Even though the article says that Microsoft removed the “bypassnro” workaround earlier this year, I just used it earlier this evening to set up a new Win11 PC for a neighbour successfully (she didn't have a Microsoft account on her previous Win10 laptop, and wanted it the same way).
At the part of the initial setup where it asks to connect to a network, press Shift + F10 to open the Command Prompt. Then, type oobe\bypassnro and press Enter. The system will reboot and start the initial setup again in a non-network mode that allows you to create a local user account.
The new HP PCs I've deployed recently did not have current Windows 11 builds installed. I tend to think OEMs are being slow to update their master images.
The ICON picture in this blog post is of my ICON and taken from my blog (with credit, which is a nice gesture). If anyone is interested in reading my two posts about the Burroughs ICON computer running QNX, here are the links (the first post has YouTube links of my QNX demos):
Do you have any plans to backup the software and ROMs to archive.org? Lack of access to the ROMs has been a stumbling point for creating an emulator for this system.
You don’t have to be a biologist or zoologist to appreciate what Jane Goodall brought to the world.
Her work transcended science. It touched on compassion, respect for all living beings, and a deep curiosity about the natural world that inspired generations. She didn’t just study chimpanzees; she taught us what it means to observe with empathy, to advocate with conviction, and to act with hope. Her legacy will echo for a very long time.
I'm guessing just one in a hundred is that person. But maybe not impossible, after all, that'd it'd be someone like her. Did you see what she saw? From the article:
> Her most disturbing studies came in the mid-1970s, when she and her team of field workers began to record a series of savage attacks.
> The incidents grew into what Goodall called the four-year war, a period of brutality carried out by a band of male chimpanzees from a region known as the Kasakela Valley. The marauders beat and slashed to death all the males in a neighboring colony and subjugated the breeding females, essentially annihilating an entire community.
When I was evaluating ways to add comments to my blog on GitHub Pages, I quickly passed by Disqus because it was a 3rd party service that I didn't trust for reasons like this.
Instead, I went with a tight solution that minimized 3rd party interaction: GitHub Discussions leveraged using the Giscus app (https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/github-discussions-blog...). You have to have a GitHub account to post comments using this method, which I like because my blog is geared to those that would have that.
As someone who has used the Snapdragon X Elite (12 core Oryon) Dev Kit as a daily driver for the past year, I find this exciting. The X Elite performance still blows my mind today - so the new X2 Elite with 18 cores is likely going to be even more impressive from a performance perspective!
I can't speak to the battery life, however, since it is dismal on my Dev Kit ;-)
Surface Pro 11 owner here. SQL Server won't install on ARM without hacks. Hyper-V does not support nested virtualization on ARM. Most games are broken with unplayable graphical glitches with Qualcomm video drivers, but fortunately not all. Most Windows recovery tools do not support ARM: no Media Creation Tool, no Installation Assistant, and recovery drives created on x64 machines aren't compatible [EDIT: see reply, I might be mistaken on this]. Creation of a recovery drive for a Snapdragon-based Surface (which you have to do from a working Snapdragon-based Surface) requires typing your serial code into a Microsoft website, then downloading a .zip of drivers that you manually overwrite onto the recovery media that Windows 11 creates for you.
Day-to-day, it's all fine, but I may be returning to x64 next time around. I'm not sure that I'm receiving an offsetting benefit for these downsides. Battery life isn't something that matters for me.
You ABSOLUTELY do not have to create a recovery drive from a Snapdragon based device. I've done it multiple times from x64 Windows for both a SPX and 11.
Hmm, thank you, that's good to know. Did you just apply the Snapdragon driver zip over the x64 recovery drive? It didn't work for me when my OS killed itself but I could easily have done something wrong in my panic over the machine not working. Since I only have the one Snapdragon device, I was making the assumption that it would have worked if I had a second one, but I didn't actually know that.
Thanks again for this. Honestly, it may sway my choice on returning to x64 vs. sticking with ARM64 next time. The other issues are relatively minor and can be dealt with, but I didn't like thinking that I was one OS failure away from a bricked machine that I couldn't recover.
