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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

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Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#501
post #152

Can anybody actually confirm these claims? I'm no fan of the new notary system, but in my experience the behavior described is not how things work. Has there been an update or change in behavior recently? I've been running a Debian thinkpad for the last meaningful stretch of time, but from what I recall macOS quarantines any files created by the user via an extended attribute `com.apple.quarantine`. Quarantined files…

Notarization is an additional check that ensures that Apple has not revoked permission for the software to run.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#502
post #291

I feel like the continual development of MacOS is making it worse and worse. Similar to Windows, where every extra feature causes more and more complications. But alas the 1000s of engineers gotta be put to work somehow.

There are significantly fewer than 1000 engineers working on macOS.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#503

Last year I was preaching that if you can't develop in a submarine or a space station (or on the metro), from a fresh git clone to your next git push, then your development environment is broken and you should burn it to the ground and start over. It'll be interesting to see how much power we developers will let Apple take from us before we jump the garden wall.

Interestingly, I hear that iPads cannot be used on the ISS because apps will stop launching if you disconnect from Apple's servers for too long.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#504
post #439
post #27

I completely understand why things are going the way they are as our computing environment has become ever more hostile. But I am very nostalgic for the time where I would power up a Vic-20 and within seconds be able to get to work. Teaching my daughter to program on a modern computer, we spend more time bootstrapping and in process, than we do in actual development.

At the Computer History Museum, I use an IBM 1401 mainframe (1959). When you hit the power button, relays go ch-ch-chunk and it's immediately ready to use. Because it has magnetic core memory, it even has the previous program already in memory, preserved over power-down. Computers have taken many steps backwards as far as startup time. Of course, loading a new program from punch cards is slow, so some things have imp…

I've spent surely coming up on years watching and reading all the content you've either created or helped produce. Indeed some things may have improved, but I sure enjoy the heck reading and watching all your exploits with 'legacy computing'!

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Gatekeeper behavior is specific to running things from Finder (not Terminal), and only if you downloaded it via a browser that sets the com.apple.quarantine xattr. Two posts from Apple dev support (Cmd+F "eskimo") describe this in more detail. https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/127709 https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/127694

Quinn The Eskimo at Apple's forums is a 10x support engineer, his posts have helped me fix dozens of problems.

Unless somebody took over his name he’s been at Apple for almost 25 years, and was already being interviewed as such 20 years ago (http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.16/16.06/Ju...)

His site (http://www.quinn.echidna.id.au/Quinn/WWW/) supports its claim “I'm not a great believer in web” :-)

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#506

It seems like there is a lot of confusion here as to whether this is real or not. I've been able to confirm the behavior in the post by: - Using a new, random executable. Even echo $rand_int will work. Edit: What I mean here is generate your rand int beforehand and statically include it in your script. - Using a fresh filename too. Just throw a rand int at the end there. e.g. /tmp/test4329.sh I MITMd myself while rec…

[deleted]

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That computers are just slower to interact with now is such a truism that we hardly remark upon it any more. It seems utterly insane that in the early 90's I could just run Windows 3.1 on a bit of kit that in all likelihood wouldn't even power a toaster today, and the experience was, well, frictionless. I don't recall ever thinking "wtf is this thing doing ?", whereas today, by contrast, if I have the audacity to be…

I call this 'Outsourcing the cost of development to the user'... Getting knowledgeable people costs money so we build more abstractions that lower the cost of development and pass the costs of development from the company to the user in the form of requiring more hardware to do the same thing. How come I need 16Gb of RAM these days when 8Gb did it yesterday? How come my phone needs 4Gb of RAM while my 2012 tablet had…

The reason is very simple: developers don't want to develop anymore, they just want to offload real programming to third party libraries, where what used to take 100 lines of code to accomplish will take 10K or more (because, obviously, the library will do the most general version of what it wants to do). All this is considered "good development practices", which means that programs will inflate to take whatever memory is available and run slower for as long as we continue to use the same practices.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to switch back to Linux but Apple's Retina displays are absolutely beautiful and there is no way I could enjoy going back to anything with noticeably lower pixel density on a laptop. I'd like to be told I'm wrong, but as far as I know it's not really possible to recreate a comparable high pixel density experience under Linux on a laptop.

Two years ago, I helped a friend install Ubuntu Linux on a Retina Macbook Pro, and it worked like a charm. If you're looking for a new laptop entirely, there are loads of 4K+ Linux-compatible laptops out there (ThinkPads are probably your best bet).

It seems the new Dell XPS finally have a touchpad which is close to the ones on the MacBooks. The touchpad and display are the two things which hold me back from switching away from Apple.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it’s just that they’re becoming more popular. When you become a popular desktop OS, governments and militaries want to start using it which comes with some strange requirements. It also means that you can’t rely on “obscurity” to provide any sort of security, where before you could overlook some things.

Can you cite any sources for your claim that these things are being implemented to satisfy government/military requirements?

DISA?

I don’t know why grand op is downvoted. DoD requirements literally require a timeout setting for screensavers to begin locking. This has caught systems which have a race condition where you can move your mouse quickly and gain desktop access before it locks.

The long term effects come from the required changes to the development security model to remain productive and profitable (took MSFT a few OOB hotfixes and service packs to fix that example above, look when gnome kde xscreensaver etc introduced that feature etc)

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#510
post #27

I completely understand why things are going the way they are as our computing environment has become ever more hostile. But I am very nostalgic for the time where I would power up a Vic-20 and within seconds be able to get to work. Teaching my daughter to program on a modern computer, we spend more time bootstrapping and in process, than we do in actual development.

Watch a repl.it boot. It is the new joy, for children, to see an entire machine appear before their eyes and be able to instantly code away on it.
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