I'd like it to be integrated a little better in my car than the equivalent of a mere audio plug. BTW, what's the sound quality over BT? I haven't tried, but voice calls often are considerably degraded compared to direct phone use. A streaming solution would also require buffering that I doubt a $15 device will provide. This is why I started my post with the unmentioned but implied Carplay/Android Auto which does exactly what I'm looking for regarding audio. That didn't happen really until the last year or 2.
You'll have to provide some backup for that privacy assertion. OSX doesn't send anything to Apple if I don't want it to. I cannot stop Windows from sending data if I am connected to the internet.
As for commercial OS environments, exactly what are you wanting or needing? If it is a secure system with windows, you'll need to completely detach from the internet or run some seriously interesting firewalls and proxies. I've been in that environment, it seems easier to just go with something else, honestly, as I have also been in a secure UNIX based shop, and that was much much simpler to deal with with no real issues.
Add in that Windows itself is an insecure architecture, and the answer seems obvious - the only secure private system is a non-windows system.
Windows. The cheapest, best option. If your time is worthless.
Linux has never been an option when your time is worthless. Anyone thinking that there is no time commitment when learning how to use a tool has a broken valuation standard - they're also ignoring all the time they have spent learning and fighting with the O.S. they are currently using.
This is what people don't understand. A LiveCD(DVD) will get you running on Linux with minimal fuss, much like the initial crappy windows install. Windows was alluring because it was simpler for many, and came pre-installed. Plus, Office ran on it. Office is now no longer as important (seriously, it isn't, you can live without it even in an Office oriented world) and the costs of keeping Windows running and not invading your privacy IMHO has now exceeded learning Mac OS or Linux. Hell, even learning how to build and install Gentoo might be simpler.
Now if you'll excuse me I'll go back to grumbling about systemd, GNOME 3.x and other real problems . . . except we can route around the damage.
Systemd is banned on any system I run. Any *service* that demands that POSIX compliant apps be rewritten to its non-POSIX standards is a massive FAIL. The sooner the various systemd pandering distros realize that, the better. Or maybe not. After all, NetBSD, or any BSD really, is rock solid and a better system in many ways. And no systemd there.:)
I would really like to inject false information into the telemetry instead, wild and crazy enough to mess up things completely and render the telemetry useless.
I said the same thing about browser fingerprinting, FB image scanning, etc. Haven't seen anyone produce one, and I'm too busy for things I don't use anyways or don't affect me.
A more insightful question is one you should ask yourself: "With a company almost as anti-consumer as Sony, why are you still doing business with them?"
A better question regarding windows 10 is: "If I have to learn all this technical crap just to retain some privacy, perhaps I should look at an alternative OS. I've heard about Macs and Linux, maybe they aren't so bad".
My car has BT, but doesn't support playing audio through it. In fact, only recently has BT been audio compatible AFAIK, because I've been looking at options to make that happen. So, I'd say anyone that bought ANY car prior to 2016 model years, for Android or iOS. Or after market radios since about 2013, which isn't an option for some cars.
I do know that MS received around $87 per copy of HPFS, and the amount per HPFS386 sounds excessive, but not by an order of magnitude. The price of their HPFS licenses drove the price of both Win95 and NT, so that those would cause IBM to suffer a loss on every copy of OS/2 sold if they were to compete with Windows. Remember that MS wanted OS/2 to fail, and they almost failed until Office95 was purposefully made to break OS/2 support by querying memory at 2GB on startup. Never needed it, would never use it, but OS/2's VM's maxed out at 512MB, and would return an error, causing Office95 to fail to load. Definitely a dirty trick, because otherwise, Office95, IIRC, could run on OS/2 just fine. Add in the 10 months of failing to support older office versions and the upgrade cycle at the time, and MS killed off OS/2 by incompatibility in a large swath of industries.
Lotus Notes should be a rotted pile of compost by now. That it outlived OS/2 (officially anyways) is a crying shame.
The server version should have been repacked as the client for OS/2 Warp 5, but it would have cost well over $250 due to the MS tax exacted on HPFS386. It could have been released in 1994 and been a huge improvement over the cluster that was NT.
It was very rare that *new* mainstream hardware actually worked. If you waited a few months, the needed drivers came out, and all was well.
On Linux, in those days, you could become a neckbeard before a driver came out to support whatever flavor hardware you happen to want to buy that week. If you stuck to certain high dollar items that met specs, then you were fine.
Linux was for people who didn't necessarily need the latest, shiniest new thing, it was for people who knew their shit. If it almost never worked (ever) on mainstream hardware, then it would have gone the way of OS/2...because that's actually what the problem was with OS/2. Mainstream hardware didn't work...
Incorrect, Windows specific hardware didn't work. That it was considered "mainstream" is also incorrect. In general, windows hardware was cheap and marketed to joe blow consumer, whereas things like HP LaserJets which implemented accepted standards worked just fine with OS/2. In fact, they worked better than Windows anything boxes because they all depended upon the GDI interface to print, and that was specific to the machine and device configuration they had, thus altering printed pages on a computer basis. There was no guarantee even 2 identical PCs with different software would print a page the same way even out of Word. That's how "awesome" windows was.
I get a kick out of the fact that OS/2 will now support USB...but only 1.1 and 2.0. I mean seriously...what's the fucking point?
You don't mention what version you were running. 2.0 admittedly sucked. 2.1 was reasonably decent on supported hardware. 2.2 was by far better. On the particular hardware I had, Win95 was absolutely unusable (EISA and "Smartdrive" did not get along, with the latter wiping the CMOS EISA configuration on install) and NT 3.5 was unbearably slow and had no supported software of note at the time.
There were legacy drivers in 16 bit, but OS/2 itself was primarily 32 bit by Warp 4, except for... you guessed it: HPFS, which was wholly MS's purview. Now I wonder why on earth MS was interested in keeping that driver 16 bit and didn't allow IBM to run the 32 bit HPFS386? It couldn't have anything to do with their absolutely sucky NT?