One reason is that Apple sold subsidized devkits to developers starting around 6 months before Apple Silicon launched, while the X Elite devkit was not subsidized, came with Windows 11 Home (meaning that you had to pay another $100 to upgrade to Pro if you were an actual professional developer who needed to join the computer to your work domain), and didn't ship until after months after X Elite laptops started shipping. As a result, when the X Elite launched basically everything had to run under emulation.
I think another reason is Apple's control over the platform vs Microsoft's. Apple has the ability to say "we're not going to make any more x86 computers, you're gonna have to port your software to ARM", while Microsoft doesn't have that ability. This means that Snapdragon has to compete against Intel/AMD on its own merits. A couple months after X Elite launched, Intel started shipping laptops with the Lunar Lake architecture. This low-power x86 architecture managed to beat X Elite on battery life and thermals without having to deal with x86 emulation or poor driver support. Of course it didn't solve Intel's problems (especially since it's fabricated at TSMC rather than by Intel), but it demonstrated that you could get comparable battery life without having to switch architectures, which took a lot of wind out of X Elite's sails.
Apple had a great translation layer (Rosetta) that allows you to run x64 code, and it's very fast. However, Apple being Apple, they are going to discontinue this feature in 2026, that's when we'll see some Apple users really struggling to go fully arm, or just ditch their MacBook. I know if Apple does follow through with killing Rosetta, I'll do the latter.
It's a transpiler that takes the x86-64 binary assembly and spits out the aarch64 assembly only on the first run AFAIK. This is then cached on storage for consecutive runs.
Apple silicon also has special hardware support for x86-64's "TSO" memory order (important for multithreaded code) and half-carry status flag.
BTW. A more common term for what Rosetta does is "binary translation". A "transpiler" typically compiles from one high-level language to another, never touching machine code.
Did it? From that list: SQL server doesn't work on Mac and there's no Apple equivalent, virtualisation is built into the system so that kind of worked but with restrictions, games barely exist Mac so a few that cared did the ports but it's still minimal. There's basically no installation media for Macs in the same way as windows in general.
What I'm trying to say is - the scope is very different / smaller there. There's a tonne of things that didn't work on Macs both before and after and the migration was not that perfect either.
Out of the gate, Apple silicon lacked nested virtualization, too. They added it in the M3 chip and macOS 15. Macs have different needs than Windows though; I think it's less of a big deal there. On Windows we need it for running WSL2 inside a VM.
I'd guess the M3 features aren't required for nested virtualization, and it was more of a sw design decision to only add the support when some helpful hardware features were shipped too. Eg here's nested virtualization support for ARM on Linux in 2017: https://lwn.net/Articles/728193/
Nested virt does need hardware support to implement efficiently and securely. The Apple chips added that over time, eg M2 actually had somewhat workable support but still incomplete and hacky https://lwn.net/Articles/928426/ - the GIC (interrupt controller) was a mess to virtualise in older versions, which is different from the instruction set of the CPU.
On Windows nested virtualization already existed before WSL, all the kernel and device drivers security features introduced on Windows 10, and made always enabled on Windows 11, require running Hyper-V, which is a type 1 hypervisor.
So it is rather easy having to deal with nested virtualization, even those of us that seldom use WSL.
Yes, nested virtualization has existed for a long time... on Intel. On Windows, it is not supported on ARM. For a long time it wasn't even supported on AMD! They added AMD nested virtualization support in Windows Server 2022!
Note that when the Windows host is invisibly running under Hyper-V, your other Hyper-V VMs are its "siblings" and not nested children. You're not using nested virtualization in that situation. It's only when running a Hyper-V VM inside another Hyper-V VM. WSL2 is a Hyper-V VM, so if you want to run WSL2 inside a Windows Hyper-V VM which is inside your Windows host, it ends up needing to nest.
Nested virtualization is not required for WSL2 or Hyper-V VMs. It's only required if you want to run VMs from within WSL2 (Windows 11 only) or Hyper-V VMs within Hyper-V VMs.
