Category Archives: News

Article note: Sweet! Mac68k emulation low-level enough to run A/UX is a rare thing. A/UX is, as ever, a fussy bitch, but it looks like the QEMU setup is not making it any fussier.

Article note: Everything that _isn't_ built on the file abstraction is a roach-motel. _IF_ there was a credible substitute (which, frankly, some of the DB-like file systems could have been) it would be one thing, but in practice non-file-abstraction designs are always radically disempowering. I've been making this argument for _years_.

Article note: They're going to dither until hospital capacities force their hand, and then come up with wherever the winds were blowing at that point. Someone needs to communicate to policymakers that a good in-person class and a good remote class have different cadence, and different material choices, and different delivery methods, so you CAN NOT switch back and forth or do both at once and expect it to work. I'm totally onboard that NTI isn't working for many younger students, and the _ways_ in which it isn't working amplify inequity, but just sending kids home with nothing when too many students and staff get infected is not better, and we're coming up on 25 districts that have done that for at least a week now. The limbo-state isn't tractable for teachers (which, along with normal kids passing diseases around becoming a mortal threat, is probably why so many have left), and isn't tractable for parents who need to arrange for childcare when the schools fall over.

Article note: Of fucking course Broprah got the 'rona, he hangs out with the kind of dumb shits who pass it around, and nods along with their bullshit. And of course he got it while touring during a pandemic, in Florida where the worst of it is happening due to mismanagement. And of course he got expensive treatments, both ones that aren't accessible to most people (monoclonal antibodies) and that have failed to be effective in study after study but the bro-science types believe in (ivermectin) instead of shutting the fuck up, getting vaccinated, and not traveling.

Article note: I've seen these cute little things trundling around campus and was awaiting this headline. ...And it really was at UK that someone hit one with an SUV.

@rach.ipsa

Reply to @cody_offic it's about as wonderful as you imagined

♬...

Article note: Yes, but there are such a horrible set of incentives around that. Piles of little attached computers with lacking documentation, all trying to obscure their proprietary innards from their users to "protect the vendors' IP" and/or hide the absolute bullshit they shipped. Common hardware configurations (esp. all the asymmetric multiprocessing things) that don't even have good theoretical solutions, much less practical ones. Necessary drivers for basic things (eg. modern USB or TCP/IP) that are individually more complicated than a whole OS stack when most of the platform architectures we're running were conceived.

Article note: I for one am looking forward to seeing the refurb market for machines with perfectly adequate 6th and 7th generation Intel parts crater so I can buy cheap mid-range boxes to run Linux on. I've been putting off getting a new TV computer because even refurb prices are pretty high at the moment, but this should create a sharp drop as big corporate customers decide to upgrade to avoid "unsupported" configurations.

Enlarge

If you were hoping for Microsoft to backtrack on Windows 11's stringent security-focused new system requirements, we have good news and bad news. The good news is that a small handful of 7th-generation Intel Core processors have been added to the support list, and systems that use those chips will officially support the final version of Windows 11 when it comes out in the fall. The bad news is that they are the only processors being added to the support list, and Microsoft "will maintain the minimum system requirements as originally set."

Intel's 7th-generation Core processors, codenamed Kaby Lake, were launched mostly in late 2016 and through 2017, though many computers that use them were available for purchase long after that. The specific 7th-generation processors that have been added to the compatibility list are:

• X-series processors based on the Skylake-X and Kaby Lake architectures, like the Core i5-7640X and Core i7-7800X
• W-series Xeon processors
• The Core i7-7820HQ specifically, with the caveat that systems with this processor must be using DCH drivers

If the decision to support one specific 7th-generation Core i7 laptop processor strikes you as odd, you don't need to look far for an explanation—this just happens to be the CPU included in Microsoft's Surface Studio 2, which Microsoft still sells but has not updated in three years. That Microsoft was about to stop supporting a PC it is currently selling and for which it controls everything from the firmware to the drivers earned the company some well-deserved scorn from users and the press. Adding support for it is laudable, but it's also the bare minimum—Windows 11 will still leave behind Surface products as recent as 2017's 5th-generation Surface Pro and 1st-generation Surface Laptop and the cheapest configurations of 2017's Surface Book 2 (higher-end configurations used 8th-generation processors, but the cheapest models did not).

Article note: Oh. SoftBank got looted for IP by their 51% Chinese joint venture, who have gone rogue, as is the predictable MO of these Chinese joint ventures. The interesting question is how much we're going to see a bifurcation of the ARM ecosystem around where they realized and stopped letting new tech into China, the Chinese firm might "obtain" post-separation stuff and compete with main ARM. The low-end ARM market is already flooded with Chinese knockoffs (see Apex and Artery and whatnot STM32likes), it might be moving up-market.

Article note: Huh. The "obvious suicide" didn't change, the banking industry's fear of the dangerous-but-ineffectual FOSTA/SESTA regulations is unlikely to have changed overnight, so what's the game here?

Article note: Geez. It's a good, exhaustive (and exhausting) article, that features a number of google messaging products I didn't even know existed. It's also a great demonstration of Google's now famous inability to maintain products because their institutional culture only rewards novelty.

Enlarge / Take the Google Messaging quiz! Can you name all the icons? (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google Talk, Google's first-ever instant messaging platform, launched on August 24, 2005. This company has been in the messaging business for 16 years, meaning Google has been making messaging clients for longer than some of its rivals have existed. But thanks to a decade and a half of nearly constant strategy changes, competing product launches, and internal sabotage, you can't say Google has a dominant or even stable instant messaging platform today.

Google's 16 years of messenger wheel-spinning has allowed products from more focused companies to pass it by. Embarrassingly, nearly all of these products are much younger than Google's messaging efforts. Consider competitors like WhatsApp (12 years old), Facebook Messenger (nine years old), iMessage (nine years old), and Slack (eight years old)—Google Talk even had video chat four years before Zoom was a thing.

Currently, you would probably rank Google's offerings behind every other big-tech competitor. A lack of any kind of top-down messaging leadership at Google has led to a decade and a half of messaging purgatory, with Google both unable to leave the space altogether and unable to commit to a single product. While companies like Facebook and Salesforce invest tens of billions of dollars into a lone messaging app, Google seems content only to spin up an innumerable number of under-funded, unstable side projects led by job-hopping project managers. There have been periods when Google briefly produced a good messaging solution, but the constant shutdowns, focus-shifting, and sabotage of established products have stopped Google from carrying much of these user bases—or user goodwill—forward into the present day.