error while writing to a networked backup volume, it aborts the backup and forces a filesystem check on the remote disk image at the start of the next backup. …

If there's an example of getting great game performance with a GC language, Unity isn't it. Lots of Unity games get stuttery, and even when they don't, they seem to use a lot of RA…

Device backups are handled by Finder in the post-iTunes world, at least on the Mac. I think iTunes is still a thing on Windows?

APFS is “optimized for SSD”, so performance is miserable on hard disks. For awhile Apple held off upgrading the system disk if it was an HDD, but that’s no longer an option if you …

That makes it suck slightly less, but TM can pretty much never be "fast" the way it works now, with the number of files we all have these days. In the best case, if a folder doesn'…

Just a block

I think the point is that if Apple had to remove DTrace for legal reasons, the impact to Apple's business and customers would be minimal. If a hypothetical AppleZFS shipped on a bi…

Today you can verify backups on OS X with "tmutil verifychecksums", at least on 10.11. The UI to this could be improved, but user data checksums don't necessarily need to be a file…

It was a stealthy feature addition that went totally unannounced, but as of 10.11, Time Machine stores file checksums in the backup. See 'tmutil verifyChecksums'.

Do checksums actually need to be in the filesystem, though? It does seem like an important feature, but couldn't they be done at a higher level, like the way Spotlight indexing wor…

If you assume Apple cares about having a disk format in common with other platforms, sure, I'd agree that's probably possible. But I don't think they do; they seem to care a lot mo…

Is moving data between computers that way a thing that non-technical people do often? FAT-formatted USB sticks seem to be good enough for that, but e-mail/Dropbox/file sharing/clou…

Classic comic, but I don't think it applies. APFS looks intended to solve Apple's product problems really well, and it doesn't even try to be a filesystem for everyone. Apple has s…

If you poke around in the the APFS kernel extension, it's not a very big binary, given the feature set. (It's a 550K extension, compared to the 2.5MB zfs.ko on FreeBSD.) I haven't …

And everyone will think they're secure anyway, since Google got lots of press for announcing they'll encrypt everything. Win-win for Google!

Re: 2), there are significant parts of OS X that seem to either check for HFS+ or rely on its implementation and bugs, and those things don't work properly on other filesystems. Op…

HFS+ is an oddball filesystem among FSes that anyone actually uses. Since the earliest days of the Mac, it's been able to e.g. track file identity even as a file is moved around, a…