Yeah, I understand this and said it correctly in my post. We need nested virtualization to run WSL2 inside a VM: this is a Linux VM inside a Windows VM inside a Windows host. WSL2 is already a VM, so if you want to run that inside a VM, it requires nested virtualization. Nested virtualization is one of those features that people don't know about unless they need it, and they find out for the first time when they get an error message from Hyper-V. If you have a development VM on a system without nested virtualization, you're stuck with WSL1 inside that VM, or using a "sibling" Linux VM that you set up manually (the latter was my actual solution to this issue).
Actually, the Macho file format was multiarch by design (On Windows we're still stuck with Program Files (x86))..
Anyway, before dropping 32bit, they've dropped PowerPC.
Another consideration, Apple is the king of dylib, you're usually dynamically linking to the OS frameworks/libs. so they can actually plan their glue smarter so the frameworks would still work in native arch.
(that was really important with PPC->Intel where you also had big endian...)
Apple already went through this before with PowerPC -> x86. They had universal binaries, Rosetta, etc. to build off of. And they got to do it with their own hardware, which includes some special instructions intended to help with emulation.
> Apple already went through this before with PowerPC -> x86
Not to mention 68K -> PowerPC.
Rhapsody supported x86, and I think during the PowerPC era Apple kept creating x86 builds of OS X just in case. This may have helped to keep things like byte order dependencies from creeping in.
Having a narrow product line helped Apple a lot. Similarly being able to deprecate things faster than business-oriented Microsoft. Apple also controls silicon implementation. So they could design hardware features that enabled low to zero overhead x86 emulation. All in all Rosetta 2 was a pretty good implementation.
Microsoft is trying to retain binary compatibility across architectures with ARM64EC stuff which is intriguing and horrifying. They, however, didn't put any effort into ensuring Qualcomm is implementing the hardware side well. Unlike Apple, Qualcomm has no experience in making good desktop systems and it shows.
I didn't say otherwise. They probably realized they can pull a complete desktop CPU design off at the latest with iPad, probably earlier. They were probably not happy using Intel chips and their business strategy has always been controlling and limiting HW capabilities as much as possible.
Linux is different. Decades of being tied to x86 made the OS way more coupled with the processor family than one might think.
Decades of bugfixes, optimizations and workarounds were made assuming a standard BIOS and ACPI standards.
Specially on the desktop side.
That, and the fact that SoC vendors are decades behind on driver quality. They remind me of the NDiswrapper era.
Also, a personal theory I have is that have unfair expectations with ARM Linux. Back then, when x86 Linux had similar compatibility problems, there was nothing to be compared with, so people just accepted that Linux was going to be a pain and that was it.
Now the bar is higher. People expect Linux to work the way it does in x86, in 2025.
Linux runs perfectly on MIPS, Power, Sparc, obviously ARM - cue the millions of phone running Linux today, RiscV, and at least a dozen other architectures with little to no user. It's absolutely not tied to x86.
This doesn't pass the smell test when Linux powers so many smart or integrated devices and IoT on architectures like ARM, MIPS, Xtensa, and has done so for decades.
I didn't even count Android here which is Linux kernel as first class citizen on billions of mostly ARM-based phones.
Every Mac transitions to ARM, only a very small amount of Windows PCs are running ARM. SO right now there's not an large user base to incentivise software to be written for it.
You are right that Windows on ARM cannot be called a success. But if you make Windows/macOS cross platform software then your software needs to be written for ARM anyway.
So if you support macOS/x86, macos/ARM, and Windows/x86, then the additional work to add Windows/ARM is rather small, unless you do low-level stuff (I remember Fortnite WoA port taking almost a year from announcement to release due to anticheat).
>Creation of a recovery drive for a Snapdragon-based Surface (which you have to do from a working Snapdragon-based Surface) requires typing your serial code into a Microsoft website, then downloading a .zip of drivers that you manually overwrite onto the recovery media that Windows 11 creates for you.
That's just creation of a recovery drive for anything that Microsoft itself makes. It's the same process for the Intel Surface devices too.
>no Media Creation Tool
Why would anyone care about that? Most actively avoid Microsoft's media creation tool and use Rufus instead.
I have a similar Windows Arm64 machine (Lenovo "IdeaPad 5 Slim"), RDP into it works OK.
