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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The default actually works pretty well these days.

    Messing with the EFI partition, for instance by attempting to have two of those on separate disks, will probably cause you more pain than Windows will. As far as I understand, only one EFI partition can be configured in BIOS as the boot partition, so you will have to change the configuration in BIOS whenever you want to boot to the other OS.

    Windows does have a history of changing the default EFI bootloader once in a while; however your chosen bootloader is still there, just not marked as the default anymore. A Windows app like EasyUEFI will let you change the default back.



  • One funny thing about humans is that they aren’t just gloriously fallible: they also get quite upset when that’s pointed out. :)

    Unfortunately, that’s also how you end up with blameful company cultures that actively make reliability worse, because then your humans make just the same amounts of mistakes, but they hide them – and you never get a chance to evolve your systems with the safeguards that would have prevented these.






  • Thank you! I know all these things. This still doesn’t help when the DAW support and VST compatibility aren’t there.

    If you’re intent on doing music production on Linux, at least do yourself a favor and get a Reaper license, there are few enough pro DAWs that are Linux native. But be aware that many of the big industry VSTs are still not going to work. If you’re fine sticking to e.g. ZynAddSubFX or Pianoteq, though, knock yourself out.

    But you can’t reasonably expect musicians to jump those hoops and abandon their fav VSTs when their Windows tooling is there, and works.





  • Big missing piece there: cloud.

    In the first half of the 2010s, there was a study from Gartner or another such company, that forecast that the cloud service market would amount to 1 trillion USD/year by 2030 or so, and since then the big players have been racing to try and carve as much as possible of the future juicy pie from Amazon’s hands.

    Google completely missed the boat at first then pivoted hard. MS leveraged its deep enterprise presence as hard as it could to get existing customers into its cloud offering; that’s why your MS consumer products (Office, OneDrive, etc) are tied at the hip with cloud these days. Not for consumers, for the business market.

    It’s business to business, however, so the generak public doesn’t hear about it a lot. It’s also largely non-sexy, and therefore not headline-worthy, with a few exceptions. The whole AI thing, for instance. But even there, consumers are not the target market. Cloud customers are.

    In that sense Google, MS and Amazon absolutely already are the new IBM and Oracle.

    Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, Meta is still trying to execute on its mission to connect people while still headed by people who have no idea how people connect. Apple is Apple, keeps just making oodles of money off the kind of people who buy Apple products.






  • A CPU performs operations like “read a small bit of thing from the memory into the CPU” and “do a small bit of computation on things inside the CPU” and “put a small bit of thing from the CPU into the memory”.

    Doing small bits of computation on things inside the CPU is very fast but moving bits of things from or to the memory is slow in comparison. In order to not be slowed down, CPUs read the code ahead of what is currently being executed, and try to guess what is going to happen and what will need to be moved from the memory into the CPU, so they can do it ahead of time, and have the small bit of thing from the memory already available right there in the CPU when it’s time to do a bit of computation on it. That way, there is no need to wait on slow memory, and the CPU runs much faster overall. That’s a good thing.

    In this case, a researcher found a way to make certain CPUs guess what is going to happen with the code wrong, in such a way that the small bits of things that were read from the memory ahead of time do not get properly cleaned up, and can still be found inside the CPU by another program. Those small bits of things might be your password or banking details, so that’s bad.