It’s funny cos when I was young I recall it being called (at least sometimes) ADD. So the H has been added (or made mandatory in the name) at a time when we’re realising that hyperactivity is not a necessary symptom.

None of what you said is new to me, or likely to anyone in this thread. And apart from the last two paragraphs, none of it is even controversial.

The penultimate paragraph is a bit misleading. It’s not that Taiwan is not “a legitimate national government”. It’s that its claims to be the national government of all of China were obviously bullshit for a government that had not had actual control over mainland China for over two decades at the point that UN recognition changed.

The last paragraph is true in the sense of what is official recognised, but obviously incorrect in reality. Taiwan is an independent country as a matter of fact and has been since the end of the civil war. I’m not interested in what they claim, or the PRC claims, or America claims, or even what Australia claims. It is an entirely separate country that maintains entirely separate foreign policy, separate defence force, and entirely operates its own internal affairs. In no real sense is it part of the same country. And that’s what actually matters. Anyone who claims Taiwan is not an independent country is doing so for political reasons, and their discussions on the subject should be treated with significant scepticism. At best, they’re playing a game of realpolitik. At worst they’re talking bullshit.

I know which is going on here.

Taiwan has been an independent country for over three quarters of a century. So yes, a forceful invasion of another country for the purposes of exploiting its resources and population would be colonialism.

Nice deflection. We’re not talking about what happened 400 years ago. We’re talking about what’s going on right now.

Yes, the pre-communist, pre-republic Chinese imperialism against the native Taiwanese population was bad. It doesn’t justify modern-day imperialism from the PRC, any more than poor treatment of the various central Vietnamese native populations would justify Chinese imperialism against Vietnam. Or indeed any more than Australia’s treatment of its Indigenous population would justify China deciding to invade Australia.

Your blatant whataboutism is not a defence of China here.

Yes, that’s completely true.

It does not in any way excuse China for its own current imperialism (e.g., Tibet, Xianjiang), or for its threats of further direct military conquests for the sake of expanding its empire (the subject of this article).

to violently oppose China and Taiwan unifying their governmental and national defense structures

You say that as though there’s any prospect of that happening by any means other than violent colonial oppression on the part of the PRC.

Oh, I used HA to mean high availability. I was not aware people also abbreviated Home Assistant.

Sorry for the late reply. I’m just disorganised and have way too many unread notifications.

LXC containers sound really interesting, especially on a machine that’s hosting a lot of services. But how available are they? One advantage of Docker is its ubiquity, with a lot of useful tools already built as Docker images. Does LXC have a similarly broad supply of images? Or else is it easy to create one yourself?

Re VM vs LXC, have I got this right? You generally use VMs only for things that are intermittently spun up, rather than services you keep running all the time, with a couple of exceptions like HomeAssistant? What’s the reason they’re an exception?

Possibly related: your examples are all that VMs get access to the discrete GPU, containers use the integrated GPU. Is there a particular reason for that distribution?

I’m really curious about the cluster thing too. How simple is that? Is it something where you could start out just using an old spare laptop, then later add a dedicated server and have it transparently expand the power of your server? Or is the advantage just around HA? Or something else?

Sorry for the late reply. I’m just disorganised and have way too many unread notifications.

LXC containers sound really interesting, especially on a machine that’s hosting a lot of services. But how available are they? One advantage of Docker is its ubiquity, with a lot of useful tools already built as Docker images. Does LXC have a similarly broad supply of images? Or another easy way to run things?

But FCP X is amazing. It’s the one thing I really miss having a Mac for and it’s so disappointing that nobody else has even attempted to replicate it. It’s leaps and bounds ahead of everybody else. Calling it a “rebranded iMovie” shows either a complete lack of awareness of literally anything about it, or an incredible intellectual dishonesty that doesn’t even seen to serve a practical purpose.

It’s also…not subscription based. Or wasn’t in 2018 when I last had a Mac.

Aww I still wanted to see yours!

Simple asexuals are mutants

What about complex asexuals?

Oh yeah, the “run headless” tip too was great! I would never have used a desktop environment, and would in effect have been using it headless. But had you and others not specifically suggested running it as headless it would probably not have occurred to me that that’s a setting change I’d need to make while installing it.

Thanks! I genuinely wasn’t sure how much RAM would be necessary, and would have probably seriously considered 8 GB enough if I hadn’t gotten the feedback.

I’ve no comments on RISC-V, but I agree that a move towards ARM in the Windows & Linux worlds would seem sensible. I would guess it hasn’t happened for the same reason IPv6 hasn’t taken over. Too much momentum. Too many developers still working in an x86 world, too many legacy apps that won’t easily run on ARM, too many hardware manufacturers each making the individual choice to keep making the current-popular option. Apple could transition because they’re the single gatekeeper. They make the decision, and everybody else who wants to use a Mac has to follow along. I’m going to guess that the control they have over the hardware and the software also means Rosetta 2 works a hell of a lot better than Microsoft’s Prism. (I can’t say for sure, having never used an ARM-based Windows machine or an ARM-based Mac.)

In terms of heat, what kind of room do you have it in? Somewhere with good natural airflow, or away in a closet somewhere?

I guess I have the same question for you as I did for curbstickle. What’s the advantage of doing things that way with VMs, vs running Docker containers? How does it end up working?

Interesting. I’ve never really played around with that style of VM-based server architecture before. I’ve always either used Docker (& Kubernetes) or ran things on bare metal.

If you’re willing to talk a bit more about how it works, advantages of it, etc., I’d love to hear. But I sincerely don’t want to put any pressure and won’t be at all offended if you don’t have the time or effort.

I’m not sure I agree with your definition of walled garden. I’d say it’s a place that’s designed to be nice and easy to use within the bounds designed for you (the garden), but which protects the user from doing something that might harm them, even if that “protection” comes at the cost of being able to do other things they want to do, in a kind of paternalistic way (the wall). The classic example would be iOS, where the only apps you can install are the ones Apple has approved for you. Getting apps from the open web the way you would on Windows, macOS, or Linux could be dangerous!

Your description of:

you may run into roadblocks doing things that way, yes. You are pretty much limited to what’s on their (vast) catalog

Makes it sound very much a walled garden to me. Not as high-walled as iOS of course, but it’s a spectrum.

But anyway, it’s basically semantics. Not that important what you call it.

Not at all. It’s completely open source

Being open source doesn’t necessarily preclude being a walled garden. If (and I fully admit I could be completely wrong about this) it makes it easy to do certain things through a friendly UI, but it becomes much harder or more awkward (or impossible) to do things that aren’t explicitly supported, as part of a deliberate design decision/tradeoff for that usability.

Anyway, thanks a heap for answering all my questions. Has been very helpful.

if I’m doing virt though

What’s the use case for that? My plan has been to run a single server with a handful of Docker containers. No need for more complex stuff like load balancing or distributed compute.