There is one issue I ran into that I haven't on my (self-built) Windows desktops: when Windows Hello (fingerprint lock) is enabled, and neither machine is on a Windows domain, the RDP client will just refuse to authenticate.
On the bright side, there's a good chance that Windows on ARM is not well supported by malware. There's a situation where you benefit from things being broken.
Yeah, I too was surprised to find the dev experience very good: all JetBrains IDEs work well, Visual Studio appears to work fine, and most language toolchains seem well supported.
Have I had any app compatibility issues?
To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: "No."
The Prism binary emulation for x86 apps that don't have an ARM equivalent has been stellar with near-native performance (better than Rosetta in macOS). And I've tried some really obscure stuff!
I suspect that's due to the GPU and not due to Prism, because they basically just took a mobile GPU and stuffed it into a laptop chip. Generally performance seems to be on par with whatever a typical flagship Android devices can do.
Desktop games that have mobile ports generally seem to run well, emulation is pretty solid too (e.g. Dolphin). Warcraft III runs OK-ish.
The GPUs don't go toe-to-toe with current gen desktop GPUs but they should be significantly better than the GTX 650, a mid range desktop GPU from 2012, the game (2019) lists as recommended. It does sound like something odd is going on than just lack of hardware.
That something odd is called GPU drivers. Even Intel struggled (they recently announced that they are dropping all gpu driver older than Alchemist development) to get games running on their iGpus
Ironically, the app I've had the most trouble with is Visual Studio 2022. Since it has a native ARM64 build and installation of the x64 version is blocked, there are a bunch of IDE extensions that are unavailable.
SGI hardware was the sexiest hardware of the 1990s, and IRIX was the sexiest UNIX OS of the same period. They were the desire of nearly every UNIX nerd back then.
I credit a lab full of SGIs at Ohio State with my transition from a career in mechanical engineering towards technology and information security. I just got transfixed by all of the things I could do and would spend my time in class distributing povray renders across the whole lab instead of paying attention to what I was supposed to be doing.
We also had a gorgeous lab of NeXT computers in a basement computer lab. Between just doing what seemed like magic in Mathematica and seeing how small I could make fonts on the laser printer, I also got scolded directly by Steve Jobs by replying to his default email in the mail client with 'read receipt' enabled. He said it was a violation of his privacy lol.
I too have an O2 along with some SGI flat panel screens, which was amazing tech in the world of CRT displays of yesteryear.
I've been trying to donate this stuff to local museums for a while but sadly, none seem interested. The O2 still boots without any issues, and at least one of the screens work. Shame to just throw away.
I'm probably just nostalgic, but to me this hardware is a piece of history that's mostly forgotten or overlooked by anyone who wasn't working in IT at the time. That's why I've been trying to get museums to take it, because my hope would be they'd do something educational with the hardware. Alas, selling is indeed probably my only recourse if I don't want these things to end up on the heap (right away.)
I was there wishing I could afford those amazing machines. My point with the pricing is to hopefully find someone who values the machine as more than a sum of its parts. Speaking of which it reminds me of the youtube channel save it for parts. Saving old tech is not very popular. We lost Living Computers: Museum + Labs after Paul Allen died.
Thanks for posting this; never seen that particular model before. It looks like one of those kitschy, pad-supplied coffee or soda makers. I find the urge, very prevalent from the mid-90s to the mid-Aughts, to entomb even professional-grade electronics in cases that look like cheap toys or other household appliances both bizarre and fascinating, analog to the 70s trend of styling (especially home) computing devices as faux-wooden furniture pieces, et cetera.
I think the irony of this is the MIPS processors weren't that good for very long at all. (Famously Toy Story was rendered on SparcStations, even if the animation was prepared on SGIs). The PA-RISC ones seemed to have the most staying power, but many people don't view HP 9000 as sexy in the way SGI was.
The PA-RISC processor are really cool - the C8900 has a 64MB external shared L2, and a 768KB I & D cache per core. That's more I & D cache than any modern processor I am aware of, and more last level cache than basically anything but an AMD X3D or the last 5-10 years of X86 server chips. It's much slower of course than any modern cache.
