76% is still really far from 100%. Macs were 8% of their revenue, which is still 7 billion dollars. With a B. Tres comas. You’d have to be bonkers to throw away 7 billion. And you’d have to be bonkers to reduce your product diversity, especially by tanking your most consistent product line.

No, it’s far more likely that Apple—knowing they have spent the last few years investing heavily in an ARM-based platform, and knowing the newest ARM chips rival Intel for per-core performance at a fraction of the power—believes they can build an ARM laptop light years ahead of the rest of the market. And considering no one else on the market has come close to their level of hardware integration and optimization on ARM, they’re probably right.

There are a couple laptops in preview using the new high powered ARM chips, but Windows+ARM has failed once before, will they be able to launch this time? Apple can launch a product and instantly get mass market penetration even with people bitching left and right about headphone jacks, touch bars, and USB-C ports. Has any Windows laptop gotten that kind of penetration in the last 5 years?

If Apple releases a MacBook Pro that’s competitive with Intel based Windows laptops for compute power, with some ridiculous amount of battery life like 14 hours, what do you think will happen? Do you think the new Windows+ARM and the CLR will be able to compete with Darwin, an ARM-native platform that’s been around for a decade, with an ARM-native kernel, a huge ecosystem of ARM-native libraries, and countless deep integrations with Apple-made ARM chips?

Nah dude, Apple isn’t trying to lock down the laptop ecosystem, they’re trying to reuse their gigantic investment to get off of a hardware platform that’s honestly been stalling. Intel isn’t reducing power use, they aren’t increasing core density, they don’t integrate well with peripheral co-processors that are redefining consumer electronics. Hell IBM POWER might actually take market share from Xeon. Say that to someone from 2010 and they’d laugh so hard they’d halfway suffocate.

Right, and the only way an expensive change to the workstations makes sense if your goal is “better iPad apps” is to make the developer experience better

That’s exactly my impression too. I can’t help but wonder how much of this hand wringing is actually virtue signaling.

How many of these people will actually make the switch? And why haven’t they done so already if MacOS.current is so god awful?

OK, but my point is, you claim these are things we should expect. I claim there’s no actual business motivation for them to do this. I assert that they will continue to treat their general purpose computers like general purpose computers.

Things like Gatekeeper are easily disabled. It’s there to prevent end users like my 76 year old mother in law from shooting herself in the foot, and honestly, she needs them!

Until they actually happen, you can keep telling me the sky is falling, and I say I’ll believe it when and if it actually happens.

You have to run a Postgres database too so I wouldn’t try to run it on that hardware. I’ve got 24 cores and 64GB RAM, NVME SSD for ZFS cache, etc.

Why isn’t 100 an octal (or a hex or binary) constant? Why is it bytes instead of machine words? Why is read bound to a file descriptor instead of having a record size from an ioctl, and then reading in 100 records?

Just some examples. :)

So if you run an empty file with sh, you would prefer it exits failure. And when you run an empty file with python, ruby, perl, et al., also failures?

Why should a program have one or more statements / expressions? A function need not have one or more statements / expressions. Isn’t top level code in a script just a de facto main function?

It’s intuitive to me that a script, as a sequence of statements to run sequentially, could have zero length. A program with an entry point needs to have at least a main function, which can be empty. But a script is a program where the entry point is the top of the file. It “has a main function” if the file exists.

Exactly. It sounds like arbitrary hackery common in UNIX development. Just imagine writing a semi-formal spec that defines a program as “zero characters” which you pass onto peer review. They’d say it was an empty file, not a program.

I don’t see how that follows.

You claim the exact opposite behavior would have been equally reasonable. That is, the opposite of an empty shell script exiting true. The precise opposite would be an empty shell script—i.e. a script without an explicit exit—exiting false. This would affect all shell scripts.

Unless you meant the opposite of executing a file not loadable as an executable binary by passing it to /bin/sh, in which case I really would like to know what the “precise opposite” of passing a file to /bin/sh would be.

You’re being pedantic. Obviously, under some circumstances it will set error codes, as well. It very clearly reads some amount of data, subject to the limitations and exceptions of the system; zero knowledge of Unix is required to intuit that behavior.

No. Many people assume read will fill the buffer size they provide unless they are reading the trailing bytes of the file. However, read is allowed to return any number of bytes within the buffer size at any time.

It also has multiple result codes that are not errors. Many people assume when read returns -1 that means error. Did you omit that detail for brevity, or was it not obvious to you?

If a file is marked executable, I think it’s quite intuitive that the system attempt to execute. If it’s not a native executable, the next obvious alternative would be to interpret it, using the default system interpreter.

The reason for the existence of human intelligence isn’t obvious either but that doesn’t make it random. A hostile environment naturally provides a strong incentive for an organism to evolve intelligence.

As far as the operating system executing non-binaries with “/bin/sh” being arbitrary, fair enough. Though I would argue that once the concepts of the shebang line and an interpreter exist, it’s not far off to imagine the concept of a “default interpreter.” Do you think the concept of a default is arbitrary?