Source: NYT > Education
A historian went down an 18-year rabbit hole in search of obsolete machines. But there was one he thought he’d never find.
Source: Hacker News
Source: OSNews
The Document Foundation, which developers LibreOffice, is mad at Microsoft for the levels of complexity in the Microsoft 365 document format. They claim Microsoft intentionally makes this format’s XML schema as complex and obtuse as possible to lock users into the Microsoft Office ecosystem.
This artificial complexity is characterised by a deeply nested tag structure with excessive abstraction, dozens or even hundreds of optional or overloaded elements, non-intuitive naming conventions, the widespread use of extension points and wildcards, the multiple import of namespaces and type hierarchies, and sparse or cryptic documentation.
In the case of the Microsoft 365 document format, the only characteristic not present is sparse or cryptic documentation, given that we are talking about a set of documents totalling over 8,000 pages. All the other characteristics are present to a greater or lesser extent, making life almost impossible for a developer trying to implement the schema.
↫ Italo Vignoli
I feel like this was widely known already, since I distinctly remember the discussions around the standardisation process for the Office Open XML file formats. Then, too, it was claimed that Microsoft’s then-new XML file formats were far more complex and obtuse than the existing, already standardised OpenDocument file formats, and that there was no need to push Microsoft’s new file formats through the process.
These days, you might wonder how relevant all of this still is, but considering vast swaths of the private, corporate, government, and academic world still run on Microsoft Office and its default file formats, it’s definitely still a hugely relevant matter. As an office suite, you are basically required to support Office Open XML, and if Microsoft is making that more complex and obtuse on purpose, that’s a form of monopoly abuse that should be addressed.
Source: The Register
The founder of SaaS business development outfit SaaStr has claimed AI coding tool Replit deleted a database despite his instructions not to change any code without permission.…
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: OSNews
A recent bug report filed against Ubuntu’s upgrading tool confirmed a major change with regards to the RISC-V requirements for the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 release — most existing RISC-V devices will not be able to run Ubuntu 25.10.
How come?
↫ Joey Sneddon at omgubuntu.co.uk
RISC-V just isn’t delivering. That’s the cold and harsh truth more and more people are having to deal with, such as Chimera Linux dropping RISC-V support because the ecosystem is simply lacking the kind of powerful and available hardware to sustain itself (Chimera got lucky, though, and gained access to a Milk-V Pioneer through Adélie Linux). The number of systems and boards that are both powerful and available is close enough to zero that it might as well be zero, and if neither users nor developers can buy RISC-V hardware, what’s the point in supporting it?
The issue for Ubuntu specifically is that version 25.10 of the distribution intends to target only the RVA23 baseline RISC-V profile, while currently Ubuntu supports RVA20 as the baseline. This higher baseline profile requires a number of extensions to the instruction set that no existing hardware yet supports, making 25.10 effectively a clean break for all existing RISC-V hardware. In other words, if you’re running Ubuntu on RISC-V hardware today, you won’t be able to upgrade to 25.10 or higher.
RISC-V really needs vastly improved hardware availability, because right now it’s just not delivering on the years of promises.
