Source: NYT > U.S.
This is the first significant personnel overhaul of top White House aides, and the kind of shake-up President Trump has sought to avoid in his second term.
Source: The Verge - All Posts
Epic Games v. Apple judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers just ruled that, effective immediately, Apple is no longer allowed to collect fees on purchases made outside apps and blocks the company from restricting how developers can point users to where they can make purchases outside of apps. Apple says it will appeal the order.
The ruling was issued as part of Epic Games’ ongoing legal dispute against Apple, and it’s a major victory for Epic’s arguments. Gonzalez Rogers also says that Apple “willfully” chose not to comply with her previous injunction from her original 2021 ruling. “That [Apple] thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation,” Gonzalez Rogers says.
The judge also referred the case to the US attorney to review it for possible criminal contempt proceedings.
As part of the ruling, the judge says that Apple cannot:
Apple’s senior director of corporate communications, Olivia Dalton, sent a statement to The Verge that reads, “We strongly disagree with the decision. We will comply with the court’s order and we will appeal.”
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says that, following this ruling, the company will bring Fortnite back to the US App Store “next week.” Sweeney is also offering a “peace proposal” from Epic: “If Apple extends the court’s friction-free, Apple-tax-free framework worldwide, we’ll return Fortnite to the App Store worldwide and drop current and future litigation on the topic.”
We will return Fortnite to the US iOS App Store next week.
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) April 30, 2025
Epic puts forth a peace proposal: If Apple extends the court's friction-free, Apple-tax-free framework worldwide, we'll return Fortnite to the App Store worldwide and drop current and future litigation on the topic. https://t.co/bIRTePm0Tv
In many cases, Apple takes a 30 percent cut of purchases made in its apps, and Gonzalez Rogers’ 2021 ruling forced Apple to allow developers to point to alternative payment options. But Apple instituted a policy that demanded developers pay Apple a 27 percent commission on those purchases, which many companies, including Epic, were unhappy about.
“In the end, Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this Court’s Injunction,” Gonzalez Rogers says. She notes that, inside Apple, App Store chief Phil Schiller advocated for the company to comply with the injunction, but that CEO Tim Cook “chose poorly” by ignoring Schiller and letting CFO Luca Maestri “convince him otherwise.”
Update, April 30th: Added statement from Apple.
Source: Ars Technica
Getting the hang of through-hole soldering is tricky for those of us tinkering at home with our irons, spools, flux, and, sometimes, braids. It's almost reassuring, then, to learn that through-hole soldering was also a pain for a firm that has made more than 60 million products with it.
Raspberry Pi boards have a combination of surface-mount devices (SMDs) and through-hole bits. SMDs allow for far more tiny chips, resistors, and other bits to be attached to boards by their tiny pins, flat contacts, solder balls, or other connections. For those things that are bigger, or subject to rough forces like clumsy human hands, through-hole soldering is still required, with leads poked through a connective hole and solder applied to connect and join them securely.
The Raspberry Pi board has a 40-pin GPIO header on it that needs through-hole soldering, along with bits like the Ethernet and USB ports. These require robust solder joints, which can't be done the same way as with SMT (surface-mount technology) tools. "In the early days of Raspberry Pi, these parts were inserted by hand, and later by robotic placement," writes Roger Thornton, director of applications for Raspberry Pi, in a blog post. The boards then had to go through a follow-up wave soldering step.
Source: Hack a Day
Most of us learned to design circuits with schematics. But if you get to a certain level of complexity, schematics are a pain. Modern designers — especially for digital circuits — prefer to use some kind of hardware description language.
There are a few options to do similar things with PCB layout, including tscircuit. There’s a walk-through for using it to create an LED matrix and you can even try it out online, if you like. If you’re more of a visual learner, there’s also an introductory video you can watch below.
The example project imports a Pico microcontroller and some smart LEDs. They do appear graphically, but you don’t have to deal with them graphically. You write “code” to manage the connections. For example:
<trace from={".LED1 .GND"} to="net.GND" />
If that looks like HTML to you, you aren’t wrong. Once you have the schematic, you can do the same kind of thing to lay out the PCB using footprints. If you want to play with the actual design, you can load it in your browser and make changes. You’ll note that at the top right, there are buttons that let you view the schematic, the board, a 3D render of the board, a BOM, an assembly drawing, and several other types of output.
Will we use this? We don’t know. Years ago, designers resisted using HDLs for FPGAs, but the bigger FPGAs get, the fewer people want to deal with page after page of schematics. Maybe a better question is: Will you use this? Let us know in the comments.
This isn’t a new idea, of course. Time will tell which HDLs will survive and which will whither.
Source: Published articles
This is _absolutely delightful_.
Source: Hacker News
Source: OSNews
The Wii homebrew community has been dealt a pretty serious blow, as developers of The Homebrew Channel for the Wii have discovered that not only does an important library most Wii homebrew software rely on use code stolen straight from Nintendo, that same library also uses code taken from an open source real-time operating system without giving proper attribution.
Most Wii homebrew software is built atop a library called libogc. This library apparently contains code stolen from Nintendo’s SDK as well as from games using this SDK, decompiled and cleaned. This has been known for a while, but it was believed that large, important parts of libogc were at least original, but that, too, turns out to be untrue. Recently it has been discovered that libogc’s threading/OS implementation has been stolen from RTEMS, an open source real-time operating system.
The developers of libogc have indicated that they do not care, intend to do nothing about it, and deleted any issues reporting the stolen code. What’s wild about the code stolen from RTEMS is that it’s an open source operating system with a nice, permissive license; there was no need to steal the code at all, and all it would take to address it is proper attribution.
As such, the fail0verflow group, which develops The Homebrew Channel for the Wii, has ceased all development on The Homebrew Channel, and archived the code repository.
The Wii homebrew community was all built on top of a pile of lies and copyright infringement, and it’s all thanks to shagkur (who did the stealing) and the rest of the team (who enabled it and did nothing when it was discovered). Together, the developers deceived everyone into believing their work was original.
Please demand that the leaders and major contributors to console or other proprietary device SDKs and toolkits that you use and work with do things legally, and do not tolerate this kind of behavior.
↫ The Homebrew Channel GitHub page
Considering Nintendo is on a crusade to shutdown emulators, stuff like this is really not helping anyone trying to argue that consoles should be open devices, that emulators play an important role in preservation, and that people have a right to play the games they own on a device other than the console it’s intended for.
I’m sure this isn’t the last we’ll hear about this development.
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
