Author Archives: pappp

Article note: Imagine that, machines which are just (cheap, rugged) dumb terminals to access big organization-run compute environments had a spike in demand during the pandemic-induced remote schooling boom and then it crashed.

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Although PCs are still selling at a greater volume than before the COVID-19 pandemic, demand is starting to drop. In Q3 2021, shipments of laptops, desktops, and tablets dropped 2 percent compared to Q3 2020, according to numbers that researcher Canalys shared on Monday. Interest in Chromebooks dropped the most, with a reported decline as high as 36.9 percent. Demand for tablets also fell, showing a 15 percent year-on-year decline, according to Canalys.

Chromebooks’ “massive downturn”

Both Canalys and the IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker shared Q3 numbers for Chromebooks and tablets on Monday. Canalys said 5.8 million Chromebooks shipped globally during this time, while the IDC said the number was 6.5 million. Both pointed to a huge decline compared to Q3 2020. Canalys reported the drop at 36.9 percent, and IDC pegged it at 29.8 percent.

Canalys said that Q3 Chromebook sales took a "major downturn" as the education markets in the US, Japan, and elsewhere became saturated. Demand lessened as government programs supporting remote learning went away, the research group said. After reaching a high of 18 percent market share since the start of 2020, Chromebooks reportedly represented just 9 percent of laptop shipments in Q3 2021.

Article note: Tadpole's unusual architecture laptops (SPARC, Alpha, and PowerPC workstations in laptops!) were weird objects of impractical desire in the 90s, and are still weird objects of impractical desire decades later. Always fun to see them.

Article note: Scheduling on weird modern (not that SMT is a new thing) vaguely-heterogeneous machines continues to be the next big OS problem. Linux is not the best at it right now, but these new core (rather than tread) affinity scheduling controls are a good step.

Article note: Complexity always has costs. Unicode is absurdly complex to allow it to not just represent goddamn everything, but to mix all those things together, and we pay for that shit everywhere it appears. My usual preference is "make parsers vigorously flag and/or refuse to allow mixed pages."

Article note: Oracle is so toxic that everyone left for actually-open alternatives rather than expose themselves to the risk of touching their licenses, so now they are re-baiting the hook.

Article note: Rename to confuse the waters because your brand has become so toxic that the name recognition is of negative value. Like Comcast calling itself "Xfinity."

Enlarge / Facebook? Who is Facebook? My name is Meta! (credit: Facebook / YouTube)

As part of a Connect 2021 keynote presentation today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rolled out the name "Meta" as a new corporate identity reflecting the company's "new north star—to help bring the metaverse to life."

The name, which Zuckerberg noted comes from the Greek word for "beyond," is "a new company brand to encompass everything that we do." That means the company will be "looking at and reporting on our business as two different segments, one for a family of apps and one for work on future platforms," he said.

The name "Facebook," Zuckerberg said, "just doesn't encompass everything we do" anymore. While social media apps will "always" be a focus for Meta, it has been limiting to have a "brand that is so tightly linked to one product that it can't possibly represent everything we're doing today, let alone in the future," he said.

Article note: Huh, I'd never read what the post-pseudoephedrine-restriction meth synthesis methods were, the chemistry alone in this article is interesting. The apparently-in-vogue methods are a little less attractive-nuisance easy looking, but not exactly difficult, and starting with pretty common stock. Also, holy shit there is a lot of meth being made and consumed.

Article note: Oh man, that's a lot of utility in a tiny $15 package.

Enlarge / The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. (credit: Raspberry Pi Foundation)

The diminutive Raspberry Pi Zero is getting its first upgrade in nearly five years. Today, Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton announced the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, a new $15 product that puts the processor from the Raspberry Pi 3 into a board the exact same size as the original Zero.

The new board swaps the old Zero's 1 GHz single-core ARM11 processor for a quad-core Cortex A53-based Broadcom BCM2710A1 processor, also clocked at 1 GHz—the same processor used in the original Raspberry Pi 3 released back in 2016, albeit clocked slightly lower. This is a substantial increase in power and capability for the Pi Zero, going from one core to four and from 32 bits to 64.

Upton said that the performance increase over the original Zero "varies across workloads" but that for multithreaded tasks like those simulated by sysbench, "it is almost exactly five times faster." Heat dissipation is provided by "thick internal copper layers" in the board, which should help prevent thermal throttling without the use of additional fans or heatsinks.

Article note: This is a nifty idea, to make a single-build-system tool for writing language tutorials that can manage the (markdown) content as well as the source and output and such. Now that everyone has decided language churn can go along at a breakneck pace, we need better tooling to make tutorials not misleading 3 months after they're published.