Read the 4 patents, they're not much more than a description of the TOR router and standard internet components that were around in the 80s. I'd have to dig too deeply to dispute each one of those patents, but it seems obvious that they are broad generic idea patents without a shred of invention in them, giving the pre-existing and publicly available source code at the time. All 4 patents should be voided on the basis of pre-existing art.
You're either trying to run a fully scaled out production configuration that forces memory consumption
Precisely. I'm not just running a test suite against the code (which should have been obvious as I could run tests against code for any platform from any platform, thus negating the need to run the actual OSes) but automated functionality testing against individual builds. I need a production environment (e.g. one that closely matches what the end user will be using) in order to do that; so, yes, I'm running a fully scaled out production configuration. Out of necessity.
Fully scaled out production system can mean several things - one is using 128 GB of RAM to support 100K+ concurrent users in sub 500ms service call times, the other is a complete system scaled out to support 100 users in 4GB of RAM in sub 500ms service call times. (I hate waiting, I will rarely sacrifice response speed for scalability into smaller footprints)
To be sure, I just checked. System Information lists it as a MacBook Pro 11,3 and About This Mac states Mid 2014.
Exact same laptop I have, 500GB SSD. There is something seriously wrong with yours if the fans kick up and it throttles watching a youtube video. Mine doesn't even have a blip on the front page trump video, although now I need some mint.
I have two of them, each capable of 1100MB/sec writes, in a RAID0.
Still slow.... NVMe promises 3GB/s +, per drive.;) Apple's MBPs are supposed to be running NVMe in the next release, but that is an unsubstantiated rumor at this point. It would follow the previous 3 releases though, roughly doubling disk performance on each release.
And now we have DDR4, which goes up to 19200MB/sec bandwidth in currently available modules. Faster speeds will be developed, so... wake me when I can buy an M.2 SSD that tops 20GB/sec with seek times measured in clock cycles rather than microseconds. I'll write a fat check for a couple of them.
And seek times are dropping with NVMe as well. But the point is having a "smaller" high performance memory with a reasonably fast swap space may suffice unless you're willing to drop serious coin on pure memory as it's always faster, we all know that. But I do wish they'd offer a 32 or 64 GB option, just to have more than I need available on my next laptop.
Unless you're RAM-constrained, in which case sharing some system RAM with the Intel GPU might just be the thing that gets you swapping.
You, sir, are mistaken. They do appear to have an error on their site, not surprising given that they've let this model stagnate;
Well, I'll be darned. They're still selling the mid 2012 model. That's a surprise. Stagnate isn't what I'd call that.;)
I do the same, and my MBP and 1 external 2TB disk carries everything I "need"
Uh... I don't see how an external disk has any bearing on the amount of RAM available for running additional operating systems in a virtualized environment, but okay...
It allows me to carry all those non-essential low-hit but desired things that otherwise would take up extra space on the high end SSD that is better served as swap space if needed.
I find, quite often, that my Mac is using upward of around 12GB of RAM (minus buffers, caches, and the like) while my PC sits comfortably at just over 8GB running the same applications.
I'm running 3-4 IDEs, XCode, Mail, Safari with multiple tabs open (memory hog), multiple terminal sessions, MySQL, H2 test suites, and currently my memory stack is at 20GB out of 24GB, mostly due to some heavy research involving about 20+ safari tabs being open (you know how much RAM that eats). My laptop runs a similar stack, minus the 20-40 safari tabs, and rarely exceeds 16GB. This includes running both XCode iOS emulation and Android Studio plus emulation, and the entire server side stack and applications. My windows VMs are restricted to 4GB RAM max generally because I'm testing, not running production levels, or, for browsers, down to 1.5GB. Linux VMs, depending upon use, are similarly restricted, except they range from 1-4GB. I also tend to tune my VMs to not be running crap they don't need. Memory hasn't been a problem yet, even on a project that required Oracle on windows, SugarCRM on windows (separate VM) and JBoss on Windows (yep, 3 windows servers, on a laptop no less)
You're either trying to run a fully scaled out production configuration that forces memory consumption, or your requirements are far far higher than mine, which would surprise me and result in "I wish to subscribe to your newsletter";)
As for test suites - I run a full set today, my laptop runs it fastest. It still takes 45 minutes or so to run upwards of a total of 2000 unit and integration tests across the entire build. I could, if I really wanted to spend the week working on it, likely reduce that entire runtime down to around 5 minutes, but it would be a wasted week since I hardly ever run the entire set and wait on it, I offload the full suite to my CI server and only deal with the subset I need locally 99% of the time.
You know, if I could do it legally, I'd just throw the 32GB in my PC and run OS X in a VM and call it a day. But I can't, and I also can't buy a MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM and the models that come with RAM slots only support up to 16GB (again, only 8GB officially); so, I carry 3 laptops when I know I'm going to have to work remotely.
I would have sworn that the last pluggable set supported 16GB officially and 32GB max. I just checked, you are correct, only 8GB officially. At this point, that's unbelievable. Even the minis are 8GB officially. I have a few of those, and they're all maxed out at 16GB and have been, for years. I guess that just made me assume 16GB was the official max.
I'm good with not doing that; I just won't buy another Apple computer until they sell something that fits my needs. If the one I'm using currently (well, there are two but one won't boot OS X anymore for reasons discussed earlier in the thread) happens to break before Apple starts selling something that actually suits my needs (or begins allowing OS X to run on non-Apple hardware, legally and without hacks), well, I g
The current crop is finally using the slot M drives my 2013 model PC is using? I could swear my 2013 rMBP uses one as well, though I didn't look that closely and it might simply be PCIe.
It appears to be the case since 2014, at least.
And I question your knowledge of Apple's product lines given the following:
go to that link, click on the MBP picture. You'll note that when you do, it will come up with an enlarged picture with "Macbook Pro with Retina". AFAIK, they no longer sell non retina MBPs, and haven't for at least the last couple of years. To go non-retina, you have to buy a Macbook.
