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Nomokison How Apple’s rivals plan to catch up with the M1 chip

I'm okay with 5% yearly increases in performance if it means I don't have to pay Apple $200 for an 8GB RAM upgrade. If I can choose which SSD to buy or which GPU or CPU. Nobody else is capable of doing what Apple has achieved here. That's not a good thing for customers, considering how authoritarian Apple behaves as a company over its customers.

Nomokison How Apple’s rivals plan to catch up with the M1 chip

I'm terrified of Apple's strategy here. It's a clear message that the strategy of independent manufacturers and vendors is far less effective, at least in a modern context. We're going to see Apple eating up increasing amounts of the market, which is concerning when I particularly care about freedom and Apple is all too eager to lock everything down. We're going to see other companies increasingly look to vertical integration on a scale that we haven't seen in decades. In 50 years, there might not even be any independent manufacturers anymore. Either you buy in to the Apple stack or whoever owns the only other competing stack, if one exists. We'll get to reminisce about the good old days when we could still choose which GPU/CPU/MB/RAM/etc to buy from which manufacturer for the price that we prefer.

Nomokison Leaked documents from Nintendo investigation of hacker in 2013

> I know it's a difficult position to argue for practically

I'm not sure it is. It's a completely novel state of affairs that companies expect to have perpetual ownership and absolute control/monopoly over what they've created. It's completely unjustified outside of "well, we have the money to make it so" and the public domain is dead solely because of efforts of companies like Disney.

Nomokison Nobody ever ported Doom to run on a Cray 1

Man, this guy has some great articles.

http://www.chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital-archeology/

http://www.chrisfenton.com/cos-recovery/

I just wish he'd made higher resolution pictures.

He's also seriously hardcore (or maybe I feel out of depth because I'm a software guy):

> I built a robot that would manually move the head forward 1/5200th of an inch at a time (there are 400 data tracks per inch, so this gives me a whopping 13 steps per data track!), while a high-speed analog-to-digital converter would take the analog signal straight from the drive’s read amplifier and buffer it into an FPGA at a blistering 80 million samples-per-second (like I said earlier, the theme here was overkill…the data was only changing at ~10 MHz or so)