I am extremely sad about this (and find it nonsensical since we’re talking about streaming, and there are plenty of Remote Desktop and video streaming apps out there).

Since I kind of saw this coming a mile away, I actually got myself an NVIDIA Shield a few weeks back. I haven’t had time to write about it at length, but there are two things I can share at this point:

It (metaphorically) hurts to have an Android box plugged into my TV when the Apple TV could theoretically do it all, and it’s still a bit of a hack to run xCloud on it (better than before, though).

But I can stream whatever games I want, and that, ultimately, is the future.

Bonus annoyance: the Android TV experience is surprisingly good. Enough to make me wonder about the long-term survival of the Apple TV outside our little bubble of nerdery and ultra-polished UX.

No new design (sad), but it’s nice to see a brand new hardware revision with decent graphics (even if it’s still a Radeon).

My ageing i5 is getting a bit long in the tooth, but right now I’m going to wait for the ARM version (or, more likely, for a new mini).

Update: 1080p FaceTime cameras, too. Finally. RAM’s hugely overpriced, though, good thing it’s still user-expandable.

Two of my favorite things, in a brilliant article I just had to mention here.

The organization section alone is worth more than most functionality guidelines I’ve come across (although I still think of Bruce Tognazzini’s work as the golden standard).

Well, this is a surprise. I used New Relic for years before moving to Azure Application Insights (which is now converging with OpenCensus to a degree), so I have a personal stake in the observability camp (besides considering it a cornerstone of app maintainability).

Curious to see how their new business model is going to turn out now that this kind of sophisticated monitoring becomes the new normal and becomes a commodity.

Time to get out your popcorn, folks.

We’re in for a few weeks of armchair commentary concerning ARM licensing, how this will (or not) lead to a schism in Apple/non-Apple ARM variants (think AMD/Intel), if NVIDIA should be the target of an anti-trust probe since it might essentially be competing with its own licensees, and whether or not this is another nail in Intel’s future coffin as NVIDIA clearly prepares to build its own CPU/GPU combos, but starting from the GPU side (whereas Apple has added GPU capabilities to a high-octane, very finely tuned ARM design).

Any which way, Apple can certainly hold its own. I suspect they’ve planned this far ahead and then some, maybe as far as ARM 128-bit.

Note the reference to “data centers” in the PR. This is a play for the (belatedly nascent) ARM server market as well, and NVIDIA is already present in the server space–they acquired Mellanox, for instance, but still have to take Intel along for the ride, and that is clearly not a way to turn enough profit.

Well, this is turning out to be a perfect storm. Apple switches to ARM, AMD is shipping Ryzen CPUs that trounce Intel’s in a variety of workloads, and now they can’t deliver 7nm on schedule.

Too bad that AMD seems to be purposefully coasting and pushing slightly tweaked versions of their previous-gen chips to drive up profit rather than renewing their range (its coming, but only later in the year/early next year).

The server market is key to keeping Intel afloat and this has a pretty significant impact on their ability to deliver there, but I’m really curious as to how this is going to shape the PC landscape going forward.

This is an almost direct match for my current experience. Although the study mostly covered my US colleagues and there is a considerable amount of additional entropy involved in my current role and timezone span, it is extremely accurate.

Longer hours and 30-minute meetings, in particular, have in fact become the new norm. And I found it highly amusing that my “Swiss cheese” analogy made the story.

What the piece doesn’t cover is the loss of productivity (and burnout) that comes from constant context-switching and the massive amount of synchronous “face time” we keep getting pulled in to on account of the novelty (and reassurance of having attention) that video calls provide.

Again, remote was great until everyone else joined in and turned it into an “Eternal September” of short video calls and calendar battleships.

$160 seems like a much saner price for a keyboard cover, and much less emphasis on form over function. I’m curious as to trackpad responsiveness, but Logitech usually ships quality hardware.

One to keep an eye on as I consider when to move to the 11” Pro.

Stuff I’m involved with, for later recollection.

I’ve been doing a surprising amount of telco work over the past six months, and my background has been of tremendous help (I really wish I could focus on just the one industry vertical, but it is hard to “just” do Internet and telco no matter how much fun it is for me).

Of course I’m smack in the middle of this right now (just wanted to capture the moment, really).

It’s been an interesting six months in Services, and I am quite curious as to how this fiscal year will pan out.

(also: Disclaimer)

This is nothing short of absolutely, spectacularly, irreprehensibly brilliant.