For references, as a software developer who tests on all common platforms, gaming is not my focus either (I have consoles for that). 32GB in one machine capable of legally running OS X without a bunch of hackery would mean I no longer need to maintain 3 separate systems for testing purposes, which is why I'm seeking precisely that. No, a Mac Pro is not the solution, as it lacks the portability I often need. One of the perks of working for myself is that I can work from wherever (this means traveling with the wife when she goes to visit family), which basically requires that all of my equipment be portable.
I do the same, and my MBP and 1 external 2TB disk carries everything I "need", extending to my music library and latest few movies I haven't seen yet.;) I have a set of configured VMs on the laptop for those support needs plus a set of pristine originals on the external. (Copy to the internal, then configure if I need something different, also allows me to keep any clients separated) I guess I've gone one step further along this path or you would have to make a concession that is not palatable.
Ah, but instruction efficiency is. Don't underestimate how important that is; you'll note that the performance of each subsequent release from Intel exceeds that of the previous generation at the same clock speed. Well, given your workload you might not, but a lot of others do, myself included.
As I mentioned, I have the 980x. When OC'd to match the turbo clock speeds of the current top of the line crop, the performance is no more than 50% improved in the new processors with several general benchmarks. That's a 6 year old CPU, and not enough of an improvement to warrant upgrading the system. Microbenchmarks show marked improvements in some cases, but microbenchmarks are not very useful for comparing general performance. With the next CPU releases with 20+ cores, I may consider it, but only once the price hits some reasonable number. Now, that's for desktops, for laptops which are power driven, the performance has definitely been improving per power consumption, but they're close to hitting desktop limits at this point as compared to desktop performance per core. You just can't cram 12+ cores in a laptop just yet and get reasonable performance (battery life) plus you could probably roast a turkey with it.
Yeah, the m.2 SSDs are pretty cool, but the general market ones you see are generally significantly slower. You have to go high end to match the Apple MBPs of which the current crop actually use slot M M.2 drives.:) Those use 4 PCIe lanes for 1400+ MB/s. MBPs were ahead of the pack again, my 2014 has the 2 lane SSDs with 700MB/s transfers, which explains the huge speed improvement over my RAID0 850 SATA III setup on the desktop, even 2 850s just can't pump through more than about 400MB/s continuous. I'd have to go with 4 in a RAID 0 configuration, or buy faster drives, which I'm sure some exist by now as the last upgrade was over a year ago.
Now I bought my mid 2014 15" MBP on sale from B&H with AppleCare, 16GB RAM and 500GB storage, and it ran me about $2200, minus another $300 or so trade in for the flaky 2009 (I just didn't feel right selling it to someone knowing the root issue, so I recycled it) The 2015s are twice as fast disk speed wise, but I doubt I'd notice at this point:) I do notice when I have to use one of the 40MB/s (disk I/O) dev boxes I have lying around. Those things crawl.
Lastly, I'd 100% agree if gaming was my focus. It's not. So for non-game non-GPU specific loads I just don't notice a difference. BTW, you keep mentioning rMBP... exactly how OLD is that MBP? It hasn't been known as a rMBP since early 2013, IIRC, when they stopped selling non retina MBPs. Yes, marketing keeps the "MBP with Retina Display" going on their web site, but no one I know expects to see anything but a retina screen when someone says "I have a MBP". For my 2006, which is a MBP, I'd never say "oh yeah, use my MBP" and hand them that machine...:-D
I haven't tried back-porting SL to my MBP, I know it runs on the desktop, because I still have a SL image somewhere. It ran ML fine, which in its last iteration was somewhat stable, but 10.10.5 runs fine. Note: this is on an intel 980x LGA-1366 which is still standard BIOS, running currently with a substandard AMD card in it as I haven't bothered upgrading to a nVidia 960 or higher. 10.11 is supposed to run ok, but I haven't upgraded any of my daily systems to it yet as I'm not sure it is stable enough. I know why GCD was implemented in 10.6, and they've been continuing to migrate more and more subsystems to the GCD system with each release, but 10.11 wasn't smooth, same with all of 10.7 and the first couple releases of 10.8, 10.10, and 10.11. 10.11 is still having some issues even with 10.11.4. Once GCD is fully incorporated, I'll bet you $1 that you're going to see massive core counts on Apple products. 10, 20, 100+. Because a message passing paradigm greatly increases the ability to parallel process things over the old threading model and core clock speed is no longer increasing.
I guess this is where we differ. I've tested my late model MBP 16GB RAM and 500GB SSD system against my hexcore desktop. It's faster in quite a few things, and the only place where the laptop struggles to meet the desktop is in video encoding (something about 6 cores running around 3.5GHz trumps 4 cores of a newer couple of gen CPUs turbo'd at 3.4GHz every day, but the laptop is still no slouch:) As far as running compilations, the laptop is actually faster than the dual 850 RAID0 setup on the desktop, with or without running the full unit test suite as well. That shocked me. I've also had 3 VMs up and running including 2 Windows VMs and a Linux VM with no trouble on the laptop, and a couple of DBs. To say it's not beefy enough, you're likely outside the capacity of most if not all laptops. The SSDs they use in these MBPs are nothing short of amazing and blow everything SATA connected out of the water.
I'd say the MBP has earned its "Pro" moniker. Yeah, I may not like the lack of serviceability, but if I don't need to service it, what's the problem? That was the entire thing that drew me to MBPs in the first place. Buy it, configure it like you want, and then use it for 5+ years and never worry about hardware again. I've had 5 Apple laptops, a PowerBook I sold after 5 years, a 2006 early intel that is still in use but long in the tooth and going out to pasture shortly, a 2009 that developed a SATA controller glitch in early 2015, a 2013 work system that is still in daily use, and my current 2014 laptop (replaced the 2009) that has had no issues to date. I only mention this to note that the only changes were to the 2006 getting an SSD and memory upgrade, and the 2009 also getting an SSD and memory upgrade. The rest came with full memory and have needed no updates. The only battery replacement was for the 2006 and was done for free in the 5th year due to a recall.
I understand that OWC now has SSD upgrades, but I have no reason to get one at this point. 500GB for a working laptop is sufficient, as long as you don't carry around every bit of digital cruft you've collected for the last 20 years. It's portable, you have external storage for those things. You really have to ask yourself at this point what do you need vs what do you want. My needs are covered, my wants are mostly covered or can be accommodated easily.
