531–540 of 764 posts
There’s a rather strong counter to this is: I, and the vast majority of computer users, don’t want to manage every nitty-gritty detail of the security and privacy of my computer. I have better things to do. In fact, doing it fully competently is more than a full time job. So farming this out to a third-party is a necessity, for me and many, many others. Of course, it’s not perfect. How much can I trust the third part…
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Of course they are. You need to invest a lot in your platform to make it convenient, so you have to be able to monetize it well enough.
I agree with forest dweller - they are not mutually exclusive. There are many open source products that have had huge investments without monetization.
Like what?
Why so much of the privacy-scare activism is coming from Berlin? It is starting to feel like a bubble syndrome, rather than organic.
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And what do you expect us to do, install Linux and spend days configuring the touchpad? Computers are a tool we use to do our work. Setting up the computer cannot become a job by itself.
But it should be your tool. Apple just grands you the right to use it like they think it's the best for you. That leads to this https://mobile.twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/13269902964... How could it be that people are all about freedom when it comes to governments but have no problem if private companies censor and controll what they write and do?
I.e. if you take away the rights to privately create and distribute software, the current situation will become permanent.
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It's funny because almost nobody uses Apple where I live (Poland). The only people who use MacBooks are some "artsy" types and some managers (because they only need office and outlook to work :) ). Developers never use apple because it has tons of compatibility issues.
It is a luxury brand in the US. Every tech person that has made it would never buy anything but Apple. Yes, things like battery life are great. But if you are seen working at a coffee shop, there is a 100% guarantee of a that glowing apple logo on your laptop.
Good PC laptops are much better if you're using them like a developer would (move it twice a day, code on it for hours without moving).
Thermal design is awful on apple laptops, they are basically running half-speed by design. Can't fix anything if it breaks.
Why would people value brand over all these concerns is beyond me. Must be consumer patriotism, like with Harley-Davidson :)
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>I think the point is that before, if you had a computer, you had the ability to inspect, modify and program, and with curiosity you'd learn. That's a rose-colored view that maybe reflects a small window in time. But take the 80s. First of all that computer was maybe $5,000 in today's money. (Yes, there were some limited alternatives like the Sinclair and Commodore 64 that were cheaper.) Long distance telephone calls…
My experience being born in 1992 is that as a kid I could toy with QBasic for instance (and then with Dev-C++ a bit later) ; as well as go peek & change stuff in random files (hello red alert save files :D) - can't really do that with an iPad.
I'm not saying it's exactly equivalent, but there's certainly a perspective which could argue that a) the free JavaScript interpreter available on every device is more featureful and interesting than anything available to us 80s and 90s kids, b) low-cost SBCs running free open source operating systems and compilers are more accessible and better supported than the commercial compilers that few could have accessed back then, and c) the overall ramp from curious/creative gamer kid to capable hacker is much smoother now than it was then, with a lot of interim options between JavaScript and commercial environments in which to gain comfort and achieve interesting results (thinking stuff like GameMaker and RPGMaker, modding communities for existing games, hacking/homebrew/porting communities for consoles, etc).
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Apple gives you the option to turn telemetry on/off as part of the machine setup & OS upgrade process. This option is explained in simple english and not buried in the legalese.
The question is, is the telemetry really off completely on mac or either? Is there any guarantee that Apple gets zero bytes of your data or do we just take their word for it because their products are shiny and cool?
What we poor souls didn't understand all these years is that we're effectively helping other companies to steal from Apple by running software that isn't distributed via their app store [1]. I think now that Apple has learned from iOS how profitable a walled garden business model is they are trying to bring that model to the PC world as well. Shipping hardware with their own processors is an important step in that di…
Fortunately Apple has like 3% market share in the desktop market globally[1] , so it doesn't really matter what they do. [1] browsing data shows around 10% market share but it is based mostly on English websites which are minority (and English-speaking countries have significantly higher apple users percentage than the rest of the world).
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Maybe because Germans have a history with state surveillance?
Oh really? Nazis had surveillance system in place like todays? I suspect this has a lot to do with huge amount of EU funds going into Berlin-based initiatives to make it the new Silicon Valley. Creating a culture of antipathy, against SV. Well, obviously picking on the most obvious wrongdoing SV has as of late years; privacy.
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Gen Z can get real general-purpose computers with a development environment for cheap. The new Raspberry Pi 400 is a modern take on home computers like the C64, but 15 times cheaper. Pi 400 full kit: $100, C64: $595 (1982) / $1576 (inflation adjusted for 2019). The computers are not just getting cheaper, educative material is easier than ever to find. Because modern computers are much more complex and do much more th…
> The new Raspberry Pi 400 Learning about the Raspberry Pi is nice, but that doesn't help preserve the institutional knowledge needed to build system/low-level features in a modern OS. I'm not talking about teaching kids to program; I'm concerned about preserving in the future the knowledge of how to create all of the complex tech we use today. Many civilizations throughout history collapsed after they lost the techn…
And for cobbling together a computer out of microelectronics there's CollapseOS https://collapseos.org/