Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-06-18:/2488796] "What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-06-17:/2488496] "Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-06-16:/2488199] "Linux kernel 7.1 sends Intel 486 support to silicon heaven"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-06-15:/2487839] "Fox is buying Roku"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-06-14:/2487662] "Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere."
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-06-19:/2489115] "I used sound waves to make espresso"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-06-10:/2486637] "German court rules Google is liable for whatever Google’s “AI” generates"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-06-01:/2484373] "Microsoft is intentionally bricking all Office for Mac 2019/2021 installations"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-06-01:/2484272] "Nvidia's Grace Blackwell superchips are officially coming to the PC with RTX Spark notebooks"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-05-30:/2483921] "Adding Linux support back for the BASIC (free) version of Vivado"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-05-30:/2483835] "Proposed new US funding rules: We can cancel any grant at any time"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-05-27:/2483228] "The exemptions in age-verification laws for open source operating systems are bad, actually"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-05-31:/2484064] "Mysteries of the Griffin iMate"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-05-23:/2482255] "AMD (Xilinx) is Excluding Linux From the Free Tier For Its FPGA Dev Tool"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-05-19:/2481210] "The Virtual OS Museum"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-05-19:/2481121] "Google changes its search box"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-05-15:/2480224] "Windows 11 tests an adjustable taskbar and resizable Start menu"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-05-15:/2480167] "Send the arXiv AI-generated slop, get a yearlong vacation from submissions"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-05-13:/2479471] "KDE Receives $1.4 Million Investment From Sovereign Tech Fund"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-05-12:/2479155] "Google's Android-powered laptops are called Googlebooks, and they're coming this year"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-05-07:/2478063] "Canvas is online again after ShinyHunters threaten to leak schools’ data"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-05-07:/2477845] "Aramark, University of Kentucky to end partnership, eliminating more than 900 jobs"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2026-04-29:/2475951] "Apple gives up on Vision Pro, disbands Vision Pro team"
Article note: That is a really cool bit of forensics.
AMD K6-2s did much more sophisticated uop decomposition and scheduling for complicated instructions (specifically LOOP) and worse with handling programmer/compiler generated simple instruction sequence, while contemporary Intel parts were the opposite; their errata suggested using the simpler instructions like building your loop on JCXZ instead of using LOOP.
So code that did limited precision timer comparisons on either end of fixed-length LOOPs failed with a divide by 0 on AMD parts at lower clocks than on Intel parts.
Article note: As I was musing with a friend the other day, the "court a dev who make something cool on your platform, pump them for information, then squash them with a first-party clone" maneuver might as well be called "Pulling an Apple," but here is Microsoft doing it.
OTOH, in this case "Windows gets a package manager" would have been welcome news any time since 1994 (and this is only marginally a real package manager since it doesn't do dependency management and the install actions execute arbitrary binaries that may do things it can't roll back), so it is perhaps not surprising that Microsoft finally acted.
Windows bod acknowledges project's influence on WinGet
Microsoft's Andrew Clinick, a group program manager in the Windows team who is involved with the development of the WinGet package manager, has tried to make good with the open-source community by publishing an acknowledgement of what was borrowed from the existing AppGet project.…
Article note: Lately I've been a believer in semantic hard-wrapping when it has a clear meaning to the reader, and otherwise soft wrapping. In the languages and style I write, it never seems to produce lines over 120char or so that aren't bad for other reasons.
Writing more LaTeX than code (and doing the "sentence per line" style for better interaction with source type tools) probably has a lot to do with that.
Article note: Now with enough RAM to render modern websites!
I was just thinking about picking up a Pi4 to do local streaming and retro games for the other TV, now I have to think about how much RAM it needs.
Article note: I hope they keep the product lines intact, GE's glass-envelope, no plastic collar LED bulbs are my favorites, especially the Reveals with their better spectrum.
Article note: This once again shores up my "OS X peaked around Snow Leopard, and has just been getting worse by accumulating misfeatures for the last decade" idea.
