I'm still sad that Linux dropped support for i486 and early-i586 CPUs.
And more disappointed that distributions especially Debian the "universal operating system" has dropped support for i586 already (and is dropping support for i686)
Open-source doesn't have the same pressures of commercial software from Apple or Microsoft. I really love the idea of obsessive, perfectionism approach of providing indefinite hardware support to obscure old hardware (but especially once-popular old hardware), with adequate automated testing suites to test ancient hardware.
Maybe with agentic AI coding we'll be able to expand support windows, and even bring back hardware support for older hardware.
> Open-source doesn't have the same pressures of commercial software from Apple or Microsoft.
Open source has a pressure that's often even more difficult to overcome: limited spare time from volunteer maintainers. Volunteers are usually drawn from the pool of users. There aren't many i586 users left, so the pool of volunteers is small enough that there's no one able or willing to maintain Debian for it.
If you're that disappointed, step up to maintain the i586 port! If you're unable or unwilling to do so, then you have your answer, generalized across all i586 enthusiasts, as to why they dropped support.
Open-source doesn't have the same pressures of commercial software from Apple or Microsoft
Look at who contributes to the Linux kernel. We'd never have "secure" boot or any of that hostile lockdown stuff if it wasn't tainted with commercial interests pushing their agenda.
> We'd never have "secure" boot or any of that hostile lockdown stuff if it wasn't tainted with commercial interests pushing their agenda.
To be fair, there is value to be had in reasonably trustworthy cryptography and computing. As long as you can enroll your own certificates in the secure-boot trustchain, you can have a device where you can be reasonably certain that, even assuming an evil-maid attack, as long as your computer is powered down, it is protected against a wide, wide class of attacks.
And for some people, that matters. Even in the US, greetings go out to ICE.
I imagine you don't need to; you can emulate i586 on x86_64, and it would probably be performant enough.
But I suspect that's not really the hurdle: none of the existing Debian developers care enough about it to maintain it, and no one who cares about it enough about it is willing to maintain it.
NetBSD has the same problem that the major Linux distros do, it's just expressed differently. Instead of dropping support like the Linux distros do, they will keep cross-compiling for old and obscure platforms even if nobody cares enough about them to test them. Then major breakages will start to appear that make the ports unusable (crash on boot, no video, no keyboard input, etc) and they go unnoticed for years because these ports have no actual real-world users. The only benefit I can think of for the project being set up this way is that it makes some nostalgic Gen X'ers happy when they pull up the NetBSD site and go "oh I could run a supported OS on my 68k Mac/Next Cube/Windows CE handheld/whatever, that's neat" and then they go about the rest of their day without actually doing that.
The shotgun approach (suing FB, TikTok, Snapchat, and Google simultaneously) makes this sound as ridiculous as the punchline "woman sues McDonalds for coffee being too hot" (distinct from that actual case, which was less ridiculous than the headline).
Suing Facebook for systematically behaving badly is one thing, if you can prove it and prove it harmed you.
Suing _everybody_ is one random person getting rich for… being mad at the world she was born into?
> the punchline "woman sues McDonalds for coffee being too hot" (distinct from that actual case, which was less ridiculous than the headline).
Whenever the McDonald's coffee case comes up, I always see caveats about how the actual case was a lot less sensational than the "woman sues McDonald's for coffee being too hot" headline implies.
I strongly disagree. I'm very familiar with the details of the actual case, and the Wikipedia article gives a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau... . Yes, the plaintiff received horrific third degree burns when she spilled the coffee on herself, but lots of products can cause horrible harm if used incorrectly - people cut fingers off all the time with kitchen knives, for example.
I find the headline "Woman sues McDonald's for their coffee being too hot" a completely accurate description of what happened, with no hyperbole and no "ridiculousness" at all.
You neglected to mention:
- It was company policy to keep coffee excessively hot (180-190 degrees Fahrenheit, vs 140 or so for coffee brewed at home). This was to make customers drink it more slowly and request fewer refills
- Other customers had suffered similar burns, and McDonald's knew about it and did not change the policy
McDonald's, then, was willfully and inevitably causing injury to random customers in order to save themselves a few cents in coffee.
In light of those facts, I think a $2M verdict was too low, and the executives who decided to continue keeping the coffee that hot should have been criminally charged with reckless endangerment.
> 180-190 degrees Fahrenheit, vs 140 or so for coffee brewed at home
Did you just make up that 140 number? To add to the other sibling comment, SCA (https://sca.coffee/) requires that water contacts the grounds at a temp of 195-205 F and that the coffee be at a temp of 175-185 up to 30 mins after brewing in order to certify home brewers:
> The SCA ensures that the brewer's carafe is appropriately sized for its designated machine and can maintain the coffee's warmth. Specifically, the brew must stay within the range of 176 °-185°F (80°-85°C) for at least 30 minutes post-brew. While retaining this warmth, the machine must never actively reheat the brew, ensuring the coffee's nuanced flavors remain intact. (from https://us.moccamaster.com/blogs/blog/certified-by-the-sca-m...)
