Historically, Usenet clients tended to respond to both groups in response to articles posted to multiple newsgroups.

This tended to result in trolls doing things like posting “I’m in the market for a computer. Which is better, PC or Mac?” to comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy and comp.os.mac.advocacy with the intention of starting flamewars.

You could also just only use Macs.

I actually don’t know what the current requirement is. Back in the day, Apple used to build some of the OS — like QuickDraw — into the ROMs, so unless you had a physical Mac, not just a purchased copy of MacOS, you couldn’t legally run MacOS, since the ROM contents were copyrighted, and doing so would require infringing on the ROM copyright. Apple obviously doesn’t care about this most of the time, but I imagine that if it becomes institutionalized at places that make real money, they might.

But I don’t know if that’s still the case today. I’m vaguely recalling that there was some period where part of Apple’s EULA for MacOS prohibited running MacOS on non-Apple hardware, which would have been a different method of trying to tie it to the hardware.

searches

This is from 2019, and it sounds like at that point, Apple was leveraging the EULAs.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250646417?sortBy=rank

Posted on Sep 20, 2019 5:05 AM

The widely held consensus is that it is only legal to run virtual copies of macOS on a genuine Apple made Apple Mac computer.

There are numerous packages to do this but as above they all have to be done on a genuine Apple Mac.

• VMware Fusion - this allows creating VMs that run as windows within a normal Mac environment. You can therefore have a virtual Mac running inside a Mac. This is useful to either run simultaneously different versions of macOS or to run a test environment inside your production environment. A lot of people are going to use this approach to run an older version of macOS which supports 32bit apps as macOS Catalina will not support old 32bit apps.
• VMware ESXi aka vSphere - this is a different approach known as a ‘bare metal’ approach. With this you use a special VMware environment and then inside that create and run virtual machines. So on a Mac you could create one or more virtual Mac but these would run inside ESXi and not inside a Mac environment. It is more commonly used in enterprise situations and hence less applicable to Mac users.
• Parallels Desktop - this works in the same way as VMware Fusion but is written by Parallels instead.
• VirtualBox - this works in the same way as VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop. Unlike those it is free of charge. Ostensible it is ‘owned’ by Oracle. It works but at least with regards to running virtual copies of macOS is still vastly inferior to VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop. (You get what you pay for.)

Last time I checked Apple’s terms you could do the following.

• Run a virtualised copy of macOS on a genuine Apple made Mac for the purposes of doing software development
• Run a virtualised copy of macOS on a genuine Apple made Mac for the purposes of testing
• Run a virtualised copy of macOS on a genuine Apple made Mac for the purposes of being a server
• Run a virtualised copy of macOS on a genuine Apple made Mac for personal non-commercial use

No. Apple spells this out very clearly in the License Agreement for macOS. Must be installed on Apple branded hardware.

They switched to ARM in 2020, so unless their legal position changed around ARM, I’d guess that they’re probably still relying on the EULA restrictions. That being said, EULAs have also been thrown out for various reasons, so…shrugs

goes looking for the actual license text.

Yeah, this is Tahoe’s EULA, the most-recent release:

https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSTahoe.pdf

Page 2 (of 895 pages):

They allow only on Apple-branded hardware for individual purchases unless you buy from the Mac Store. For Mac Store purchases, they allow up to two virtual instances of MacOS to be executed on Apple-branded hardware that is also running the OS, and only under certain conditions (like for software development). And for volume purchase contracts, they say that the terms are whatever the purchaser negotiated. I’m assuming that there’s no chance that Apple is going to grant some “go use it as much as you want whenever you want to do CI tests or builds for open-source projects targeting MacOS” license.

So for the general case, the EULA prohibits you from running MacOS wherever on non-Apple hardware.

Now my question is, who’s making that one query that leaks my domain name? Is it Apache on startup

If you’re wanting a list of DNS queries from your system, assuming that it’s DNS and not DoH, maybe:

# tcpdump port domain

Then go start Apache or whatever.

