Category Archives: News

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The most unethical thing I was asked to build while working at Twitter in 2015

Posted on 2022-11-07 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The real kick is "We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies." That is _vile_, and was apparently accepted practice already in 2015. The rise of the Consumer Computer has been a disaster.
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C isn’t a programming language anymore

Posted on 2022-11-07 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The language-agnostic platform bindings problem is a _huge problem_. C is a horrible tool for it, but no one has ever really come up with something better, in large part because the higher-level langues that have a hard time with it...just punt the details to the platform, who has (in almost all modern OSes) defined them in C. It _is_ fun to think about what else we could do. The interfaces could be a declarative description language with a easier to deal with parser (if a thousand legacy systems and all new ones agreed to do a bunch of extra work to make that happen). The interfaces (at a cost of massive implementation complication and performance penalty) could be an interrogatable message-passing interface (think dbus). Etc.
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Quantum winter is coming

Posted on 2022-11-05 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It's one of several hype-cycles overdue for breaking.
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Microsoft Mulls Cheap PCs Supported by Ads, Subs

Posted on 2022-11-03 by pappp

Source: Slashdot

Article note: Anyone remember the i-Opener? One of the horseman of the dotcom crash? There it is again.

The Register: A number of job postings -- including this now-closed ad from late September for a principal software engineering manager -- are looking for engineers and others to become part of the "newly formed Windows Incubation team" whose mission is to "build a new direction for Windows in a cloud first world." The lofty goal is to "move Windows to a place that combines the benefits of the cloud and Microsoft 365 to offer more compute resources on demand and creates a hybrid app model that spans from on-premises to the cloud." According to the ad, it also includes "building a Web-based shell with direct integration with Windows 365." Included in the possible models are low-cost PCs available via subscriptions, with advertising helping to offset some of the costs. (Also mentioned in the job are direct-to-cloud devices.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Boot Partitions

Posted on 2022-11-03 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The ESP will be a feeble vfat partition, which is typically too small to realistically use for storing kernel images... so you should use it, or a second, also vfat partition, to store our even-bigger UKI kernel images. What?
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GNU Make to drop support for OS/2, AmigaOS, Xenix

Posted on 2022-11-02 by pappp

Source: OSNews

Article note: Interesting drops. OS/2 is only used in places that got trapped, and they don't want to touch it, but it's still faintly surprising that one of the big trapped entities didn't bankroll the development work. AmigaOS ...I'm surprised, the rabid Amiga people keep that ecosystem first-class amazingly beyond it's sell-by date. Xenix is for historical interest only, and immiscible with anything modern, it's more surprising it was still in there.

GNU Make 4.4 is here, and it has some interesting – and sad – news for some of the old operating systems we still cover on OSNews. Sadly, support for OS/2 (EMX), AmigaOS, Xenix, and Cray will be dropped from the next release of Make. Now, I’m not entirely sure just how many users of these operating systems even use Make, but for those of you that do – tough cookie right here.

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9front releases new version of Plan 9 OS fork: The Golden Age of Ballooning

Posted on 2022-11-02 by pappp

Source: The Register

Article note: Plan9 is one of the most prominent places where ideas from the early 90s lodged when computing popularized and calcified. 9Front is where all the crazy people who those ideas resonate go to play.

Prepare to be confused

9front is a fork and continuation of Plan 9 from Bell Labs, which is what the minds behind UNIX and the C programming language went on to do next. It is also rather strange.…

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Adobe replacing old Pantone spot colors with black when you load files using them

Posted on 2022-10-28 by pappp

Source: Boing Boing

Article note: Layers of horseshit. Asserting property rights on a color horseshit. Software as a Service horseshit.

Welcome to intellectual property hell, designers! This one's great because you never saw it coming: Adobe removing certain Pantone spot colors should you try to open PSD files containing them. Now you can see nothing at all, because it replaces them with black. — Read the rest

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Linux 6.1 on NanoPi R4S – On fixing SD-card support, Heisenbugs and Rabbit Holes

Posted on 2022-10-28 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It's an excellent tale of a bug hunt. I spent some time staring into device trees and specifically weird SD/MMC behavior at the U-Boot to Linux hand-off a few months ago on some Zynq boards... this totally tracks, though I haven't cracked the behavior I was seeing. In my case, the boards in question have sequenced regulators for 3v3, 1v9, 1v8, and 1v5 and some examples have other issues with the power sequence, so it's a great angle to look at. I should see if the behaviors are related.
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The Beautiful Machine (2020)

Posted on 2022-10-28 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I remember when this went around shortly after being posted, but man. That is a beautiful machine, and exactly in the vein of the aspirational designs of the 80s - it looks like something FrogDesign would have pitched before being rejected or drastically cheapened/practical-ized before it hit the market. It's of course expensive ($275 + 136 for the bespoke PSU + 33 for the GPU cooler = ~$450 case and cooler) - but not as obscene as I expected at first glance. The owner's gorgeous split ergo keyboard (ErgoDox?) setup is pretty majestic and cyberpunk too.
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