Putting slow local checks or even network round-trip signature checks on many file accesses and all program launches doesn't seem like something any sane entity would even consider.
Apparently, Apple is making macOS Catalina phone home so much it’s making the operating system slow, laggy, and beachbally, as Allan Odgaard details.
Apple has introduced notarization, setting aside the inconvenience this brings to us developers, it also results in a degraded user experience, as the first time a user runs a new executable, Apple delays execution while waiting for a reply from their server. This check for me takes close to a second.
This is not just for files downloaded from the internet, nor is it only when you launch them via Finder, this is everything. So even if you write a one line shell script and run it in a terminal, you will get a delay!
Aside from the obviously terrible design and privacy implications of your computer phoning home to Apple every time you execute something, this is also another case of Apple only designing for the absolutely optimal use-cases – i.e., people working and living in Cupertino – and that’s it. The less optimal your internet connection or the farther away you are, the worse your experience will be.
Apple has a few file system locations that require user permission to access them, for example ~/Desktop, ~/Documents, and ~/Downloads.
Surprisingly though, just obtaining the display name or icon for one of these folders will trigger Apple’s code to verify that the client is allowed to access the location.
This is done by sending a message to the sandboxd process which sends a message to tccd which calls SecCodeCheckValidityWithErrors and seems to communicate with yet another process, but I can’t find which, and this takes around 150 ms per location.
It may not seem like much, but this adds up, and can add more than half a second of delay when opening an application.
Like with privileged folders, keychain items also require permission for applications to access them.
But again, something is wrong. Specifically calling SecKeychainFindGenericPassword can cause noticeable delays, on a bad internet day I had this call stall for 3.3 seconds and this was with System Integrity Protection disabled!
And on other delays in launching applications in general:
This is the worst issue, sometimes, things will stall for 5-30 seconds.
Mostly though it is when launching applications. Sampling the application during launch shows stalls in ImageLoaderMachO::loadCodeSignature, SLSMainConnectionID, and many references to Skylight and CGS in the stack trace.
The current best way to “address” this issue is disabling System Integrity Protection and disconnecting from the internet (!), and especially that second one is of course entirely unreasonable. I wouldn’t touch macOS with a ten-foot pole even before Catalina – it always felt slow and sluggish to me, even on faster Macs, and Mac hardware is terrible value right now – but with all the general complaints about Catalina, and now this, it’s getting ever clearer I’m not missing out on anything by sticking to Linux.
At least my computer isn’t calling home to Clement Lefebvre every time I run a tiny script.
After nearly a decade on the job, the University of Kentucky's president wants to extend his tenure while volunteering for a pay cut as the school deals with financial fallout … Click to Continue »
Article note: There has been a real spate of this kind of leak (full stacks for older generations of console) of late.
The original Xbox was a new frontier for modders and tinkerers, as the included hard drive made it easy to install unofficial dashboards and pirated games. Those enthusiasts might be getting a flashback to 2002, as the official Xbox OS has leaked onl...
Article note: Microsoft finally introducing a rudimentary not-system-wide package manager like its the 90s.
At least they're doing it.
Microsoft surprised Windows users with a new package manager yesterday. It’s a command line tool that allows developers, power users, and really any Windows user to install their favorite apps from a simple command. If you’ve ever had to wipe a Windows machine clean or set up a new device, you’ll know the pain of having to reinstall apps, find download links, and get a PC ready again.
[…]
Microsoft creating its own Windows Package Manager (winget) is significant, and the command line tool is already more useful than the Windows Store. You can navigate to a command prompt, type “winget install Steam,” and the latest version of Valve’s Steam app will be installed on your system. Steam doesn’t even exist in the Windows Store right now; there are many apps already available on winget like Zoom, WinRAR, and Logitech Harmony Remote that are also missing from the Store.
Developers can choose to distribute their applications this way, and it seems Microsoft is managing a list of popular third party applications by itself. This is a great addition to Windows.