Now where I think Apple is screwing up is with the mini/Mac Pro configurations. I get that they don't want to cannibalize their Mac Pros, but the 2012 minis rocked for low power reliable servers. Drop 2 SSDs in RAID 1 and you had a pretty rock steady low power Unix server for most things you could want. Mac Pros deal with a different group - they are for desktop use, but Apple's positioning them as a grid combo, if I read their intentions correctly, so they can use those GPUs in a grid application (basically lots of headless Mac Pros). The minis can also be used this way, and with quad i7s were actually pretty cost effective. The problem apple has is that a regular solid PC box with 4 NVidia or AMD cards linked will dollar for dollar beat a Mac Pro configuration, mainly because they haven't upgraded in 2 years.
A dual core i5 mini at a sub $400 price point is fine for casual desktop use, but for heavier desktop users that don't need the GPU firepower of the Mac Pro a quad i7 mini at a sub $700 price with reasonable or upgradeable RAM would certainly be nice.
Fortunately for me, I am only inflicted with Windows on my work machine; so it's more of an academic exercise that I watch with bemusement than a "OMG" thing for me.
As of yesterday, I am down to the 1 holdout, and fortunately the W10 thing doesn't apply to that one:)
It's not all about LD50 numbers. O2 or H2O can both kill you, yet, like salt, you must have them. Glyphosate has no beneficial health properties, it merely makes farming "easier" apparently. We grew crops successfully long before glyphosate, maybe we should review that effort. Considering one of the linked stories, in western societies incidences of various chronic diseases has increased markedly since Glyphosate entered wide-spread use.
FYI, IIRC, there's at least 3 KBs related to the W10 update "virus" which as of just recently added Windows Update itself as a 4th with the recommended setting for W10. There's at least 10 related to telemetry junk. I have not kept up, because I took my own advice years ago and switched to alternative systems where ever possible, and am actively moving those that request my support to alternatives as well. No one has been upset that has moved. That says something about the level of pain that MS is inflicting on people. Of my last 3 holdouts, 1 is actively looking to switch, 1 is pretty open to it, and one is of the opinion that they'll pry XP out of their cold dead fingers.
In short, install W7 from a known "clean" source, as much as that exists, and then manually download and update only those pieces that you deem necessary. There's a list out there somewhere with what you need.
While I may be flippant above, it actually is the right answer for 99% of windows users, including most admins. If you're running any still supported windows, you will need to expend significant effort to ensure that you are both "safe"* and not subject to those "bad" updates.
I say this from the POV of someone that has gone through that process with NT/2K/XP/2003/2008/2008R2 in stripping down the OS to only what was needed, removing large amounts of useless (to me) and insecure components and only keeping those that were needed updated. The first step in any of these processes is to remove Windows Update entirely from the system. The second is download all updates you need. If you're lucky, a service pack can be used and then stripped down post install. In others, be prepared for a couple of days of fun getting everything packaged up. Slipstreaming an install disk used to be the way to go. With the latter few OSes we didn't have to install much, because those were appliances that were heavily restricted and cordoned off from just about everything with only 2 services really available. Keeping up with the updates is a different story though, that's almost a full time job.
* "safe" means you have the updates necessary for security for those components you have running, as much as windows can be made "safe". You'll note elsewhere that my opinion on windows (in)security can be summed up as "a castle built on sand". Everything you code in windows has to design around the masked security tokens they use, where each process must have a maximum permission token for the process with permissions masked for anything you wish to reduce. There is no permission elevation, only removal of mask(s). This is why every buffer exploit in windows is a potential System level process, since just about every process starts with System when it's spawned.
How can I check to see if I was infected with this Windows Malware in my Win 7 system?
And second, if it did do that, is there any way to throw the genie out of the bottle? (Get rid of the spyware?)
Does your system run any MS OSes newer than DOS? Then you have Windows Malware.
For the average person, the only way to run Windows 7 plus without getting malware is to not connect that machine to any network that allows access to the internet. This includes generic malware as well as the lovely virus otherwise known as w10.
My primary gripe with Apple's offerings are lack of upgradable RAM, especially in the new minis along with dropping the quad cores. Ridiculous. The 2012s were the best minis ever for certain tasks, and the new ones are way overpriced by comparison. If they maxed out at roughly $700 fully loaded, maybe the changes would be acceptable, especially if a Mac Pro dropped into the $900 or so price range. But that's a different conversation.
As for laptop memory, I get why they soldered it on - it reduces the thickness of the machine by at least a quarter inch and/or increases battery capacity. Plus, it removes a primary area for damage and operational problems. While you and I may be savvy enough to grab the correct RAM for an upgrade, especially when that may exceed the officially supported max ram, many people think the cheapest "laptop" RAM sold at whatever store is near them should work just fine. After they zap their motherboard, they take it to the Genius bar with the original RAM in it, and now it becomes a "what failed" question. With the pricing offered, at least when I bought mine on sale, it wasn't a huge issue. (I'm guessing pricing mistake, because I paid at least $700 under a later price for what I think was the same machine).
Now, in 2016, I agree they should be offering at least a maximum 32GB laptops, however I haven't needed more than the 16 in mine. with the drive hardware in the laptops, swap space is no where near as useless as with the old spinning disks and is actually fine the handful of times I have needed it. Spinning disks in a meant to be portable device? No thanks. I'd hazard a guess an optical drive is useless for more than 99.999999% of the use of the laptop away from home base. An external optical works well and doesn't impact weight or performance. I have 2, because one is an HD-DVD player that sits in the closet....
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Let me put this another way, if you have an older car, but want to spend $650 on a new iPhone, are you not willing to spend $15 on a BT adapter?
http://amzn.to/1P22AN8 - $15
I'd like it to be integrated a little better in my car than the equivalent of a mere audio plug. BTW, what's the sound quality over BT? I haven't tried, but voice calls often are considerably degraded compared to direct phone use. A streaming solution would also require buffering that I doubt a $15 device will provide. This is why I started my post with the unmentioned but implied Carplay/Android Auto which does exactly what I'm looking for regarding audio. That didn't happen really until the last year or 2.
