As unsafe as it may be, I plan to just keep using Windows 10 past the EOL date this October. I practice reasonable discipline in regards to online security and I will just handle all of my sensitive accounts and login activity on my Mac. I just really don't want to use the mess that is Windows 11 unless absolutely necessary. The way I see it, that's probably a few years away.
Edit: I am also comfortable using Linux, and I may end up spending a lot of time searching for the best distro that will work for me as a daily driver. I'm certainly open to that, but for now I plan to just keep chugging along with what I've got until I build a new PC.
Windows 11 recently pushed an update to discontinue Windows Mixed Reality (WMR), bricking my <5 years old, $500 Reverb G2 VR headset, which I bought after Meta bought out Oculus and started requiring a Meta account, essentially bricking my Rift S. No thanks.
As a non-Windows user, can someone neatly summarize what the problem is? I recently used Windows 11 a bit to port an app, and while it's a horrible OS to dev on, the UX just seemed like any other Windows.
The TPM requirements rule out a lot of computers older than 5 years old.
With the pace of modern hardware development, a lot of these computers are still perfectly serviceable.
People are unhappy at being told to buy new hardware when they have working hardware.
(Other things that have concerned people: Further attempts to force people to microsoft accounts, more invasive copilot promotion, recall, A/B tested ads in explorer, etc.)
Your CPU is missing HW instructions for VBS, a new requirement now, that's why Windows 11 isn't officially supported. It's nothing to do with raw compute power of the CPU.
>The TPM requirements rule out a lot of computers older than 5 years old.
Why do people love making false claims with confidence? As of today, 5 years ago was 2020, not 2015. TPM 2.0 requirement is fulfilled by CPUs since at least 2017, but that's not the main compatibility issue.
Windows 11 requires VBS (Virtualization Based Security) HW support, which only works on CPUs from Intel 8th gen or Ryzen 2000 series, which are of vintage 2017-2018 not 2020. VBS is quite the nice security feature to have so it makes sense to see Microsoft mandating it at some point in order to enhance security going forward.
Edit: damn, even posting facts on HN gets you downvoted
Lots of budget PCs sold as new today use chips from 3+ years ago, and several use ones from 5+ years ago. (This is especially common with old i7s, because your average consumer has been fooled by marketing to think that an i7 is automatically better than an i5). Anecdotally, this practice was even more common 5 years ago (the last time I shopped for prebuilts for my parents).
(That said, I agree that complaining about the TPM requirement specifically is ridiculous - MS has offered ways around the TPM requirement for upgraders. And more relevantly, any CPU that old is going have bigger problems when the UI is basically all React Native)
Okay, it seems like I misremembered, because the ones I'm thinking of have "(renewed)" slapped onto them, but literally the first result for "budget desktop" on Amazon (And the second for "Dell desktop", a brand that boomers trust) has a seven year old CPU:
And I don't expect an average consumer to know that "renewed" is code for "literally no parts are new and it's probably worse than the product you're replacing" - because why would they? No other product category this way. Obviously we know enough to not trust it, but they have no reason to believe that "reliable companies like Dell" are selling already-broken merchandise.
And no, it's technically not Microsoft's fault (in fact, the TPM requirement is probably good exactly because it prevent vendors selling these pieces of crap) but it is the reality we live in, so you have to account for it when you act like all computers bought today have processors manufactured in the last few years.
> If you buy a new iPhone 6 today and realize you don't get any more SW updates do you blame Apple?
Obviously yes? If I (or again, my Dad who know nothing about computers) can walk out of an Apple store with a device that is already unsupported, that's Apple's fault, not his.
>Obviously yes? If I (or again, my Dad who know nothing about computers) can walk out of an Apple store with a device that is already unsupported, that's Apple's fault, not his.
Obviously no!
1) Apple Isn't the only one selling apple devices. Your Dad can buy a new old stock iPhone 6 form anywhere like Walmart or eBay.
2) SW support, legally speaking begins from the product launch date, not from the date you purchased it. If you buy an iPhone 1 off eBay in 2050 you can't hold apple on the hook for 10+ year of SW Updates.
3) Why is it Apple's fault your dad buys dated stuff without doing due diligence? Should consumers be protected against their own stupidity and lack of research? Where does the government nanny state begin?
I'm a long time Linux user. I think the first version I installed was 0.11 back in the early-mid 90s. I worked in IT for most of my career until I retired a few years ago. After all that, I still don't have the patience to migrate to Linux. Between the games I enjoy and the music production software I'm used to using, is not worth the amount of time it requires fiddling with stuff. I wish it were different.
Gaming in Linux is massively easier nowadays due to Proton. I haven't ran into an issue yet playing any of my games. One caveat to that is most of the large online competitive multiplayer games (CoD, Fortnite, etc.) won't work due to how they implemented their anti-cheat softwares.
