Source: Hacker News
Source: Ars Technica
ARM Macs get a whole Apple SoC, with lots of components. [credit: Apple ]
After 15 years, Apple will again transition the Mac to a new architecture. The company announced at its developer conference today that it will introduce Macs featuring Apple-designed, ARM-based processors similar to those already used in the iPhone and iPad.
Tim Cook pegged this switch as one of the four biggest transitions the Mac has ever had. Alongside the move to PowerPC, the move to Intel, and the transition to Mac OS X, ARM will be one of the biggest Mac changes ever. Apple is promising "a whole new level of performance" with a "Family of Mac SoCs.
Longtime Apple users have been through all this before, with the transition from PowerPC to Intel and now for Intel x86 to ARM. All the big platform transition hits are coming back. The transition to ARM from x86 means that some Mac apps will be native and some won't. For apps that support both x86 and ARM, Apple is introducing the "Universal 2" binary that will package both codebases together. For apps that haven't made the transition to ARM yet, the Rosetta emulator is back as "Rosetta 2" and will now let x86 apps run on your ARM Mac, albeit with reduced performance.
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Source: Ars Technica
It's WWDC, and today Apple is announcing the next big version of macOS "Big Sur," which, after 15 versions of "OS 10.x," is actually version 11! Big Sur, like the previous versions, is named after a region in California.
Apple says Big Sur comes with an "entirely new interface" with "refinements in buttons and controls" and a new unified icon yet. Finder and most other apps feature a more transparent, top-to-bottom sidebar with an all-white (or all-dark) main section to the right. Toolbars have been redesigned, with the big gray window topper of previous versions getting the boot.
Control Center has arrived on the Mac, too. Clicking on the toolbar by the time will bring it up, just like the notification panel. Inside, you'll find sliders for the volume and display brightness, along with other power controls and media playback. You can drag controls into the status bar for quick access. Widgets have been reworked with a gallery display view, and you can easily drag them into the side widget bar.
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Source: Hacker News
Source: The Week: Most Recent Home Page Posts
The Supreme Court has ruled against President Trump on ending DACA.
In a 5-4 decision on Thursday, the court blocked the Trump administration from ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program protecting undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. before turning 16 from being deported, NBC News reports.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, stating that the administration's effort to end DACA was "arbitrary and capricious" and that it violated Administrative Procedure Act, so the rescission of DACA "must be vacated." Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor joined Roberts. The opinion notes, however, that "the dispute before the court is not whether DHS may rescind DACA. All parties agree that it may. The dispute is instead primarily about the procedure the agency followed in doing so."
This decision came days after another loss for the Trump administration when earlier this week, the court ruled that gay and transgender Americans are protected from workplace discrimination under the Civil Rights Act, rejecting the administration's argument.
Source: The Week: Most Recent Home Page Posts
This Friday is Juneteenth, which marks the day in 1865 that news of the Emancipation Proclamation finally made it all the way to Texas. Though it comes before the Fourth of July in our calendar year, Juneteenth celebrates a later and fuller Independence Day, a point of vital — though still incomplete — victory for black Americans' freedom and equality, as the nationwide protests against police brutality demonstrate afresh this year.
Those protests have put Juneteenth on corporate radars like never before. Major companies including Google, Nike, Target, and Mastercard have announced they will recognize the holiday, giving many or all employees the day off. But what most of these announcements don't make clear is whether this is a one-time thing. Lyft is an apparent exception — its announcement tweet says Juneteenth is an official holiday "[s]tarting this year" — but The New York Times' tweet says Juneteenth is a paid holiday "this year," and the NFL announcement references the "current climate."
What about next year and years to come? My guess is if the climate has changed, most of these companies will quietly forget the holiday about justice they presently find so convenient for dress-up wokeness. Some employees may successfully lobby to make the holiday permanent, but many corporations will be resistant for the usual corporate reason: Holidays cost money, and if there's no federal designation or critical mass of workers demanding the day off, it won't be given.
This is a problem for Juneteenth, but it's a bigger problem, too. Americans no longer prioritize a single set of holidays. We largely lack the cultural — and especially the religious and political — unity to celebrate the same things. What if we stopped pretending otherwise?