You'll have to provide some backup for that privacy assertion. OSX doesn't send anything to Apple if I don't want it to. I cannot stop Windows from sending data if I am connected to the internet.
As for commercial OS environments, exactly what are you wanting or needing? If it is a secure system with windows, you'll need to completely detach from the internet or run some seriously interesting firewalls and proxies. I've been in that environment, it seems easier to just go with something else, honestly, as I have also been in a secure UNIX based shop, and that was much much simpler to deal with with no real issues.
Add in that Windows itself is an insecure architecture, and the answer seems obvious - the only secure private system is a non-windows system.
Windows. The cheapest, best option. If your time is worthless.
Linux has never been an option when your time is worthless. Anyone thinking that there is no time commitment when learning how to use a tool has a broken valuation standard - they're also ignoring all the time they have spent learning and fighting with the O.S. they are currently using.
This is what people don't understand. A LiveCD(DVD) will get you running on Linux with minimal fuss, much like the initial crappy windows install. Windows was alluring because it was simpler for many, and came pre-installed. Plus, Office ran on it. Office is now no longer as important (seriously, it isn't, you can live without it even in an Office oriented world) and the costs of keeping Windows running and not invading your privacy IMHO has now exceeded learning Mac OS or Linux. Hell, even learning how to build and install Gentoo might be simpler.
Now if you'll excuse me I'll go back to grumbling about systemd, GNOME 3.x and other real problems . . . except we can route around the damage.
Systemd is banned on any system I run. Any *service* that demands that POSIX compliant apps be rewritten to its non-POSIX standards is a massive FAIL. The sooner the various systemd pandering distros realize that, the better. Or maybe not. After all, NetBSD, or any BSD really, is rock solid and a better system in many ways. And no systemd there. :)
Because NVMe drives are meant to go about 10 times the speed of SATA III. That might be a slight strain on the interconnect.
Having BT is one thing, having BT that supports audio is another.
I would really like to inject false information into the telemetry instead, wild and crazy enough to mess up things completely and render the telemetry useless.
I said the same thing about browser fingerprinting, FB image scanning, etc. Haven't seen anyone produce one, and I'm too busy for things I don't use anyways or don't affect me.
A more insightful question is one you should ask yourself: "With a company almost as anti-consumer as Sony, why are you still doing business with them?"
A better question regarding windows 10 is: "If I have to learn all this technical crap just to retain some privacy, perhaps I should look at an alternative OS. I've heard about Macs and Linux, maybe they aren't so bad".
My car has BT, but doesn't support playing audio through it. In fact, only recently has BT been audio compatible AFAIK, because I've been looking at options to make that happen. So, I'd say anyone that bought ANY car prior to 2016 model years, for Android or iOS. Or after market radios since about 2013, which isn't an option for some cars.
I do know that MS received around $87 per copy of HPFS, and the amount per HPFS386 sounds excessive, but not by an order of magnitude. The price of their HPFS licenses drove the price of both Win95 and NT, so that those would cause IBM to suffer a loss on every copy of OS/2 sold if they were to compete with Windows. Remember that MS wanted OS/2 to fail, and they almost failed until Office95 was purposefully made to break OS/2 support by querying memory at 2GB on startup. Never needed it, would never use it, but OS/2's VM's maxed out at 512MB, and would return an error, causing Office95 to fail to load. Definitely a dirty trick, because otherwise, Office95, IIRC, could run on OS/2 just fine. Add in the 10 months of failing to support older office versions and the upgrade cycle at the time, and MS killed off OS/2 by incompatibility in a large swath of industries.
Lotus Notes should be a rotted pile of compost by now. That it outlived OS/2 (officially anyways) is a crying shame.
The server version should have been repacked as the client for OS/2 Warp 5, but it would have cost well over $250 due to the MS tax exacted on HPFS386. It could have been released in 1994 and been a huge improvement over the cluster that was NT.
It was very rare that *new* mainstream hardware actually worked. If you waited a few months, the needed drivers came out, and all was well.
On Linux, in those days, you could become a neckbeard before a driver came out to support whatever flavor hardware you happen to want to buy that week. If you stuck to certain high dollar items that met specs, then you were fine.
Linux was for people who didn't necessarily need the latest, shiniest new thing, it was for people who knew their shit. If it almost never worked (ever) on mainstream hardware, then it would have gone the way of OS/2...because that's actually what the problem was with OS/2. Mainstream hardware didn't work...
Incorrect, Windows specific hardware didn't work. That it was considered "mainstream" is also incorrect. In general, windows hardware was cheap and marketed to joe blow consumer, whereas things like HP LaserJets which implemented accepted standards worked just fine with OS/2. In fact, they worked better than Windows anything boxes because they all depended upon the GDI interface to print, and that was specific to the machine and device configuration they had, thus altering printed pages on a computer basis. There was no guarantee even 2 identical PCs with different software would print a page the same way even out of Word. That's how "awesome" windows was.
I get a kick out of the fact that OS/2 will now support USB...but only 1.1 and 2.0. I mean seriously...what's the fucking point?
OS/2 supported USB 2.0 prior to Linux supporting it. What's your point?
You don't mention what version you were running. 2.0 admittedly sucked. 2.1 was reasonably decent on supported hardware. 2.2 was by far better. On the particular hardware I had, Win95 was absolutely unusable (EISA and "Smartdrive" did not get along, with the latter wiping the CMOS EISA configuration on install) and NT 3.5 was unbearably slow and had no supported software of note at the time.
There were legacy drivers in 16 bit, but OS/2 itself was primarily 32 bit by Warp 4, except for... you guessed it: HPFS, which was wholly MS's purview. Now I wonder why on earth MS was interested in keeping that driver 16 bit and didn't allow IBM to run the 32 bit HPFS386? It couldn't have anything to do with their absolutely sucky NT?