There's a very interesting vid about the design of the ISA here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C53tGHzp1PI and I think it's pretty clear they learned from early MIPS/Sparc. It's a shame it got abandoned in the Itanium push.
The Alpha was also a performance king in that era, but tbh I don't have the same nostalgia for it, although clearly it was executed very well.
(author) You can also count me in that list - working on a PA-RISC system was my first job out of college. I found the ISA very clean and they were strong performers. How HP got the wrong idea about VLIW, I'll never understand.
That's cool you worked on a PA-RISC system as a job! The ISA seems clean and the later superscalar designs were very advanced for their time.
I think an updated PA-RISC design be awesome for modern workloads; huge caches with prefetch, a good branch predictor + a 8-10 wide dispatch, and some sort of vector extension. A Mix of AMD Zen+X3D & Apple ARM. To be fair, ISA doesn't matter as much really these days, any core with similar features probably would perform well.
There's always someone who thinks VLIW or a similar is a good idea. So far that's been a bit tricky for a general purpose CPU, or even some parallel designs.
* 100% personal opinion, I've never actually worked on HW design directly *
PS2, as well. But games and game hardware tend to have very different CPU requirements than general purpose workstations.
The N64/PS1/PS2 (and others) weren’t exceptional for very long, if ever, in terms of CPU power. They relied on dedicated graphics hardware, low price, ease—of-use, a business model that allowed for selling the base hardware at a loss, and devs optimizing for a fixed platform to stay competitive for 5-10 years as PC hardware improved.
I seem to recall the CPU in the N64 was specced to be something like 75% of the performance of a Pentium 90 but for 20% of the price. The PS1 doesn't even have floating point. When the PS2 was released it felt like x86 was advancing faster than ever, so whatever impressive performance edge it had lasted for about five minutes.
In all cases it's hard to argue that MIPS devices were sold on the strength of their CPUs from the mid 90s onwards.
Not really, no. The memory system and graphics systems are completely different, and the CPU is a different MIPS processor to one in any SGI desktop. Some devkits did involve having whole subsystems on expansions in Indys though.
It should say something that when the Indy was announced the quip was "It's an Indigo without the go" so even had the N64 been Indy based it would not have been noted for CPU performance.
Didn't PA-RISC lead MIPS, and everyone else, on those? When the already-obsolete machine being discussed in the OP was finally marketed in mid-1996, its int/fp socres of either 8/10 or 9/11 depending on the clock speed were not great compared to the available PA8000 workstations that scored 12 on SPECint95 and 17 on SPECfp95. People bought SGIs because there was some critical app they needed that was only available on IRIX, and they tolerated the bad CPU performance because they didn't have a choice.
> SGI hardware was the sexiest hardware of the 1990s, and IRIX was the sexiest UNIX OS of the same period.
Back in the 90s my best friend's stepfather happened to be the top dog of SGI Benelux (Belgium / The Netherlands / Luxembourg) so... My best friend had an SGI Indy (Indy, not Indygo) at home.
After school we'd go back to his place and have fun with the Indy. That thing already had a webcam (in, what, 1993?).
I remember a 3D demo of oil pipelines, some crazy music video with little balls bouncing on top of sound waves and... the terminal. I learned my very first Un*x command on that thing.
One one hand we had Commodore Amiga and games nearly as good as the arcade and on the other hand we had the Indy.
We of course also had our mediocre beige PC with an even more mediocre OS: DOS and then Windows.
Thankfully a few years late Linux came out and saved us from mediocrity.
A note of caution: everything is relative, and details are important.
If you love what you do (artist, self-employed, etc.) a 996 culture can be considered a good thing as a certain amount of "good" stress allows us to feel self-actualized.
As is a 996 culture that provides for work-life balance. For example, working from home with flex time for 12 hours where you get to take long breaks whenever you feel like it to run, walk the dog, eat, get coffee, etc., is quite enjoyable as well. Who cares if you're still replying to emails at 7pm if you can do this, right?
Added note: I find it very interesting that this was immediately downvoted. I'm interested in understanding why for those who wish to share their rationale and perspective.