Then you say
> Other customers had suffered similar burns, and McDonald's knew about it and did not change the policy
Again, lots of people cut their fingers off, accidentally, with knives. I don't think this means knife makers were "willfully and inevitably causing injury to random customers" because their product was too sharp.
Have other people never made coffee? Boiled soup? Been in a kitchen at all?
It wasn't just that the plaintiff spilled coffee on herself, it's that she spilled it while she was in her car and didn't immediately try to get it off (not blaming her, she was elderly). So yeah, I'm not surprised that spilling a very hot liquid on yourself and then sitting in it for an extended period causes severe burns.
Before the iPhone, what was their attempts at that? I remember using OSX a bunch before the iPhone was public, but never remember any of the ways they tried to lock it down, I might have been too young then.
Getting music on an ipod was always a pain unless you bought the music on itunes or ripped a music CD directly with itunes (yes, that was an actual feature. hard to imagine these days).
No simple drag and drop onto a mounted USB drive like all other mp3 players back in the day. Maybe more of a lock-in attempt instead of lock down, but related imo.
> ripped a music CD directly with itunes (yes, that was an actual feature. hard to imagine these days).
These days? Last week (though WMP). My retired father's old computer died, his new one, no CD slot. Emails me from Australia asking how to rip his CDs for his media player. He's not an audiophile but he's not a technophile (and his blues music collection is sufficiently large that at least one of the blues radio stations in his city will on occasion ask him to borrow something because they don't have it in their library.
Told him to get a USB CD player and a card reader (his media player is on micro/SD).
You can still rip CDs with Apple Music. In fact, that's the only use I have for that app (I recently lost a hard drive with music and I'm in the process of backing up all my CDs again).
"locked down" is a vague, moving target. The criticisms of pre-OSX MacOS was that it was an operating system for little babies, and not serious tech enthusiasts and power users. Also they were too expensive, and you can build a PC that is 100000x more powerful for cheaper. This literally hasn't changed.
Are you being sarcastic? This has definitely changed with Apple Silicon.
Looking at hardware value, the M-series are way more competitive than the Intel macs ever were, and if you want to run an LLM locally, they are undefeated.
However, it is quite ironic that while the value of their hardware has sharply increased, their software has become the slop that everyone is complaining about.
Their previous lock-downs were on the hardware level, not offering ISA slots and stuff. The original Mac (then Mac+ and classic) had no expansion slots at all, and they started adding them only later.
ADB ports only finally went away when USB came out. But I do have to give Apple credit, because those fruity-colored iMacs with the hockey puck mouse, that had only USB ports... those are really what got USB to become fully adopted. PCs had USB ports for a while before those came out, but nobody made any peripherals, probably because Windows had really crappy support for it... Once those fruity iMacs were released, then came the flood of USB stuff.
First iPhone was 18 years ago, but yeah it around the time of the first iPhone. IIRC he actually mentioned that because he had already been confronted to Apple’s lockdown before the iPhone. It was a long time ago and I was young, so I don’t remember the details.
I'm in my fifties, have been involved in computing since I was a kid and I like Apple's stance on this because the threat landscape has changed, particularly for non-tech-savvy people. If you want that freedom there are various *nix flavours to choose from, you're not compelled to use Apple.
I suspect the way you get to that size is having a team of 5 people doing X for Fortnite going "man, we could do our specific job a bit better if we has 7 people." Scale that to a whole corp.
Each job is justified in isolation to do a specific thing, at least at the hiring time. I suspect there aren't a lot of people thinking at a high level as you are "we have this many gajillion dollars - what are we betting on?"
Also as you get bigger you need more and more "glue" people, HR, accounting, etc. A five-man team can avoid all that, but you can't take them to 25 and have 5 5-people teams anymore. Some amount is just management.
I really don't think that the Nix language is nearly as bad as people say it is once you get used to it, and I've been using NixOS since before ChatGPT was released so I've gotten pretty ok with it. Plus, there are niceties like being able to use variables for things like interface names which makes it pretty nice.
Also, something kind of nice about NixOS is that once you get it working, it kind of stays working. I have my config file backed up to Sourcehut, and I'm relatively confident that the configuration file is an accurate representation of reality.
I'm happy to hear suggestions. This format was actually the internal .rexc bytecode for Rex (routing expressions), but when I realized it was actually a pretty good standalone format, I renamed it `.rx` for short. I am aware of RxJS, but I think that `rx-format` is different enough and `.rx` file extensions are unique enough, it's not too confusing.
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