Read the 4 patents, they're not much more than a description of the TOR router and standard internet components that were around in the 80s. I'd have to dig too deeply to dispute each one of those patents, but it seems obvious that they are broad generic idea patents without a shred of invention in them, giving the pre-existing and publicly available source code at the time. All 4 patents should be voided on the basis of pre-existing art.
You're either trying to run a fully scaled out production configuration that forces memory consumption
Precisely. I'm not just running a test suite against the code (which should have been obvious as I could run tests against code for any platform from any platform, thus negating the need to run the actual OSes) but automated functionality testing against individual builds. I need a production environment (e.g. one that closely matches what the end user will be using) in order to do that; so, yes, I'm running a fully scaled out production configuration. Out of necessity.
Fully scaled out production system can mean several things - one is using 128 GB of RAM to support 100K+ concurrent users in sub 500ms service call times, the other is a complete system scaled out to support 100 users in 4GB of RAM in sub 500ms service call times. (I hate waiting, I will rarely sacrifice response speed for scalability into smaller footprints)
To be sure, I just checked. System Information lists it as a MacBook Pro 11,3 and About This Mac states Mid 2014.
Exact same laptop I have, 500GB SSD. There is something seriously wrong with yours if the fans kick up and it throttles watching a youtube video. Mine doesn't even have a blip on the front page trump video, although now I need some mint.
I have two of them, each capable of 1100MB/sec writes, in a RAID0.
Still slow.... NVMe promises 3GB/s +, per drive. ;) Apple's MBPs are supposed to be running NVMe in the next release, but that is an unsubstantiated rumor at this point. It would follow the previous 3 releases though, roughly doubling disk performance on each release.
And now we have DDR4, which goes up to 19200MB/sec bandwidth in currently available modules. Faster speeds will be developed, so... wake me when I can buy an M.2 SSD that tops 20GB/sec with seek times measured in clock cycles rather than microseconds. I'll write a fat check for a couple of them.
And seek times are dropping with NVMe as well. But the point is having a "smaller" high performance memory with a reasonably fast swap space may suffice unless you're willing to drop serious coin on pure memory as it's always faster, we all know that. But I do wish they'd offer a 32 or 64 GB option, just to have more than I need available on my next laptop.
Unless you're RAM-constrained, in which case sharing some system RAM with the Intel GPU might just be the thing that gets you swapping.
Well, there is that.
You, sir, are mistaken. They do appear to have an error on their site, not surprising given that they've let this model stagnate;
Well, I'll be darned. They're still selling the mid 2012 model. That's a surprise. Stagnate isn't what I'd call that. ;)
I do the same, and my MBP and 1 external 2TB disk carries everything I "need"
Uh... I don't see how an external disk has any bearing on the amount of RAM available for running additional operating systems in a virtualized environment, but okay...
It allows me to carry all those non-essential low-hit but desired things that otherwise would take up extra space on the high end SSD that is better served as swap space if needed.
I find, quite often, that my Mac is using upward of around 12GB of RAM (minus buffers, caches, and the like) while my PC sits comfortably at just over 8GB running the same applications.
I'm running 3-4 IDEs, XCode, Mail, Safari with multiple tabs open (memory hog), multiple terminal sessions, MySQL, H2 test suites, and currently my memory stack is at 20GB out of 24GB, mostly due to some heavy research involving about 20+ safari tabs being open (you know how much RAM that eats). My laptop runs a similar stack, minus the 20-40 safari tabs, and rarely exceeds 16GB. This includes running both XCode iOS emulation and Android Studio plus emulation, and the entire server side stack and applications. My windows VMs are restricted to 4GB RAM max generally because I'm testing, not running production levels, or, for browsers, down to 1.5GB. Linux VMs, depending upon use, are similarly restricted, except they range from 1-4GB. I also tend to tune my VMs to not be running crap they don't need. Memory hasn't been a problem yet, even on a project that required Oracle on windows, SugarCRM on windows (separate VM) and JBoss on Windows (yep, 3 windows servers, on a laptop no less)
You're either trying to run a fully scaled out production configuration that forces memory consumption, or your requirements are far far higher than mine, which would surprise me and result in "I wish to subscribe to your newsletter" ;)
As for test suites - I run a full set today, my laptop runs it fastest. It still takes 45 minutes or so to run upwards of a total of 2000 unit and integration tests across the entire build. I could, if I really wanted to spend the week working on it, likely reduce that entire runtime down to around 5 minutes, but it would be a wasted week since I hardly ever run the entire set and wait on it, I offload the full suite to my CI server and only deal with the subset I need locally 99% of the time.
You know, if I could do it legally, I'd just throw the 32GB in my PC and run OS X in a VM and call it a day. But I can't, and I also can't buy a MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM and the models that come with RAM slots only support up to 16GB (again, only 8GB officially); so, I carry 3 laptops when I know I'm going to have to work remotely.
I would have sworn that the last pluggable set supported 16GB officially and 32GB max. I just checked, you are correct, only 8GB officially. At this point, that's unbelievable. Even the minis are 8GB officially. I have a few of those, and they're all maxed out at 16GB and have been, for years. I guess that just made me assume 16GB was the official max.
I'm good with not doing that; I just won't buy another Apple computer until they sell something that fits my needs. If the one I'm using currently (well, there are two but one won't boot OS X anymore for reasons discussed earlier in the thread) happens to break before Apple starts selling something that actually suits my needs (or begins allowing OS X to run on non-Apple hardware, legally and without hacks), well, I g
The current crop is finally using the slot M drives my 2013 model PC is using? I could swear my 2013 rMBP uses one as well, though I didn't look that closely and it might simply be PCIe.
It appears to be the case since 2014, at least.
And I question your knowledge of Apple's product lines given the following:
when they stopped selling non retina MBPs
Because, well, it seems they still sell the 13" MBP which, really, should have been obvious since I linked to it earlier in the thread.
go to that link, click on the MBP picture. You'll note that when you do, it will come up with an enlarged picture with "Macbook Pro with Retina". AFAIK, they no longer sell non retina MBPs, and haven't for at least the last couple of years. To go non-retina, you have to buy a Macbook.