It’s “smugly”.

Okay, this is unfortunately DIY, but if you’re willing to spend time:

Get a plywood box and put it in there.

If you hear vibrations, put sorbothane between the NAS and the box.

If you need more sound absorption, put acoustic foam on the inside.

If you need more cooling, drill two holes, mount a case fan, and run the air through some kind of baffle. Like, maybe attach insulated flex-duct, like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Hon-Guan-Silencer-Reducer-Ventilation/dp/B07HC8CXQG

Milsim games involve heavy ray tracing

I guess it depends on what genre subset you’re thinking of.

I play a lot of milsims — looks like I have over 100 games tagged “War” in my Steam library. Virtually none of those are graphically intensive. I assume that you’re thinking of recent infantry-oriented first-person-shooter stuff.

I can only think of three that would remotely be graphically intensive in my library: ArmA III, DCS, and maybe IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle for Stalingrad.

Rule the Waves 3 is a 2D Windows application.

Fleet Command and the early Close Combat titles date to the '90s. Even the newer Close Combat titles are graphically-minimal.

688(i) Hunter/Killer is from 1997.

A number of of them are 2D hex-based wargames. I haven’t played any of Gary Grigsby’s stuff, but that guy is an icon, and all his stuff is 2D.

If you go to Matrix Games, which sells a lot of more hardcore wargames, a substantial chunk of their inventory is pretty old, and a lot is 2D.

I wonder if problems could be mostly avoided by running potentially-unsafe code in a container without network access.

Yes. For a single change. Like having an editor with 2 minute save lag, pushing commit using program running on cassette tapes4 or playing chess over snail-mail. It’s 2026 for Pete’s sake, and we5 won’t tolerate this behavior!

Now of course, in some Perfect World, GitHub could have a local runner with all the bells and whistles. Or maybe something that would allow me to quickly check for progress upon the push6 or even something like a “scratch commit”, i.e. a way that I could testbed different runs without polluting history of both Git and Action runs.

For the love of all that is holy, don’t let GitHub Actions manage your logic. Keep your scripts under your own damn control and just make the Actions call them!

I don’t use GitHub Actions and am not familiar with it, but if you’re using it for continuous integration or build stuff, I’d think that it’s probably a good idea to have that decoupled from GitHub anyway, unless you want to be unable to do development without an Internet connection and access to GitHub.

I mean, I’d wager that someone out there has already built some kind of system to do this for git projects. If you need some kind of isolated, reproducible environment, maybe Podman or similar, and just have some framework to run it?

like macOS builds that would be quite hard to get otherwise

Does Rust not do cross-compilation?

searches

It looks like it can.

https://rust-lang.github.io/rustup/cross-compilation.html

I guess maybe MacOS CI might be a pain to do locally on a non-MacOS machine. You can’t just freely redistribute MacOS.

goes looking

Maybe this?

https://www.darlinghq.org/

Darling is a translation layer that lets you run macOS software on Linux

That sounds a lot like Wine

And it is! Wine lets you run Windows software on Linux, and Darling does the same for macOS software.

As long as that’s sufficient, I’d think that you could maybe run MacOS CI in Darling in Podman? Podman can run on Linux, MacOS, Windows, and BSD, and if you can run Darling in Podman, I’d think that you’d be able to run MacOS stuff on whatever.

Russian intelligence claimed that the patriarch was not merely a religious leader but a metaphysical threat — an “incarnate devil”

I’m thinking that the Baltic churches may have the upper hand against Russian intelligence when it comes to theological debate.

I was gonna say that, much as I use Linux and play milsims on it, Command: Modern Operations is a pretty prominent hard milsim — like, exiting the “game” side and getting closer to the “non-game sim” side — and is one of the very few Steam games that I can’t run on Linux, but apparently, looking at ProtonDB, it can now run on Proton. Only a bronze rating, and according to some of the people there, takes some tweaking, but it runs. Huh.