For me it's all the good piracy software, especially the ones like DVDfab Passkey which operate as a Windows driver. My Windows box is a machine that turns DVDs and BDs into an ISO (for my own backup) and an x265 MKV (to share).
This is what drove me to Linux. Managing and fiddling with a windows machine is too time consuming, error prone, and not fun. It's the last thing I want to spend my time doing.
There is nothing wrong with that, as long as you are aware of the risks and know what you are doing. I still use Windows 7 with R2 patches, and Firefox ESR. I don't plan on changing anytime soon.
I've been looking into this. Any app that currently works should keep working, but new versions (especially new games, or new patches for games) may not. New versions of GPU drivers, DirectX and so on were a particular area of issue.
Good choice for a machine built for a particular purpose that doesn't need to run any new software.
> Any app that currently works should keep working, but new versions (especially new games, or new patches for games) may not. New versions of GPU drivers, DirectX and so on were a particular area of issue.
To be clear, you're looking to game on a VM?
ftr: Posting this from my Firefox remote app. Host VM is not LTSC however.
I was looking at it for a racing simulator rig specifically. I basically wanted to install some simulators on it and never have to do any maintenance. From my research it seemed like it would work for any legacy offline sims but not online stuff like iRacing. I might end up dual booting LTSC for offline simming and Win11 for iRacing.
Apple News and the Stocks app do exactly this. It's happy to clutter up your news feed with subscriber-only articles, despite knowing that you don't have a subscription. Predictably there's no option to not show subscriber-only articles. So there was a workaround: you can block individual news providers, so you can block all of the subscriber-only ones.
But now when you block one, it says "If you block XYZ, News will stop showing stories from this channel, except when selected by the Apple News editors".
Ridiculous. If I go to the trouble of blocking a site, that means I don't want to see anything from them, ever.
I belonged to an organization that had password complexity requirements. That's normal and understandable. However one requirement was that no part of my password could contain a three character subsstring that was included in my full name. I won't give my real name here, but sadly it includes some three letter subsequences that are somewhat common in many English words. I can understand a policy that prevents someone from using "matthew1234" as Matthew Smith's password, but this rule also prevents such a person from using "correcthorsebatterystaple" because it has 'att' in it.
Turns out, this rule was not from IT. It was a requirement from the cybersecurity insurance policy the organization had taken.
Imagine a being inside a turing machine wondering what came before it was turned on... implying the turing machine is even on and we're not just looking at the set of all possible rule sets on a similarly abstracted mathematical chart.
I understand that many people yearn for a religious explanation to answer the question of what caused the universe to exist. I myself am content with the "it just happened" explanation, as any information prior to the big bang, if it even exists, is unknowable.
There are countless other religions that believe in a deity who created the universe. These deities either created themselves, or had always existed outside of space and time. To that end, any one of those deities would be on equal footing with YHWH. I don't think that it is appropriate to axiomatically claim that a certain deity exists because only that deity could have caused the universe to exist.
I suspect ego played a part in Steve Jobs selecting Tim Cook as his successor. Famous CEO's tend to pick a successor that is less charismatic and more risk-averse than they were. CEO's that retire 'honorably', so to speak, don't want someone who will outshine them or make sweeping changes to the brand or the company's organization. In other words, they want to preserve their legacy.
Tim Cook is exactly this kind of executive. While he has done an incredible job with leading the business and operational side of Apple, the public doesn't give credit for that sort of thing. Now imagine if Steve appointed someone just like himself and the business fumbled. Steve would hate for his legacy to be tarnished by appointing a brash successor.
All that being said, for what it's worth, I don't think anyone could have lived up to Steve's reputation. It is quite unfair to Tim Cook that he will always be compared to what people think Steve Jobs would have done.
IDK, I think Apple creating its own laptop/desktop-class CPU was a pretty bold move with a huge payoff. It's less sexy than introducing an entirely new category of product, but it's not exactly risk-averse either.
> While he has done an incredible job with leading the business and operational side of Apple
Can we say that yet? A lot of value was made in the short term, but it kinda feels like that would happen to any CEO that has an iPhone moment on their hands. Cook's real challenge was to flip the scenario into something sustainable; can Apple take the excitement and turn it into a product line?
They certainly tried. Cook led the charge on the Apple Watch, which fell short of a tentpole offering but still found an audience. Airpods took off, presumably after Cook learned from the failure (and acquisition) of Beats by Dre. And Vision Pro... the less said the better. Maybe there's something still in the holster, but I expect this to be a dead-end product line moreso than Airpower.
Are disposable headphones enough to build a legacy off of? The Apple Watch certainly isn't, and don't even get me started on Vision Pro. We could point to the big one that everyone likes to credit him as; "the supply chain guy", but even that seems to foster political contention in America. Apple's software faces antitrust scrutiny, privacy concerns[0], and an overall degradation in app quality as their attention splits into different markets. The legacy is the important question, and if Tim Cook were to resign tomorrow I think he would be remembered as the CEO that screwed Apple over for good.