For references, as a software developer who tests on all common platforms, gaming is not my focus either (I have consoles for that). 32GB in one machine capable of legally running OS X without a bunch of hackery would mean I no longer need to maintain 3 separate systems for testing purposes, which is why I'm seeking precisely that. No, a Mac Pro is not the solution, as it lacks the portability I often need. One of the perks of working for myself is that I can work from wherever (this means traveling with the wife when she goes to visit family), which basically requires that all of my equipment be portable.
I do the same, and my MBP and 1 external 2TB disk carries everything I "need", extending to my music library and latest few movies I haven't seen yet. ;) I have a set of configured VMs on the laptop for those support needs plus a set of pristine originals on the external. (Copy to the internal, then configure if I need something different, also allows me to keep any clients separated) I guess I've gone one step further along this path or you would have to make a concession that is not palatable.
Ah, but instruction efficiency is. Don't underestimate how important that is; you'll note that the performance of each subsequent release from Intel exceeds that of the previous generation at the same clock speed. Well, given your workload you might not, but a lot of others do, myself included.
As I mentioned, I have the 980x. When OC'd to match the turbo clock speeds of the current top of the line crop, the performance is no more than 50% improved in the new processors with several general benchmarks. That's a 6 year old CPU, and not enough of an improvement to warrant upgrading the system. Microbenchmarks show marked improvements in some cases, but microbenchmarks are not very useful for comparing general performance. With the next CPU releases with 20+ cores, I may consider it, but only once the price hits some reasonable number. Now, that's for desktops, for laptops which are power driven, the performance has definitely been improving per power consumption, but they're close to hitting desktop limits at this point as compared to desktop performance per core. You just can't cram 12+ cores in a laptop just yet and get reasonable performance (battery life) plus you could probably roast a turkey with it.
Yeah, the m.2 SSDs are pretty cool, but the general market ones you see are generally significantly slower. You have to go high end to match the Apple MBPs of which the current crop actually use slot M M.2 drives. :) Those use 4 PCIe lanes for 1400+ MB/s. MBPs were ahead of the pack again, my 2014 has the 2 lane SSDs with 700MB/s transfers, which explains the huge speed improvement over my RAID0 850 SATA III setup on the desktop, even 2 850s just can't pump through more than about 400MB/s continuous. I'd have to go with 4 in a RAID 0 configuration, or buy faster drives, which I'm sure some exist by now as the last upgrade was over a year ago.
Now I bought my mid 2014 15" MBP on sale from B&H with AppleCare, 16GB RAM and 500GB storage, and it ran me about $2200, minus another $300 or so trade in for the flaky 2009 (I just didn't feel right selling it to someone knowing the root issue, so I recycled it) The 2015s are twice as fast disk speed wise, but I doubt I'd notice at this point :) I do notice when I have to use one of the 40MB/s (disk I/O) dev boxes I have lying around. Those things crawl.
Lastly, I'd 100% agree if gaming was my focus. It's not. So for non-game non-GPU specific loads I just don't notice a difference. BTW, you keep mentioning rMBP... exactly how OLD is that MBP? It hasn't been known as a rMBP since early 2013, IIRC, when they stopped selling non retina MBPs. Yes, marketing keeps the "MBP with Retina Display" going on their web site, but no one I know expects to see anything but a retina screen when someone says "I have a MBP". For my 2006, which is a MBP, I'd never say "oh yeah, use my MBP" and hand them that machine... :-D
I haven't tried back-porting SL to my MBP, I know it runs on the desktop, because I still have a SL image somewhere. It ran ML fine, which in its last iteration was somewhat stable, but 10.10.5 runs fine. Note: this is on an intel 980x LGA-1366 which is still standard BIOS, running currently with a substandard AMD card in it as I haven't bothered upgrading to a nVidia 960 or higher. 10.11 is supposed to run ok, but I haven't upgraded any of my daily systems to it yet as I'm not sure it is stable enough. I know why GCD was implemented in 10.6, and they've been continuing to migrate more and more subsystems to the GCD system with each release, but 10.11 wasn't smooth, same with all of 10.7 and the first couple releases of 10.8, 10.10, and 10.11. 10.11 is still having some issues even with 10.11.4. Once GCD is fully incorporated, I'll bet you $1 that you're going to see massive core counts on Apple products. 10, 20, 100+. Because a message passing paradigm greatly increases the ability to parallel process things over the old threading model and core clock speed is no longer increasing.
I guess this is where we differ. I've tested my late model MBP 16GB RAM and 500GB SSD system against my hexcore desktop. It's faster in quite a few things, and the only place where the laptop struggles to meet the desktop is in video encoding (something about 6 cores running around 3.5GHz trumps 4 cores of a newer couple of gen CPUs turbo'd at 3.4GHz every day, but the laptop is still no slouch :) As far as running compilations, the laptop is actually faster than the dual 850 RAID0 setup on the desktop, with or without running the full unit test suite as well. That shocked me. I've also had 3 VMs up and running including 2 Windows VMs and a Linux VM with no trouble on the laptop, and a couple of DBs. To say it's not beefy enough, you're likely outside the capacity of most if not all laptops. The SSDs they use in these MBPs are nothing short of amazing and blow everything SATA connected out of the water.
I'd say the MBP has earned its "Pro" moniker. Yeah, I may not like the lack of serviceability, but if I don't need to service it, what's the problem? That was the entire thing that drew me to MBPs in the first place. Buy it, configure it like you want, and then use it for 5+ years and never worry about hardware again. I've had 5 Apple laptops, a PowerBook I sold after 5 years, a 2006 early intel that is still in use but long in the tooth and going out to pasture shortly, a 2009 that developed a SATA controller glitch in early 2015, a 2013 work system that is still in daily use, and my current 2014 laptop (replaced the 2009) that has had no issues to date. I only mention this to note that the only changes were to the 2006 getting an SSD and memory upgrade, and the 2009 also getting an SSD and memory upgrade. The rest came with full memory and have needed no updates. The only battery replacement was for the 2006 and was done for free in the 5th year due to a recall.
