Computers

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APPLE ISN’T JUST A WALLED GARDEN, IT’S A CARRIER – The return of the Angry God of ARPU.

This is one of the more interesting metaphors you could apply. Walled garden has been used so long for Apple’s modern eco-system that it is the defacto definition, if not the dejure definition of the App Store. Using the metaphor that Apple is a carrier: seems highly appropriate, but sadly, I think paints the case that Epic should win.
You see companies are first of all in the business of staying in business. For some reason, the FUPM scene from Goodfellas is playing in the back of my mind. What is good for users, and customers, is not always what is perfect for businesses. I like to believe what is good for the customer should be good for the business if you achieve a fair compromise rather than a big stick.
The real moral of this story is that large one sided monopolies are bad. Carriers like Verizon and AT&T got away with all but murder because of the extent of their power over their own networks. To be fair, when it’s “Yours”, you should have some say in that. I believe that the whole digital signatures thing for installing apps on modern platforms is a great thing. The difference is kind of in implementation: Apple runs the App Store, and they should have power over it. Much as Google does over Google Play. But one of the twists is that on Android: the user is the last stop on the right to install software. On iPhone: Apple has total control. In my opinion users should have more control over the software they can install, not more control over a provider’s store front.
Having stopped sewing people at the drop of a hat, Apple has been doing a fair job of obeying Wheaton’s Law—don’t be a dick. Which is key to prolonging your monopoly and circumnavigating confrontations like Epic vs Apple. Because if you’re more benevolent than malevolent it is harder for your enemies to gather strong support, and come for your bottom line.
The greater your enrage customers and businesses in between: the more support potential adversaries can build. Carriers like AT&T and Verizon Wireless have done the big stick to beat down companies and shove up users keesters so well, that pretty much no one loves them for it. Eventually if you’re a big enough dick: someone will punch you in the nuts.

Rimuru – Refit 1

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For me the distinction on Rimuru between 16 and 32 GB of RAM, has more to do with the my goal for the machine to last 10 years of service life. Centauri retired after 8, and I had designed it with 5 in mind.

So I decided to acquire two sticks of the same kind of memory, and fill the other two slots while it’s still possible to get them. Actually, I think this is the first time one of my personal machines has had 4 largely identical sticks; only difference is the color to help ID the slots.

On most of my Windows machines, it’s not uncommon for my “Idle” to hover somewhere between 3.5 ~ 6.5 GB of memory. Centuari had been designed as a 2×4=8 GB machine that grew to a 12 GB when her older sister, Dahlia was decommissioned.

Since my “Work” environment already stresses the hell out of my laptop’s 16 GB, I decided Rimuru’s decade outlook called for 32 GB.

Running a single go of PassMark’s Linux version in WSL2, I had scores of 3298 before and 3520 on the Memory Mark. Which at least confirms to me no performance lossage, that shouldn’t occur because there’s no reason. I like verification. The difference between scores is within margin.

One of the aspects of my old ass Logitech 2.1 system going wonkers was replacing it with a set of Creative Pebble v3s. Since the speakers’ USB mode would only function on any of my machine’s via USB-C, that’s been consuming Rimiru’s lone front USB-C port.

Well, now I have a pair of 10 Gbit/s rated USB-C ports in the back. Problem solved.

If I was a genius, I would probably put a C to C or a C to Micro 3.0 cable in the other port and route it to my desk/monitor area. Much as I have a USB-A 3.0 extension that makes it easier to hook up hard drives and Xbox controllers and such.

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 In my opinion this video should be titled, “on why user space Linux sucks”.

In terms of what most users think about in terms of desktop this video has jack shit to do with you. Rather the video mainly focuses on the concerns of packaging your binaries and expecting it to run on Joe Random Linux Distribution.

I kind of applaud Torvalds for his long fought religious mantra of Don’t Break User Space. When you’re working with Linux itself, out of tree drivers breaking or needing pieces rewritten isn’t that unusual. Don’t maintain your driver, and you’re liable to go oh snap they replaced an entire subsystem or removed a deprecated API after comical number of years. But compatibility between the Linux kernel and user space software, is pretty superb.

One of the reasons why MS-DOS PCs took off, and CP/M before it, is the drive towards binary compatibility between customer machines. As much as Windows has often deserved its hate, backwards compatibility and stable ABIs–not I said, ABI, not API, has generally been pretty good.

Binary compatibility between Linux distributions has improved from the days where source systems were the best way to make shit work. But just the same, I did have to snicker at Torvald’s comments about the GNU C library (glibc), which has often pissed me off over the years with their concept of compatibility for such a core piece of user space.

As someone quite fond of desktop linux, I can’t say that binary compatibility of large applications between distributions is especially a fun thing. Not because it’s impossible, but because most of us involved just don’t care. I assume most, like me learned Unix systems in an environment where API compatibility was the only path to victory, or they simply don’t care about the zillion other Linux distributions.

