MBW 926: Hey Lady! Do a Thing!

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

I thought that telestator green dot was a macOS bug. It looked like the same type of green dot used for privacy showing “hey your camera is being used”. But it was in a very odd place

Alex Lindsay’s giggling glee over Apple’s behavior at doing the minimum requirements for the EU is absolutely disgusting.

It’s stuff like this that makes me not trust Apple on anything, especially privacy. Everything has to be on their terms - and if it’s not, then they pout and stamp their feet and do the absolute minimum possible. This is not a praiseworthy company, regardless of any technical competence or design acumen they’ve displayed.

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I like how Andy is describing the nuances of public speaking and how to avoid “wandering from place to place” when he does this all. the. time. He needs an internal editor.

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Leo mentioned that EMACS was written in LISP. The Wikipedia article is accurate. EMACS was first window dressing added on top of TECO – Text Editor AND (!!!) Corrector – around 1976. TTBOMK, EMACS was the first editor to update the display of your document being edited in real time. The LISP-based versions came later.

TECO was the mainstay editor on the PDP10s that MIT had on the ARPAnet. The biggest of those four machines was the KL10 used by academics and the militay to run Macsyma – the first system to solve symbolic math problems. It was the precursor of MATLAB, Mathematica, etc. It’s rather mind-blowing that Mathematica will run free and quite well on a Raspberry Pi 5. Mathematica 14 runs circles around anything that Macsyma ever did, and the RPi5 is far more powerful than those banks and banks of computer that was the KL10. I believe that Emacs really crippled the performance of all those PDP10 machines, since the [single] processor had to do serious computation for every keystroke.

EMACS was created on the PDP10 by David Moon and Guy Steele (GLS) – both legendary staffers of the MIT AI Lab. Later, Moon co-authored the original Lisp Machine Manual. GLS ended up at Sun and played a major role in the development of Java.

In the 80s, I worked for a company that hired a computer science PhD who ported a version of the PDP10’s MIT’s ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System) to the PDP11. He also ported a version of TECO from those MIT machines. We never got EMACS, but TECO was sufficient for the job we did. In all the years I worked for that company, we only found one bug in the OS that he created for the PDP11. Mike was a really smart guy.

In the early 2000s, Apple provided a version of EMACS to tun in the terminal window. I liked that; I would use the Tower of Hanoi to run a cheap benchmark on their machines in Apple Stores. Hanoi is still part of Gnu Emacs. I’m sad that Apple no longer provides EMACS, but it’s easy to get a download of Gnu Emacs.

The EMACS key commands are still part of my muscle memory. I love using them on the Apple command line and elsewhere. I fondly remember those days of TECO, PDP11s, and ITS. Those were simpler days.

He’s a unpaid spokesperson for apple pretty much. But the good news is that Apple will get slapped by the EU, because unlike the US, the Union doesn’t play around.

The biggest challenge with Apple Vision Pro has always been the price. Median US household income (which assumes two people) is $74,580. Vision Pro comes in close to $4000 after tax (not including accessories), which is about 5% of that income. That’s a staggering amount of money for something that requires, at a minimum, ownership of an already expensive iPhone - and does not include any accessories like a travel case. And if that couple has any children - the amount of discretionary income for such a device goes down correspondingly.

I applaud Apple for working on more affordable solutions, but those price cuts are going to have to be substantial if it’s going to penetrate middle-income families - many of whom are already having issues with more basic necessities like groceries and gas and mortgages.

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That’s what companies do…they do their best for their shareholders and customers - do you think Microsoft, Amazon, Samsung and Google don’t do the same thing? Please, listen to Windows Weekly…

Unfortunately, they do their best for their shareholders, it is only good for their customers, when something matches their goal of doing their best for the shareholders, or not doing it would be disadventurous to their shareholders.

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Funny you should mention Windows Weekly. Episode 887 (June 26, 2024) has Paul talking about how Microsoft usually bends-over backwards whenever there is a question that they might be anti-competitive. Microsoft, in the form of Brad Smith, likes to settle issues - not stick a finger in the eye of someone. Apple is a considerably different beast.

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Microsoft does that now out of fear after getting flogged over IE, several years ago. If you listen to almost any episode you will also hear Paul taking MS to task for doing crappy things to their customers

What bothers me at this point is how clearly uninformed he is on the subject at a macro level. Knows nothing at all about Android or the Play Store (and clearly doesn’t care to) but comments on the state of app distribution as though he’s a subject-matter expert. He’s clearly not, and the more he tries to insist his view is the correct one is frustrating to say the least.

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