Qualcomm cancels its mini PC with the Snapdragon X Elite processor
Something odd happened to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Dev Kit, an $899 mini PC powered by Windows 11 and the company’s latest Snapdragon X Elite processor. Qualcomm decided to abruptly discontinue the...
View ArticleGoogle’s ad-blocking crackdown underway
Google has gotten a bad reputation as of late for being a bit overzealous when it comes to fighting ad blockers. Most recently, it’s been spotted automatically turning off popular ad blocking...
View ArticleChromium’s influence on Chromium alternatives
I don’t think most people realize how Firefox and Safari depend on Google for more than “just” revenue from default search engine deals and prototyping new web platform features. Off the top of my...
View ArticleBooting Sun SPARC servers
In early 2022 I got several Sun SPARC servers for free off of a FreeCycle ad: I was recently called out for not providing any sort of update on those devices… so here we go! ↫ Sidneys1.com Some...
View ArticleMicrosoft maintains its own Windows debloat scripts on GitHub
It’s no secret that a default Windows installation is… Hefty. In more ways than one, Windows is a bit on the obese side of the spectrum, from taking up a lot of disk space, to requiring hefty system...
View ArticleSystem76 unveils ARM Ampere Altra workstation
System76, purveyor of Linux computers, distributions, and now also desktop environments, has just unveiled its latest top-end workstation, but this time, it’s not an x86 machine. They’ve been working...
View ArticleApple’s AirPods Pro hearing health features are as good as they sound
Apple announced a trio of major new hearing health features for the AirPods Pro 2 in September, including clinical-grade hearing aid functionality, a hearing test, and more robust hearing protection....
View Article/tmp should not exist
I commented on Lobsters that /tmp is usually a bad idea, which caused some surprise. I suppose /tmp security bugs were common in the 1990s when I was learning Unix, but they are pretty rare now so I...
View ArticleQualcomm announces Snapdragon 8 Elite flagship smartphone SoC
At the Snapdragon Summit today, Qualcomm is officially announcing the Snapdragon 8 Elite, its flagship SoC for smartphones. The Snapdragon 8 Elite is a major upgrade from its predecessor, with...
View Articlebhyve on FreeBSD and VM live migration: quo vadis?
When I think about bhyve Live Migration, it’s something I encounter almost daily in my consulting calls. VMware’s struggles with Broadcom’s licensing issues have been a frequent topic, even as we...
View ArticleSolving the mystery of ARM7TDMI multiply carry flag
The processor in the Game Boy Advance, the ARM7TDMI, has a weird characteristic where the carry flag is set to a “meaningless value” after a multiplication operation. What this means is that software...
View ArticleMicrosoft improves Windows’ update experience, and announces support for MIDI...
Windows 11, version 24H2 represents significant improvements to the already robust update foundation of Windows. With the latest version, you get reduced installation time, restart time, and central...
View ArticleContractors training Amazon, Meta and Microsoft’s AI systems left without pay...
One-third of payments to contractors training AI systems used by companies such as Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have not been paid on time after the Australian company Appen moved to a new worker...
View ArticleA deep dive into Linux’s new mseal syscall
If you love exploit mitigations, you may have heard of a new system call named mseal landing into the Linux kernel’s 6.10 release, providing a protection called “memory sealing.” Beyond notes from the...
View ArticleWhat can Windows 10 users do once support ends in October 2025?
There’s a date looming on the horizon for the vast majority of Windows users. While Windows 11 has been out for a long time now, most Windows users are using Windows 10 – about 63% – while Windows 11...
View ArticleA brief history of Mac firmware
Firmware, software that’s intimately involved with hardware at a low level, has changed radically with each of the different processor architectures used in Macs. ↫ Howard Oakley A quick but still...
View ArticleThe MIPS ‘ThinkPad’ and the unreleased Commodore HHC-4
Old Vintage Computing Research, by the incredibly knowledgeable Cameron Kaiser, is one of the best resources on the web about genuinely obscure retrocomputing, often diving quite deep in topics nobody...
View ArticleWhat’s new in POSIX 2024 – XCU
As of the previous release of POSIX, the Austin Group gained more control over the specification, having it be more working group oriented, and they got to work making the POSIX specification more...
View ArticleWorld’s first Haiku ransomware/malware
There’s many ways to judge if an operating system has made it to the big leagues, and one of the more unpleasant ones is the availability of malware. Haiku, the increasingly capable and...
View ArticleTDE R14.1.3 released, and KDE developers hold impromptu TDE installfest at...
The Trinity Desktop Environment, a fork of the last release in the KDE 3.x series, has just released their latest version, R14.1.3. Despite its rather small version number change, it contains some...
View Article