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Opinion: The M1 iPad Pro needs iPadOS 15, not macOS

While I typically roll my eyes at many posts regarding fruity things, I find this one more sane.

As a weirdo who actually prefers a Tablet First life style for my non terminal, non video game computing needs, I don’t have a lot of problems with how iPadOS 14 has evolved. So much as I wanted to puke at how iOS 12 was 😝.

Personally, I don’t really care about macOS. In the era of OS X, I used to consider the UNIX underpinnings a reason to choose it over XP if I ever had to choose between an NT or Mac based corporate machine. Basically, I don’t give much of a flying fuck about Macs outside of the POSIX programming environment that overlaps with BSD and Linux based systems.

Being the kind of weirdo who used to dock an Android tablet to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard to do actual work, my main beef with iPadOS today is that it can’t do what I used to. The limitations on background connections make it impractical for me to use my iPad Pro like a terminal. The lack of software like Docker Desktop and XCode, just make the iPad ineffective for local development. So SSH apps being forcefully disconnected by the OS after a short time in the background, means iOS is a poor terminal if you’re switching apps.

For more general use cases are kind of meh. If your GUI software doesn’t work well on my tablet, I’m probably not going to have a big opinion of it on my laptop  either. Software design has come a bit of a long way from just slap a 1990s style menu bar around it. A prime example of sorts: AquaMail worked superbly on my Android tablets and Chromebooks, so much that I wished for a PC version of the app. Something closer to Gmail or Apple Mail or Windows 10 Mail or Thunderbird or Claws, yadda, yadda — just don’t care.

I suppose there is the perk that most of my harsher software demands tend to take a command line centric view. Many of the pieces of software I really do care about fit into the unix history of command line tools from a Bourne style shell session. Not a bunch of clicky all over the place GUIs; I’ll care more about GUIs when I need to use my fat puddgy fingers to interact with a screen or when a keyboard is a combat ineffective way of interacting with a problem. For example, I wouldn’t want a command line version of GIMP, but I don’t need a GUI version of vi either. I’m weird :P.

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As it turns out there seems to be more upsides to building a demon lord class machine than expected. A while back, I discovered the massive improvement this makes in H.265/HEVC encoding times.

Series currently running has been averaging about 6 minutes per episode, since it’s one that’s more talky and less stabby than some. But the interesting thing is the responsiveness. See, Centauri could do video encoding at a modest pace but HandBrake would render the desktop hardly usable and nicing it out to take over the whole system didn’t help much because there was no head room above the encoding. Thus leaving the system rather lethargic even if you tried to keep it usable. Rimuru, just doesn’t care.

Rimuru on the other hand remains functional and responsive despite running full bore, it’s spare cycles just breeze through. To the point that I was able to pipeline my work by having MakeMKV start ripping the second disc while the first was still encoding in HandBrake. I couldn’t even tell that my system was under load, as opposed to the “Gah, I’ll come back in half a day” approach that Centauri could offer.

Little Smiles

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One of the things I’ve generally adapted to is using a local mail client again at home. Something, I sort of blame on a mixture of work and my tablet-first life style. As such, given my deep annoyance for most mail clients above the scope of mailx and mutt, I’ve mostly suffered the native Windows mail app. In particular because such applications are about the only good way to integrate my contacts and calendar accounts with the modern desktop. For me it’s worked out, since I also hate clients like Thunderbird and Outlook but suffer them just the same.

Something that has long irked me is how Windows Mail defaults to showing a couple folders (inbox, drafts, sent) and none of the many folders my mail accounts are organized into. Thus, I get a little smile when I realize the fancy spancy modern looking menu supports right clicks and defines this ridiculously short list as “Favorites”.

That’s at least one less annoyance :).

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Evernote rolling out their home screen feature to iPad OS reminds me that Nerine was my most powerful computer before I built Rimru, and it kind of pisses me off now that I think about it.

One of Stark’s weaknesses is that it runs full bore. The move to an Electron style app means that between Docker and Evernote, I have two Fat Pigs that can cause me to out type my laptop at startup. Centauri since retired and sent to work as a Stark replacement slash augment, is roughly twice as powerful as my laptop and handles startup much better. But doesn’t really breeze through Evernote.

Nerine is more powerful than Centauri at CPU oriented tasks, and pretty much wins at anything that isn’t summed up by the iPad Pro having less memory. As such, of course, the Evernote home screen is super smooth and fluid and doesn’t even make Nerine blink. Kind of like how Rimuru breezes through everything with its demon lord class PC hardware, and all the portability of an Imperial class star destroyer.

It kind of irks me in a way how much Stark and Centauri fail to “Lead the pack” in performance, despite remaining heavily used computers in my workflow. But I am kind of glad that Evernote performs superbly on my iPad Pro and my desktop that’s not years beyond its designed retirement age, lol.

