If you are looking to upgrade your TV and want a long-lasting option, you may consider getting a Samsung AI TV powered by Tizen OS. The reason is that Samsung announced plans to offer seven years of Tizen OS upgrades for some of its Smart TVs. ↫ Sagar Naresh Bhavsar at Neowin Since buying a dumb TV is no longer possible, you might as well get the one with the longest possible support lifecycle. This new policy covers Samsung TVs from 2024 onward, as well as a few modls from 2023. There’s no word on if the ads that I’m assuming are part of Samsung’s smart TVs will also receive seven years of updates. Or, you know, get a good Android TV box and never plug your actual TV into your network to begin with.
Due to its limited RAM of 1,920 bits, the Programma 101 was mostly a machine conceived to make arithmetic calculations – sums, subtractions, divisions, multiplications, square roots -, yet, like modern computers, it could also perform logical operations, conditional and unconditional jumps, and print the data stored in a register, all through a custom-made alphanumeric programming language. This was, in the early ’60s, what set computers apart from calculators, indeed. Overall, in today’s terms, Programma 101 can be considered a sort of “transitional fossil” between desktop calculators and personal computers. ↫ Riccardo Bianchini Olivetti sure is a name that carries an exceptional amount of weight in the retrocomputing world, as classic Olivetti computers, even standard Olivetti PCs, tend to be highly desirable. A Programma 101 in amazing condition is currently for sale on eBay for a massive €20000, and while there’s quite a few relatively cheap ’80s and ’90s Olivetti PCs for sale, a sizable number of them are far more desirable and carry massive premiums for their unique design. It’s sad how many once great and influential computer makers have been relegated to the dustbin of history, outcompeted, acquired, or run into the ground. Some of these once great brands live on as mere badges on electronic junk, and Olivetti, too, was not spared this fate. In fact, what is generally considered the worst PDA ever made, the Olivetti daVinci, was a generic product that just had an Olivetti logo slapped onto it. I have one in-box, and intend to one day write about it, because its awfulness needs to be shared with the world.
Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced a so-called “Account Manager” for Windows 11 that appears on the screen when you click your profile picture on the Start menu. Instead of just showing you buttons for logging out, locking your device or switching profiles, it displays Microsoft 365 ads. All the actually useful buttons are now hidden behind a three-dot submenu (apparently, my 43-inch display does not have enough space to accommodate them). Now, the “Account Manager” is coming to Windows 10 users. ↫ Taras Buria at Neowin Yes, this is a really small ad int he grand scheme of things, but the mere concept of my operating system showing me all kinds of ads and upsells, as both Windows and macOS have been doing aggressively for years now, is so deeply offensive to me. It shows such utter disrespect to me as a user, and shows that Microsoft and Apple see me not as an end user, but as a ripe plum ready to be bled dry at every turn. It’s revolting. As the latest release, Windows 11 has always been the most ad-ridden of the Windows releases still in use, but it seems Windows users can’t escape the onslaught either. I’m especially expecting ever more aggressive ads and upsells for Windows 11 to appear in Windows 10 now that the 2025 cutoff date for Windows 10 support is nearing, of course appearing at the most inopportune times – because everybody loves a giant fullscreen ad on your operating system when you’re trying to give a presentation or meet that tight deadline you forced yourself yo stress about by playing a bit too much League of Legends. If you want an ad- and upsell-free operating system, your options are legion – there’s countless Linux distributions and the various BSDs to choose from.
The greek quiz is so obscure that it is ridiculous — noone can play this. Replace it with a new quiz about galley (ship) parts. This commit changes the LAST UNMODIFIED ORIGINAL FILE (meaning revision 1.1.1.1) from the original import that created OpenBSD on Oct 18, 1995. With this commit, we have completed an amusing mission of replacing the final parts of the original OpenBSD. We have reached OpenBSD of Theseus. ↫ Theo de Raadt With this change to a quiz game in OpenBSD, every single file of the OpenBSD code base is newer than that first, original import. Now I’m curious to see which other projects have achieved this milestone, and when.