Our employment contracts, at the very least, could recognize this reality. The solution is simple and already familiar to corporate HR departments: floating holidays. These are paid days off to be used at workers' discretion, but they differ from vacation in that if you quit with unused floating holidays, there's no payout as with unused vacation days.
Some companies already include a few floating holidays in their benefits package, typically as a supplement to the standard schedule of 10 federal holidays. These extra days are conceived as a blanket accommodation for unusual beliefs. It's not a bad idea, but it's built on an increasingly incorrect assumption: that relatively few employees' beliefs will have them wanting different days off than the standard 10.
Instead of supplementing a fixed, universal schedule, floating holidays should be the entire arrangement. Simply give every employee something like 15 days a year of paid vacation to use to celebrate the days of their choice.
Calls to move in this direction may be inevitable as present religious trends progress. The United States is moving at a remarkable pace away from being a nation overwhelmingly composed of professing Christians. Religious diversity is increasing, and so too is religious disaffiliation. Granted, the only explicitly religious holiday on the standard list of 10 is Christmas, and much of its American celebration has no connection to Christianity. But it is still easy to imagine larger companies more and more discovering they have atheist or Jehovah's Witness employees who don't want to mark Christmas, alongside Muslim employees who'd rather take the day for Eid al-Fitr or Jewish workers who'd prefer to observe Yom Kippur, alongside observant Christians who want more time off for Christmas celebration. Floating holidays satisfy all of these preferences.
The political advantage to floating holidays is rising, too. The history of Thanksgiving has long put its contemporary celebration under scrutiny. Pacifists like me may not do much for holidays that glorify violence. Celebration of Columbus Day occasions an annual debate about the propriety of commemorating someone who by contemporary accounts and his own journals engaged in dehumanizing cruelty. Now, the timing of the protests sparked by George Floyd's death has likewise occasioned uproar over the neglect of Juneteenth.
Companies could continue to wade into these debates with often clumsy, performative forays into "woke-washed" marketing and HR policies, courting charges from various corners of tone deafness, insincerity, profiteering, and capitulation (all bad for the bottom line, I might note). Or they could simply announce a total shift to floating holidays, a more laissez-faire approach in which employees can celebrate whatever days they deem ethical or sacred without the interruption of vague corporate bromides about "history" or "diversity" or "love" or "family" or whatever.
This solution won't settle, of course, the larger question of what's worth celebrating. It won't even resolve disagreements about what days deserve public honor as opposed to private observance, especially the honor of recognition by the state. (Incidentally, if any day deserves to be added to the calendar of federal holidays, Juneteenth is it.) And it probably won't feel as immediately gratifying as corporate commitments to forever giving workers time off on June 19.
But it is achievable, realistic, and peaceable, which in our contentious nation is pretty high praise. It also guarantees you can commemorate Juneteenth.
Source: Ars Technica
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)
The Department of Justice today released a set of proposals calling for sweeping reform to the law that grants immunity to apps and websites for the content users post or share to them, following months of political rhetoric about the supposed suppression of conservative speech online.
The proposal outlines recommended changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. "The time is ripe to realign the scope of Section 230 with the realities of the modern internet," the DOJ wrote. "We must ensure that the internet is both an open and safe space for our society."
The report (PDF) stems from a nearly year-long investigation into Big Tech that began in the department's Antitrust Division last July. The DOJ said at the time that the probe would "consider the widespread concerns that consumers, businesses, and entrepreneurs have expressed about search, social media, and some retail services online." The agency did not name names, but Amazon, Facebook, and Google were widely considered to be on the list.
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Source: Hacker News
Source: Kentucky.com -- Education
University of Kentucky students will begin their fall semester on Aug. 17, a week earlier than originally planned, the university’s final reopening plan released on Tuesday shows. COVID-19 testing will … Click to Continue »
Source: Kentucky.com -- Fayette County
Lexington Mayor Linda Gorton issued a moratorium on no-knock warrants on Monday, less than five days after Louisville banned the controversial practice outright. No-knock warrants allow police officers to enter … Click to Continue »
