Category Archives: News

Article note: ...That's uncanny. And hilarious.

Article note: I've long thought SQLite was a particularly great piece of tooling, but had never seen the story of how it came to be, that's very cool.

Article note: That's a neat stunt, using the 286 as a front-end to a pi crammed in there is a cute approach. Usually it's either pi connected to io devices (which is cool) or original hardware (which is cool).

Article note: Cloud container orchestration is where complexity fetishism meets rent-seeking as a service.

Article note: ...Wow, that's a hard abandon. Transactional Memory has always been supremely difficult to get right, so it's not super shocking, but it's still a wild ride. They retroactively microcode-removed the "earlier buggy" implementation from most Haswell through Broadwell parts in 2014, they stopped including it in new parts from Comet Lake (2019) on, and now they're removing it for a bunch of products from the Skylake through Coffee Lake era in between with microcode updates... which is basically going back and erasing it.

Article note: Sad. Near (Byuu for most of the time they were notable, author of bsnes, higan, etc.) was ...super weird and uncomfortable in themselves in ways obvious to even a casual observer... but they were the kind of weird that drove them to be insanely productive at valuable things very few people are suited to tackle.

Article note: Bummer. He was one of the only high-profile approximate left libertarians in the US, his 2008 Democratic presidential primary run was the last time someone [vaguely credibly] ran for president without any major issue I had to had to hold my nose on.

Article note: FFS Dell. Your remote support tools work as RCEs more often than they actually work for their intended purpose.

Article note: Oh shit yes (as long as it doesn't crap up the cross-platform-ness). Maybe it won't take more resources to be on teams than the _entire goddamn development VM_ I'm usually running at the same times.

Article note: - Joined the teams of "UX professionals" who don't appear know Fitt's law and don't appreciate muscle memory with that centered re-flowing mess of a dock-like-task-bar. At least that looks fixable with settings. + Android apps as a supported software source?! (and not using Google's infrastructure) - Bottom-only taskbar (I'm a weirdo and kind of prefer that stuff at the top) ~ 11th mismatched set of UI styling. + Better snap tiling + Got rid of a bunch of unwanted Cortana integration + Got rid of a bunch of unwanted live tiles ~ Switched the integrated communication app to Teams - 64-bit only, probably requires a TPM2.0 for some feature I probably won't be happy about + Free Upgrade

Enlarge / The latest Windows focuses heavily on improved task management, prettier UI, and a much more ambitious Microsoft Store. (credit: Microsoft)

Earlier this morning, we got our first official look at Windows 11 by way of Microsoft's What's New For Windows event. The new OS offers several significant, functional changes to what we've become accustomed to in Windows 10—this isn't just the same old operating system with a fresh coat of paint.

However, Windows 11 absolutely does get that fresh coat of paint. Its new desktop environment makes heavy use of translucent window dressing with rounded corners, an effect that brings to mind panes of frosted glass. In many ways, the new look is reminiscent of compiz-based Linux desktop environments circa 2010—but with significantly higher resolution and a more coherent overall theme.

Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay ties the new look to eyebrow-raising statements about emotion: "We understand the responsibility of [functionality and practicality] more than ever before, but it must also be personal—and maybe most importantly, it must feel emotional."