> They certainly tried. Cook led the charge on the Apple Watch, which fell short of a tentpole offering but still found an audience.
That's an interesting way to say "is the best selling watch model of all time, and outsells not only all other smartwatches combined but also a substantial chunk of all normal watches put together."
Steve knew he'd dead by the time the next CEO's results were in. Do you really think he'd prefer Apple to stagnate rather than continue to soar with a great CEO after his dead?
I've seen a few instances of an arrow pointing down into a box/tray. I'm not sure how I feel about it. It seems appropriate, but the only caveat is that a lot of applications already represent 'download' with a similar icon. I imagine some product designers would be unhappy with a download-looking icon representing saving to a location in "the cloud".
MIPS was a genuine attempt at creating a new commercially viable architecture. Some of the design goals of MIPS made it conducive towards teaching, namely its relative simplicity and lack of legacy cruft. It was never intended to be an academic only ISA. Although I'm certain the owners hoped that learning MIPS in college would lead to wider industry adoption. That did not happen.
Interestingly, I recently completed a masters-level computer architecture course and we used MIPS. However, starting next semester the class will use RISC-V instead.
As an American, I finally relented and purchased a Metric measuring tape after the ordeal of trying to measure the dimensions of the rooms in my house. When it comes to interior decorating, trying to figure out how to evenly space items that are sized in feet, inches, and fractional inches is a nightmare. Imagine trying to space objects 2 feet 7½ inches long against a wall that is 13 feet 2 inches long. Now imagine this task with 80 centimeter long objects and a ~400 centimeter wall.
I am angry that IKEA's localization does not allow Americans to view dimensions in metric site-wide. You can still see dimensions in metric but those only appear on the pictures of some items. The webpage still converts all textual measurements to Imperial. You can't sort and search using metric values. IKEA designs everything in metric, using nice, even, whole numbers. Please let me see those. Seeing them converted to the nearest 32nd of an inch feels like vandalism.
Imagine trying to space objects 2 feet 7½ inches long against a wall that is 13 feet 2 inches long. Now imagine this task with 80 centimeter long objects and a ~400 centimeter wall.
You've made an artificially hard example (Ikea doesn't separate units, it is just inches).
What's harder, a 24" object on a 160" wall, or a 59cm object on a 4m 3cm wall?
Or to compare like for like (rounding & unified units), a 24" object on a 160" wall vs a 60cm object on a 400cm wall? Seems the same.
That's part of the point, though. Ikea might not do separate units, but this is not an uncommon practice elsewhere. In the metric example I don't need rounding because I can trivially see 4m 3cm and know it's 403cm. With inches I'd have to do multiplication to handle mixed units.
I don’t understand why American things absolutely never have dual measurements. I’ve been reading books on pregnancy and newborns written in the US but available across the world and every table is in only US units
As a Frenchman living in the US, my favorite Imperial units are the hand (3 hands to a foot) and the poppyseed (4 poppyseeds to a barleycorn, the shoe-size unit; 3 barleycorns to an inch). 10cm and 2mm.
People stop asking me to convert to Imperial pretty quick.
Save your sanity, don't bother learning the conversion factors. Did you know that most of us don't even know how to convert between our own units? I invite you to go around and ask 'how many pints are in a gallon?'.
It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize that there are four quarts in a gallon...
I have no such trouble with any SI unit. So with that, I will leave you with this!
"For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'The French were right again!'"
Even before real school started, I think many of us in Europe played with base ten blocks. As far as I know they are always centimetre-sized, so the 1000-cube is a litre.
The US uses the US customary system, not Imperial. [0] US customary and Imperial share some units, and, confusingly, share even more unit names, but they are different systems.
[0] well, really, it uses metric with a redefined version of the old US customary system layered over it to prevent people from noticing, but...
I am 100% convinced that the baby weight thing is because grandparents love to compare newborns with their own experiences, and they were on the cusp of the metric conversion in the 60s.
In a decade or two, this will vanish.
Imperial height is because 6 feet is the generic height of a "tall person" - we get so much of our sporting news from overseas and no one bothers to convert it.
I know that, but Americans don't and ask for "Imperial". No one has ever asked me for "US customary". Either way, I am using those units to be facetious more than compliant ;-)
In practice the volume units are a much bigger problem. I have not hit anyone with the "cubic hand" yet...
In 1776 everyone was still using the Winchester System.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_measure The UK didn't adopt the Imperial system until 1824-1826. Us Yanks have to suffer the indignity of our meager 473 mililitre pints.
Also, the US doesn't use imperial, dammit. It uses US customary units. They're related but different systems with radically different definitions on many units.
Edit: I am also comfortable using Linux, and I may end up spending a lot of time searching for the best distro that will work for me as a daily driver. I'm certainly open to that, but for now I plan to just keep chugging along with what I've got until I build a new PC.