Previously.

I haven’t used this at all (and can’t really use OBS and the like because it requires too much CPU and makes my relatively old machines sound like leaf blowers), but the branding and demo video are nothing short of brilliant.

Remarkably well thought out as a product, even if it’s not breakthrough technology–it just uses what is out there in a great, thoughtful way.

Even though this is in Portuguese, dated yesterday and way off-topic from my usual stuff, I wanted to make sure I kept a record of how the Portuguese government is handling the pandemic.

Since my last post on the topic, daily case reporting has become even more of a shambles, with demographics missing from reported figures due to “system issues” and an (apparently fumbled) attempt at consolidating data.

But the aggregate numbers are still available (and climbing), so cessation of these meetings between the government and health experts is baffling to say the least and irresponsible at worst, even if it’s couched as “entering a new phase”.

This is purely driven by economic and political interests, and it’s going to cost us as Summer unfolds and Lisbon and Algarve maintain a growing infection rate (currently at an average of 300-ish new cases a day, placing us nearly halfway up the peak).

Also, just for kicks, the Director of Information and Analysis of DGS (our NHS-like institution) just quit her job, which is… interesting.

This was way unexpected. I thought SUSE was down for the count given it’s somewhat wobbly take on the enterprise market of late.

Here’s to hoping k3s survives and doesn’t get folded into their old-style “management suites” (that ship has sailed, and their portfolio still looks like something out of the 90s).

Like a bazillion people, I got an account but haven’t done anything with it yet, so this review is quite interesting.

The productivity nut in me appreciates the sane defaults and the mobile experience, but the ex-Exchange admin and former imap_sieve user keeps wondering how much further we’d have evolved if server-side rules had become more accessible to regular humans.

What really appeals to me, however, is the mobile experience.

To this day, I have my Mail.app “inbox”/default view set to a smart folder on my Macs (something that I keep expecting Apple to break) and Gmail filters that do a little of what Hey does to lessen the crud overall, but the mobile experience on iOS (across the vast majority of mail clients) is just crappy in comparison (or proprietary, or both).

If Apple hadn’t broken iOS mail and spent a little on server-side functionality, they’d have been able to do 200% of this for decades (VIPs and passive-aggressive Junk filtering don’t count).

Gmail has pushed a lot of server-side logic (content classification, suggestions, etc.) but has clearly lost their way as well (and don’t get me started on its mobile client or web UX), and, of course, IMAP doesn’t come with matching standards for server-side filtering, so the whole thing is a three-ring circus, and the client side has been on fire for decades now.

So yes, Hey has a reason for being. I just don’t know if it has a reason for lasting, because there is so much low-hanging fruit here that just about anyone else running an e-mail service can do the same, and the reasons they haven’t done so is: a) return on investment b) privacy implications and c) inertia (pick any two).

Ironically, I have a lot of similar features in the Office 365 webmail Interface (which is what I use to get work done, in Firefox, because it’s miles ahead of the Outlook desktop clients and doesn’t turn my machines into leaf blowers).

Five years ago I wouldn’t have expected to say this, but webmail can be done sanely in a corporate setting, and Microsoft has absolutely nailed it (if you’re in the ecosystem).

That aside, and given that I still prefer a native client for my personal mail (which requires far less grooming) I just don’t see how Hey can help me personally, but then again I’ve always been very opinionated about organizing (and prioritizing) things.

This makes for fascinating reading. I was aware of some of the intricacies behind the connector from the very beginning of MFI, but it’s nice to see most of it in one place.

Salvatore Sanfilippo is stepping down as maintainer after eleven years, but will still sit on the Redis Labs advisory board–which is a good thing on many regards, since Redis now has a community (and a business) to support it and new governance, and Salvatore has too creative a mind to be tied down to a single thing.

Redis is one of my staple architecture components (and many people have no clue as to what it can really do besides “caching”), and is of the best pieces of tech I’ve ever used, so I’m really thankful for his work.

Of course these figures would leak.

And they don’t look half bad, especially considering the benchmarks are for emulated code. I’m really curious to see both native ones (even if the A12Z is not going to be the actual CPU in future Macs) and how it stacks up to a Gen 10 i7 (which is the yardstick I’d use for an “average” pro desktop).

This ties in nicely with my own perception, although most of the macOS heritage I’m concerned (and sad) about is on the UX side and not so much on the kernel/ecosystem side.