If you want to work 996 and that is what makes you feel self-actualized - by all means, go for it, nobody is stopping you. May even allow you to get ahead of the pack (or maybe the quality of your work will suffer in your overworked state - big gamble!).
For me, the big problem in your post is the "996 culture". That means the expectation is that everyone is pushing forward with a similar intensity. Now, perhaps you were talking specifically about individual efforts given your examples of artist and self-employed, but when I think about culture, I think about groups of people, and in that context 996 is problematic.
It only provides work-life balance if there is not much of a "life" to balance, where taking a break once in a while is fulfilling enough. Maaaaaybe this can work in your early 20s, but it basically removes anyone with kids, hobbies, outside interests and responsibilities, and really, anyone with life experience out of the equation. It is a highly exploitative culture, sold under the guise of camaraderie, when anyone who has gone through one or more hype cycles can tell that the majority of these startups will fold with nothing to show for them other than overworked, cynical individuals and another level of normalization of exploitative practices.
Thanks for the reply — I really appreciate how I missed the distinction between individual choice and systemic expectation. I was speaking more to personal situations (like artists or self-employed folks), but I see how referencing “996 culture” more broadly brings in serious issues of exploitation and exclusion. Your points about how this affects people at different life stages and the long-term costs gives me more to think about.
> I'm interested in understanding why for those who wish to share their rationale and perspective.
Because it overlooks the dynamics of power distribution.
When there’s a big discrepancy in power, the needs of one party feel justified, and the needs of the other feel like a whim.
Flexibility favors the employee, if and only if it is added on top of explicit office hours. Otherwise, it’s just vagueness that benefits whoever makes the decision of how you should fill them (i.e. your boss).
- People simply disagree with you, especially this line: “Who cares if you’re still replying to emails at 7pm if you can do this, right?”
That might work for you but I imagine it left a sour note for some because emailing involves entangling other people into your personal hustle. This can perpetuate “work for show” (especially if you have any power or influence). If you want to silently code into the night and save all the evidence of this for the next morning, that’s one thing. Visible evidence of constant work can be very stressful and draining to others, however.
- HN leans left, weekend HN even more so. This whole thing can feel like “shit you do because we live in a ruthless society that only cares about money”. I don’t agree with the modern left on many things, but I’m definitely coming around to this one. It was - though perhaps in a slightly different context - the original Leftist-owned meaning of “woke”. It’s the idea that you suddenly wake up to the shitty sewer water you’ve been swimming in all your life and look around astonished at everyone else, who all seem to think it’s a perfectly clean and clear place to swim. I suspect some of your downvotes are because of this.
So, in short: you’re entitled to your opinion but it’s phrased as a bit of a lightning rod for those whose values deeply conflict with your own.
These are sage points that make sense to me - I can see how it might have come across as tone-deaf or misaligned with deeper values some people hold. Likewise, I've also noticed the same regarding left-leaning here on HN (and when it comes to tech, Apple-leaning too). I'm a generally left-leaning person myself, but my flexible 996 job (of which I have complete control over) affords me a view on it that others won't appreciate. Thanks for sharing!
Ah, yet another brave soul seeks to gamify the ancient art of Vim. Admirable.
But Vim is not merely a tool... it's a discipline. A lifestyle. It is not learned in an afternoon, nor in a weekend sprint of neon-highlighted tutorials. No, Vim is best learned like one reads a long, weathered tome: slowly, reverently, one page at a time.
It begins humbly: i to whisper your intentions. <Esc> :wq to seal your work with a sacred rite. Then, perhaps days or weeks later, a revelation: "Wait… I can delete four lines with 4dd?!"
You do not master Vim. You grow into it. Each new keystroke discovered is like finding a hidden passage in a familiar castle. What begins as a cryptic incantation eventually becomes second nature... muscle memory and magic intertwined.
So yes, make it a game. But know that Vim is not beaten. It is befriended over years, not minutes.
At the part of the initial setup where it asks to connect to a network, press Shift + F10 to open the Command Prompt. Then, type oobe\bypassnro and press Enter. The system will reboot and start the initial setup again in a non-network mode that allows you to create a local user account.
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