Article note: As the joke goes, ORACLE is often stylized in all caps because it's secretly an acronym: One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison
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Oracle CEO Larry Ellison donated $250,000 to a super PAC supporting Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) reelection campaign as his company closed in on a coveted position as TikTok’s US technology partner.
FEC documents show that Ellison made the $250,000 donation to the Security is Strength PAC on September 14th. The Security is Strength PAC has bought ads exclusively in support of Graham’s political ambitions, including his 2015 presidential campaign and his current reelection bid for the US Senate.
It’s an unusually large donation for Ellison, who also donated $5,200 to Graham’s Majority Fund in January. The timing of the larger donation is also remarkable, coming mere hours after Oracle officially announced that it had been chosen as...
Article note: Michael Sweet (who is responsible for almost all CUPS commits) left Apple and has a fork that is being actively maintained.
I wonder if Apple has a plan here. Are they just ignoring the license and keeping their patches in-house? Have they decided printing is not a priority and are just parasiting a hand-me-down for "good enough"?
After only one public Git commit this year, penguinstas think: Fork it, we don't need Cupertino
The official public repository for CUPS, an Apple open-source project widely used for printing on Linux, is all-but dormant since the lead developer left Apple at the end of 2019.…
Google is, once again, changing up its messaging app strategy. The company plans to make Chat, its Slack-like app, free for everyone in 2021, when it will push people currently using Hangouts to use Chat instead. If you’re having trouble keeping trac...
Article note: Yes,but also the publicly funded but central method is attractive from the current state, but probably not actually a good plan.
Doing it the "publicly funded but central" way will make the "small government low taxes" folks angry, cause moderation problems that make Facebook and NextDoor look easy, and... hoo boy are the people who have recently discovered that the platforms they used to organize and advance their interests in the past can _also_ be used for _causes they find reprehensible_ going to be mad as this undermines their efforts to pull up ladders.
Article note: I did not know that about ARM (before 8) parts.
Clever encoding, useful (and used) for PUSH/POP, and fast copy routines, and a little restrictive and inconvenient to implement.
Google and Intel are warning of a high-severity Bluetooth flaw in all but the most recent version of the Linux Kernel. While a Google researcher said the bug allows seamless code execution by attackers within Bluetooth range, Intel is characterizing the flaw as providing an escalation of privileges or the disclosure of information.
The flaw resides in BlueZ, the software stack that by default implements all Bluetooth core protocols and layers for Linux. Besides Linux laptops, it's used in many consumer or industrial Internet-of-things devices. It works with Linux versions 2.4.6 and later.
In search of details
So far, little is known about BleedingTooth, the name given by Google engineer Andy Nguyen, who said that a blog post will be published “soon.” A Twitter thread and a YouTube video provide the most detail and give the impression that the bug provides a reliable way for nearby attackers to execute malicious code of their choice on vulnerable Linux devices that use BlueZ for Bluetooth.
Article note: I get a decent amount of sun, eat a varied diet, and am generally skeptical of dietary supplements ... I've been popping a couple 1k IU D3 tablets a week lately based on both the COVID-19 and general "Everyone no near the equator" Vitamin D news of late.
Article note: Aw, man, I was hoping someone did a teardown.
I've been super curious what the switch mechanism (8 switches? an analog stick?) in those things is for years, but not $300 curious.
I can’t remember how exactly I came across the OrbiTouch keyboard, but it’s been on my list to clack about for a long time. Launched in 2003, the OrbiTouch is a keyboard and mouse in one. It’s designed for people who can’t keyboard regularly, or simply want a different kind of experience.
The OrbiTouch was conceived of by a PhD student who started to experience carpal tunnel while writing papers. He spent fifteen years developing the OrbiTouch and found that it could assist many people who have various upper body deficiencies. So, how does it work?
It’s Like Playing Air Hockey with Both Hands
To use this keyboard, you put both hands on the sliders and move them around. They are identical eight-way joysticks or D-pads, essentially. The grips sort of resemble a mouse and have what looks like a special resting place for your pinky.
One slider points to groups of letters, numbers, and special characters, and the other chooses a color from a special OrbiTouch rainbow. Pink includes things like parentheses and their cousins along with tilde, colon and semi-colon. Black is for the modifiers like Tab, Alt, Ctrl, Shift, and Backspace. These special characters and modifiers aren’t shown on the hieroglyphs slider, you just have to keep the guide handy until you memorize the placement of everything around the circle.
You’re gonna need a decent amount of desk space for this. Image via OrbiTouch
The alphabet is divided up into groups of five letters which are color-coded in rainbow order that starts with orange, because red is reserved for the F keys. So for instance, A is orange, B is yellow, C is green, D is blue, E is purple, then it starts back over with F at orange. If you wanted to type cab, for instance, you would start by moving the hieroglyph slider to the first alphabet group and the color slider to green.
Slide Along the Rainbow
The interesting thing about this keyboard and this particular word is that all the letters for cab are in the first group. The keyboard will let you keep one of the sliders in place if you have repeated colors or letter groups, so you can keep the alpha slider in place and just move the rainbow slider around from green to orange to yellow to spell cab. Let’s watch it type ‘Hackaday’ over and over:
A selection from the slide guide. Image via OrbiTouch
Every letter, number, and special character has an equivalent directional pair that may or may not be easy to memorize. According to the FAQ, the maximum output you can expect from this thing is 30-40WPM. Although it is a combination keyboard and mouse, if you play any games that are more serious than say, Minesweeper,
forget about it. You’ll have to keep switching between keyboard and mouse mode, and it’s a whole thing, and you’re gonna die really quickly.
I think the color code is a great idea, but if you’re colorblind, it’s likely not going to be the keyboard for you. Also, you would have to have the use of both hands and a pretty good amount of coordination to be able to drive this keyboard/mouse hybrid creature. On the plus side, every gesture requires equal force, which is fairly low.
conclusion
Apparently this keyboard rates highly with autistic people because of the alphabetically rainbow-tastic way that the inputs are laid out. Those aesthetic choices are definitely a high point in my book. I think it’s neat that it’s so totally different from any other keyboard. It looks fun to try, at least for little while. Though I can’t imagine typing an entire Hackaday article on one, it looks way more fun to learn than Dvorak. I might buy one someday, but the OrbiTouch is a touch on the expensive side at $399, or you can pick them up used for around $200. They were actually sold out of both the black-and-white versions on the OrbiTouch website at the time of this writing, but there are a few out there on the electronic bay.
So is this keyboard really assistive technology? It kind of depends on your level of functioning. If typing hurts, but you still need to do it, this could be your saving grace. All things considered, I would think that all the joystick motion would aggravate wrist issues or even cause them, but since I haven’t tried actually tried one out, I can’t say for sure. Have any of you tried one?
Article note: It was such a weird rumor, the NT kernel is _fucking great_ in a lot of ways. The Windows userland has never been anything particularly special, and we're getting WSL so we can have a UNIX userland hosted (...much like the way Domain/OS could virtually host various UNIXes).
Article note: I guess Intel bought Altera so AMD feels the need to own a top-tier FPGA vendor as well?
Xilinx did make a bunch of HyperTransport-compatible FPGA modules back when that was a thing, so perhaps they have an established working relationship they plan to exploit?
It’s my belief that history is a wheel. “Inconsistency is my very essence” -says the wheel- “Rise up on my spokes if you like, but don’t complain when you are cast back down into the depths. Good times pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it is also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away”.
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