WW 680: Get Off My Alcantara Lawn

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

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One thing about Rosetta 2, it isn’t doing JIT emulation of X86_64 on ARM, it is supposedly converting the code at the time of installation, which means there is not JIT translation overhead on macOS, whereas Microsoft use the JIT method, which is always going to be slower.

Also @Leo the 8CX is not a desktop class chip, it is a laptop chip. MS and Qualcomm came to the conclusion that the smartphone class chips were powerful enough for a desktop OS and gave it a higher TDP plus some other tweaks. But it is still a long way from being a desktop class chip.

I’m guessing that Apple’s chips are going to be the first mainstream desktop ARM class chips, with desktop like TDPs and performance. So far, ARM has been low power, battery powered devices or servers, but very little in between.

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Rosetta 2 does both @big_D - according to Wikipedia:

In addition to the just-in-time (JIT) translation support available in Rosetta, Rosetta 2 includes support for translating an application at installation time, effectively creating a Universal 2 application.

As you point out, lately ARM chips have mostly been optimized for low-power environments, but there’s nothing that says ARM or RISC architectures can’t be fast. In fact, they’re preferred in many cases for supercomputers. From Wikipedia

The main distinguishing feature of RISC architecture is that the instruction set is optimized with a large number of registers and a highly regular instruction pipeline, allowing a low number of clock cycles per instruction (CPI).

Apple is no stranger to RISC. The PowerPC chips were RISC, and very nice. Both MIPS and SPARC chips were RISC, and widely used in high end workstations in the 80s and 90s.

I think it’s very likely Apple Silicon will set a new standard for workstation performance while offering excellent battery-life on laptops.

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I’d hate to poke at Paul, but… AAA video games haven’t been $60 for a while. The ‘you own the game’ price has not changed, as you said. However, there’s plenty of ways that games have cost me more than 60 bucks.
Launch day ‘DLC’, lootboxes (NBA2K which is shown in your source features this heavily in online content), battle passes (I believe you mentioned this one), cosmetic items, ‘helpers’ (items that give you some sort of advantage), all these are rather commonplace now for most AAA video games, all cost money, and all aren’t included in that $60 fee.

I don’t think Paul was trying to count in downloadable content, or loot boxes…I believe Paul was intentionally trying just speak of the cost of the title itself. The price you pay to even own the title. The extra aren’t “required” so I assume that’s Paul left them out of his title price.

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There are a bunch of small indicators I use to gauge how strong a user is off the bat, one of the quickest is whether or not they’ve disabled that search field on the taskbar. So much wasted space, and it introduces an unnecessary click. Absolutely no reason to have it enabled other than you don’t know any better.

I’m someone who “knows better” - and I like having the Search field in the taskbar. I’m trying it now with the Search field turned off and it feels awkward to me. So let’s not use the presence of the Search field as some litmus test for one’s competency with Windows or some “no true Scotsman” standard.

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Turned it off today it I think both of you are correct. If you remove it, press the windows key and starts typing… It’s still there. Actually have always done that whether the bar is there or not.

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Well, I don’t know. I agree with turning it off… but I have a whole bunch of customization I do to any Windows machine because I like what I like. I think some people are keyboard people, some people are visual people, some people like clutter and some people like extreme clean. I wouldn’t judge anyone by what they like, because variety is the spice of life.

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alright, I’ll qualify it with a “probably don’t know any better”. I’ll still wager that the majority of people that have it enabled don’t even know that it can be disabled.

I only judge a person if their desktop is full of shortcuts… Because at that point they are no longer “shortcuts”. They are longcuts :joy::joy::joy:

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I have it enabled as just the magnifying icon. So it’s easy to find if I need it but doesn’t take up 4 inches of screen real estate.

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