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Apple Just Gave Millions Of iPad, iPhone Users A Reason To Leave

Arguably an article like this on Forbes bodes ill for Apple, but shouldn’t come as a surprise to many. Folks have long talked about Apple’s “Walled garden”, both positively and negatively over the years. But some may forget that Apple is in the same boat as the rest of us.
For the most part as a user, I’ve had as positive an experience with the App Store as I have with Google Play and Amazon’s own venture. I can but hope for developers, it has less the faceless sword of mysterious injustice that seems to pop up in more Googly lands as horror stories.
What people should expect from such a store front is a responsive attitude to dealing with malicious actors, and taking the responsibility to clean their own house.
Google and Apple have at least made efforts at that. Although in the big G’s case, sometimes I wonder how much of their interactions with humanity at this point is handled by automations and scantly reviewed by mortals. I suspect whatever Apple’s review processes these days, they’re likely overrated from a security perspective.
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 “Holy fuck that’s fast” — me on launching Rimuru’s video test.

Input chosen for this case, is of course episode one of That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime aka Tensura. My normal preset in Handbrake that most notably for video does a x265 encode at quality 22, which is ample for 1080p anime.

Centauri normally takes about 35 – 40 minutes to complete encoding an episode in this context. Seeing Rimuru reporting average FPS in the 50s, I had a split take and double check that Handbrake didn’t screw up my imported preset settings, and of course it didn’t. Rimuru is just that powerful a demon lord.

Looking like the new estimated conversion time is about 10 minutes per episode rather than 35 minutes. I can almost see Shion’s smiling face in my mind’s eye….lol

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When I originally designed Centauri: it was with the spec that it should last at least five years before it would be cost effective to replace it. By that, I mean it has to take so long to do shit that it’s worth money not to have to wait on it. Dear Centauri made it to eight years with most of its bottle necks only showing up in the last couple. I’d say that’s pretty good.

Enter the new generation: Rimuru is reincarnated born.

Since my 5 year design ended up pulling 8 years of duty, I opted for the biggest influencer of that spec. Centauri rocked a Core i5-3570K based on the assumption that it would retire by the time it became the problem, and lo and behold it really was the main bottle neck. As such, Rimuru rocks a Core i7-10700K because I’ve specified parts based on a 10 year service life.

One of the primary goals aside from that was the modernization of technology. Two pieces of tech have been on my mind as possible final retro fits for a few years now.

I’ve reached a point where USB-A only exists for old technology and existing peripherals that have nigh indefinite life span relative to their host computer. Things like my web cam and mouse.

Rimuru sports a snazzy front panel USB-C port perfect for the fact that most of what I want to connect now functions through USB-C. Likewise the motherboard rather resolves one of my gripes with its predecessor. My old Z77 chipset was a superb motherboard but it sadly was a bridge chipset, literally. Coming from the era in which USB 3.0 became standard only two rear ports and the two front ports were 3.0 with the otherwise ample ports in back being 2.0s. On the H570M the only 2.0 ports are header; all rear ports are USB-A, and two of them are rated for 10 Gbit/s. A perfect solution to having to be careful which USB goes where in the back.

 Second temptation was the insane speed of NVMe drives. It’s been on my mind the last few years that there is no point in buying SATA drives anymore, except as external SSDs and use cases where big, cheap HDDs are the win. While I could retrofit an M.2 slot to my old Z77 it wouldn’t be capable of booting from the drive.

While I was at it: I decided on a fairly future proof power supply. My GTX 780 was the root cause of my last power supply upgrade, but is so powerful that it’s not typically the bottleneck Centauri experienced. 

Opting to take advantage of the situation: I picked up an affordable power supply off a list of PSUs capable of driving an RTX 3080. In terms of PCI-E power connectors I could run two 780s. It’s also a semi modular—meaning everything but the ATX power cables “Plug” into the power supply rather than having to be tied off and routed. Since Rimuru is operating M.2 NVMe only, and has 2.5″ SSD mounts on the side panel: there is nothing in the drive cages below. As such I tossed the power supply’s remaining cables in there, so I don’t scratch my head in the years to come wondering which box in the closet they landed in.

Somehow it does seem ironic that the first live fire test of Rimuru’s capabilities was playing a DOOM (1993) 😁.

Raw performance testing in more interesting vectors has also been promising. Tested one of my projects that takes Stark about 15 minutes to compile from scratch, and Centauri pulled it off in about 7½ minutes to compile. Rimuru did it in 3 minutes. Bare in mind, Stark is the development system in the family and a laptop of similar vintage to Centauri.

Like her predecessor, Rimuru gets a nice “Assembling” album that tracks and marks things as part of the build. Centauri was the first PC that I built in the era of phones and cameras everywhere, and that really worked out. In a similar lesson from Stark, she also gets her own entry in y note system to serve as a log book of major changes and configuration. I’ve actually got pretty good at coping with that puzzle over the years.

Wait, no wonder my beard is turning grey…lol