If it’s a machine used for business: corporate espionage.

You already have a cryptographically secure government id: your passport.

Encryption is supposed to come when the working group has aligned.

I wouldn’t hold my breath.

The whole RCS thing is a Bad Idea™ . It’s a standard by the GSM Association, which consists of over 1150 members (750 operators and 400 other companies). Getting all these companies to align will take forever.

To illustrate: the RCS initiative was started in 2007 and the steering committee was formed in early 2008. The first version of the Universal Profile, that would enable interoperability between different operators and networks was released in 2016. It took 8 f-ing years to come up with an interoperable messaging standard to replace SMS. It was intended to be implemented by operators, but since hardly any operator did Google had to run their own service, bypassing the network operators, just to get it off the ground. Operators are now slowly beginning to support it.

If Apple decides to add a feature to iMessage, they implement the feature, roll out an update to their servers and release it to a billion users in the next iOS update. If they want to add a feature to RCS, they first have to discuss it in the committee until they agree on a solution, this alone takes forever. Then every player needs to update their software to add support. This means potentially 750 operators who need to update their shit, and that is after their software suppliers add support for it. In the mean time, the new feature will work for some users when they communicate with some other users, depending on which phone and operator each party has. Rinse and repeat for every new feature you want to add.

This means RCS will at best only ever be a very basic messaging service. It’ll be an improvement over SMS and MMS, but that’s not saying much. It will be in no way a threat to Apple’s dominance in messaging.

It’s the “we have Apple Music” at home of streaming services.

Basically: more expensive, shitty UI, no lossless or high-res audio. Oh, and they pay the least to artists of all streaming services.

DVD? What’s next, a post on how to copy VHS tapes?

A disposable rocket at $4 billion dollars a pop, if not more. They built one rocket, they may build a second and maybe even a third. Eventually.

SpaceX is not building a rocket, they are building a rocket factory. A factory that will mass-produce fully reusable rockets.

Starship IFT-4 and WWDC.

Yes, I’m a huge nerd. How did you know?

A ‘more than usable’ machine that doesn’t even support more than 32GB RAM? That’s not a serious machine, that’s a toy.

And how do you consider that a comparable machine? Slow/hot Intel CPU, slow GPU, low-res screen, the ‘upgradable’ RAM can only be upgraded to 32GB (so pretty much useless), slow SSD, weighs more than a MacBook even with the smallest battery option, despite the fact it’s made of plastic. No thunderbolt. It can’t even drive my monitor at 60Hz.

Good joke.

Another thing they did is add hardware support for the x86 strong memory model to their ARM chips, allowing for efficient emulation. Without this, translated code takes a big performance hit.

Did Qualcomm add something similar to their ARM CPUs ?

Name 1 laptop that has a better price/performance than a MacBook Pro. I’ll wait…

You are confusing ‘costs a lot of money’ with overpriced.

Yes, Apple hardware costs a lot of money, but you do get what you pay for.

My current MacBook Pro (M1 Max, 64GB RAM) is simply the best machine I’ve ever used. It’s a no-compromise laptop. It’s fast, chews through everything I throw at it (which is a lot, I use it as a development machine). It never slow down, it never gets hot, I haven’t heard the fan run ever (not sure if it is just that silent or it simply never needs to turn on). The screen is amazing. The trackpad is amazing. The sound is amazing. The build quality is rock solid. The battery life is insane. I plug in a single thunderbolt cable and it charges my machine, connects to gbit ethernet, my audio system and drives 2 high-res monitors (5k2k and 4k).

Every time PC people claim they can get a ‘better computer’ for less it’s always some compromise. “This one has a much faster GPU and is cheaper”, sure, it also weights 8 kilos and runs for 20 minute on a full charge, is made of cheap plastic, has a screen with terrible viewing angles a crappy trackpad and sounds like a fighter jet with full afterburners on every time you put a little load on the system.

Now, that’s just a recent development. 20 years ago it was a common format for images on the interwebs.

The same purpose as a PNG or JPEG?

You know that GIF is not specifically a format for animations, right? It’s just a lossless image format.

The ones on the soda bottles are attached so closely to the ring that it makes it hard to put the cap back on. Because they are attached on one side, you always put the cap on at an angle which prevents you from screwing it closed. You have to pull the cap up a bit while closing to ensure it goes on straight. It’s a minor annoyance but half of the time it takes multiple attempts to put the cap back on.

(…) the entire purpose and selling point of VPNs, which is to encapsulate incoming and outgoing Internet traffic in an encrypted tunnel and to cloak the user’s IP address.

No. That is not the entire point of a VPN. That’s just what a few shady companies are claiming to scam uninformed users into paying for a useless service. The entire point of a VPN is to join a private network (i.e. a network that is not part of the Internet) over the public internet, such as connecting to your company network from home. Hence the name ‘virtual private network’.

There are very little, if any, benefits to using a VPN service to browse the public internet.

We have more OTA channels, you just have to pay for them. The free channels are in shitty SD quality (you have to pay for HD) and they are only unencrypted because the government requires it (as they are used for emergency broadcasts).

Here you get a grand total of three shitty channels for free OTA. Anything more requires a subscription.

Which has significantly worse picture quality than cable or fiber, has fewer channels and isn’t even significantly cheaper