I tried a fully fledged consumer NAS (QNAP with Seagate 12 TB NAS drives) but the noise of the platters was not acceptable.

If you have a NAS, then you can put it as far away as your network reaches. Just put it somewhere where you can’t hear the thing.

DDG mostly. I’m not unhappy with Kagi on any particular technical aspect, but I’m not happy about the fact that I learned that it was operating out of Serbia (it was often listed as being based in the San Francisco Bay Area; this appears to actually be a residence of the founder, not where the employees and offices are). I’d be much more comfortable about them getting in practical legal trouble if they wound up retaining data after saying that they don’t if they were operating in a US or EU or something legal jurisdiction. I posted about it to [email protected] a while back.

If they moved operations to the US or somewhere like that, I’d have no problem using them.

The publishers can do it via uploading beta branches, but there’s also a way to tell the Steam client to fetch old versions independently of that. I remember it coming up specifically with Skyrim, because updates broke a lot of modded environments, and it takes a long time for a lot of mods to be updated (during which time people couldn’t play their modded installs).

searches

https://steamcommunity.com/app/489830/discussions/0/4032473829603430509/

The download_depot Steam console command.

The above link is about Skyrim, but also links to a non-Skyrim-specific guide that talks about how to obtain manifest IDs for versions of other games.

But, yeah. It’s really not how Steam’s intended to be used, and I imagine that hypothetically, one day, it could stop working.

There are also IIRC some ways to block Steam from updating individual games, but again, not intended functionality.

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https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/0/3205995441631274440/

If you specifically want control over game updates for some game, then GOG can be a major benefit for that.

One concern I have is that games can be purchased — Oxygen Not Included, for example, was purchased by Tencent, which added data-mining. Fortunately, in that case, Tencent was open about what they were doing, and allowed players to opt out — if they let Tencent log data about them, they could “earn” various in-game rewards. But I could imagine less-pleasant malware being attached to games after someone purchases IP rights to them and just pushes it out. Can’t do that with GOG, since there’s no channel intrinsically available to a game publisher to push updates out (unless the game has that built-in to itself).

I would guess that he’s looking for a response to someone pointing out that Steam has a larger game library than GOG.

Like, he’s gonna say “yes, but a higher proportion of the excluded games aren’t good”.

I mean, it’s true that there are lots of games sold on Steam that aren’t great games, but that doesn’t hurt me much.

There are lots of products on Amazon that aren’t that great.

There are lots of websites on the Internet that aren’t that great.

As long as I can get to the stuff I want, all good.

EDIT: I think that a better selling point for GOG than that it excludes more not-good games is that the offline installer model can survive GOG going down.

Or maybe that GOG gives you control over updates. There are ways to do this with Steam, but it’s not an intended mode of operation, and some people, like heavy Skyrim modders, where an update can cause major breakage, really want control over when they update.

I think that Starlink covers a lot of disaster scenarios.

More AI datacenters being planned.

“I think we’ve done a lot of damage with very well-respected people who have painted a doomer narrative, end of the world narrative, science fiction narrative,” Huang said.

I mean, part of the role of science fiction is to try to look at the future as technology changes it. Not all of it is hard sci-fi, but I wouldn’t across-the-board discount sci-fi. A lot of changes have been in sci-fi before reality.

There are some products out there that do cater to people who want a physical keyboard on their smartphone today. It’s not the norm, but if you’re frustrated over it, it might work for you.

Amazon has a lot of portable Bluetooth keyboards that can basically collapse down into a pocket. Those are generally designed to be used at a table, though, not in a Blackberry-style thumb keyboard sense. I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen a few of the latter that can clip to a phone, though.

while visiting family in LA I saw a robot waiter which both (optionally) took orders and would serve as a mobile food/plate tray.

Yeah, I’ve run into these. That being said, I’d call them currently a novelty…but I also remember when using touchscreen kiosks for ordering instead of cashiers was a rarity.