I understand that OWC now has SSD upgrades, but I have no reason to get one at this point. 500GB for a working laptop is sufficient, as long as you don't carry around every bit of digital cruft you've collected for the last 20 years. It's portable, you have external storage for those things. You really have to ask yourself at this point what do you need vs what do you want. My needs are covered, my wants are mostly covered or can be accommodated easily.
Now where I think Apple is screwing up is with the mini/Mac Pro configurations. I get that they don't want to cannibalize their Mac Pros, but the 2012 minis rocked for low power reliable servers. Drop 2 SSDs in RAID 1 and you had a pretty rock steady low power Unix server for most things you could want. Mac Pros deal with a different group - they are for desktop use, but Apple's positioning them as a grid combo, if I read their intentions correctly, so they can use those GPUs in a grid application (basically lots of headless Mac Pros). The minis can also be used this way, and with quad i7s were actually pretty cost effective. The problem apple has is that a regular solid PC box with 4 NVidia or AMD cards linked will dollar for dollar beat a Mac Pro configuration, mainly because they haven't upgraded in 2 years.
A dual core i5 mini at a sub $400 price point is fine for casual desktop use, but for heavier desktop users that don't need the GPU firepower of the Mac Pro a quad i7 mini at a sub $700 price with reasonable or upgradeable RAM would certainly be nice.
Fortunately for me, I am only inflicted with Windows on my work machine; so it's more of an academic exercise that I watch with bemusement than a "OMG" thing for me.
As of yesterday, I am down to the 1 holdout, and fortunately the W10 thing doesn't apply to that one :)
Perhaps you shouldn't be so sure of yourself. Glyphosate may not be lethal immediately as used, but it does appear to have unexpected detrimental effects. And then there's the really bad "inert" ingredient effect to consider.
It's not all about LD50 numbers. O2 or H2O can both kill you, yet, like salt, you must have them. Glyphosate has no beneficial health properties, it merely makes farming "easier" apparently. We grew crops successfully long before glyphosate, maybe we should review that effort. Considering one of the linked stories, in western societies incidences of various chronic diseases has increased markedly since Glyphosate entered wide-spread use.
FYI, IIRC, there's at least 3 KBs related to the W10 update "virus" which as of just recently added Windows Update itself as a 4th with the recommended setting for W10. There's at least 10 related to telemetry junk. I have not kept up, because I took my own advice years ago and switched to alternative systems where ever possible, and am actively moving those that request my support to alternatives as well. No one has been upset that has moved. That says something about the level of pain that MS is inflicting on people. Of my last 3 holdouts, 1 is actively looking to switch, 1 is pretty open to it, and one is of the opinion that they'll pry XP out of their cold dead fingers.
In short, install W7 from a known "clean" source, as much as that exists, and then manually download and update only those pieces that you deem necessary. There's a list out there somewhere with what you need.
While I may be flippant above, it actually is the right answer for 99% of windows users, including most admins. If you're running any still supported windows, you will need to expend significant effort to ensure that you are both "safe"* and not subject to those "bad" updates.
I say this from the POV of someone that has gone through that process with NT/2K/XP/2003/2008/2008R2 in stripping down the OS to only what was needed, removing large amounts of useless (to me) and insecure components and only keeping those that were needed updated. The first step in any of these processes is to remove Windows Update entirely from the system. The second is download all updates you need. If you're lucky, a service pack can be used and then stripped down post install. In others, be prepared for a couple of days of fun getting everything packaged up. Slipstreaming an install disk used to be the way to go. With the latter few OSes we didn't have to install much, because those were appliances that were heavily restricted and cordoned off from just about everything with only 2 services really available. Keeping up with the updates is a different story though, that's almost a full time job.
* "safe" means you have the updates necessary for security for those components you have running, as much as windows can be made "safe". You'll note elsewhere that my opinion on windows (in)security can be summed up as "a castle built on sand". Everything you code in windows has to design around the masked security tokens they use, where each process must have a maximum permission token for the process with permissions masked for anything you wish to reduce. There is no permission elevation, only removal of mask(s). This is why every buffer exploit in windows is a potential System level process, since just about every process starts with System when it's spawned.
How can I check to see if I was infected with this Windows Malware in my Win 7 system? And second, if it did do that, is there any way to throw the genie out of the bottle? (Get rid of the spyware?)
Does your system run any MS OSes newer than DOS? Then you have Windows Malware.
For the average person, the only way to run Windows 7 plus without getting malware is to not connect that machine to any network that allows access to the internet. This includes generic malware as well as the lovely virus otherwise known as w10.
My primary gripe with Apple's offerings are lack of upgradable RAM, especially in the new minis along with dropping the quad cores. Ridiculous. The 2012s were the best minis ever for certain tasks, and the new ones are way overpriced by comparison. If they maxed out at roughly $700 fully loaded, maybe the changes would be acceptable, especially if a Mac Pro dropped into the $900 or so price range. But that's a different conversation.
As for laptop memory, I get why they soldered it on - it reduces the thickness of the machine by at least a quarter inch and/or increases battery capacity. Plus, it removes a primary area for damage and operational problems. While you and I may be savvy enough to grab the correct RAM for an upgrade, especially when that may exceed the officially supported max ram, many people think the cheapest "laptop" RAM sold at whatever store is near them should work just fine. After they zap their motherboard, they take it to the Genius bar with the original RAM in it, and now it becomes a "what failed" question. With the pricing offered, at least when I bought mine on sale, it wasn't a huge issue. (I'm guessing pricing mistake, because I paid at least $700 under a later price for what I think was the same machine).
Now, in 2016, I agree they should be offering at least a maximum 32GB laptops, however I haven't needed more than the 16 in mine. with the drive hardware in the laptops, swap space is no where near as useless as with the old spinning disks and is actually fine the handful of times I have needed it. Spinning disks in a meant to be portable device? No thanks. I'd hazard a guess an optical drive is useless for more than 99.999999% of the use of the laptop away from home base. An external optical works well and doesn't impact weight or performance. I have 2, because one is an HD-DVD player that sits in the closet....