Virtually every tech media outlet has been reporting that Microsoft is deprecating the Control Panel in Windows as if that’s some sort of big revelation we should be outraged about. They’re basing this on the following, now changed, paragraph someone found buried deep in a Windows support site somewhere: The Control Panel is a feature that’s been part of Windows for a long time. It provides a centralized location to view and manipulate system settings and controls. Through a series of applets, you can adjust various options ranging from system time and date to hardware settings, network configurations, and more. The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience. ↫ Windows support website It seems the sudden avalanche of articles about this spooked Microsoft, because when you open the same website now, that last line instead reads: Many of the settings in Control Panel are in the process of being migrated to the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience. ↫ Windows support website The idea that the Control Panel is being “deprecated” is not exactly a new one; it’s been an ongoing process since the release of Windows 8, twelve years ago now. With every new Windows release, more Control Panel applets are removed in favour of expanding the Settings application, to a point where few regular users have a need to open it directly. Settings still does rely on old Control Panel applets, though, and it won’t take you many clicks through Settings to end up at a classic applet. So, while directly opening the Control Panel might not be a common thing people do, using classic applets sure is. Microsoft may be changing the verbiage of its support page to remove the word “deprecated”, but that ain’t fooling anyone: the Control Panel has already been gutted beyond recognition, and it’s definitely in the process of being deprecated – in true Microsoft fashion, it’s just taking them a really long time, because nobody inside Microsoft seems to really care about Windows anymore.
German journalist Martin Bernklau typed his name and location into Microsoft’s Copilot to see how his culture blog articles would be picked up by the chatbot, according to German public broadcaster SWR. The answers shocked Bernklau. Copilot falsely claimed Bernklau had been charged with and convicted of child abuse and exploiting dependents. It also claimed that he had been involved in a dramatic escape from a psychiatric hospital and had exploited grieving women as an unethical mortician. Copilot even went so far as to claim that it was “unfortunate” that someone with such a criminal past had a family and, according to SWR, provided Bernklau’s full address with phone number and route planner. ↫ Matthias Bastian So why did Copilot (which is just OpenAI’s ChatGPT with sparkles) claim Bernklau did all sorts of horrible things? Well, his occupation – journalist – is a dead giveaway. He has written a lot of articles covering court proceedings in Tübingen on abuse, violence, and fraud cases, and since Copilot is just spicy autocorrect, it has no understanding of context and pinned the various crimes he covered on Bernklau. Adding in his address, phone number, and a damn planned route to his home is just the very disgusting icing on this already disgusting cake. What makes matters even worse, if you can believe it, is that Bernklau has absolutely no recourse. He contacted the public prosecutor’s office in Tübingen, but they stated they can’t press charges because the accusations coming from Copilot aren’t being made by a real person. And to make it still even worse, Microsoft just threw its hands in the air and absolved itself of any and all responsibility by pointing to its terms of service, in which Microsoft discards liability for content generated by Copilot. Convenient. This is nothing short of a nightmare scenario that can utterly destroy someone’s life, and the fact that Microsoft doesn’t care and the law isn’t even remotely prepared to take serious matters like these on is terrifying.
A page is the granularity at which an operating system manages memory. Most CPUs today support a 4 KB page size and so the Android OS and applications have historically been built and optimized to run with a 4 KB page size. ARM CPUs support the larger 16 KB page size. When Android uses this larger page size, we observe an overall performance boost of 5-10% while using ~9% additional memory. In order to improve the operating system performance overall and to give device manufacturers an option to make this trade-off, Android 15 can run with 4 KB or 16 KB page sizes. ↫ Steven Moreland Android 15 has been reworked to be page-size agnostic, meaning that a single binary can run on either 4 KB or 16 KB versions of Android. Any assumptions about page size have been removed from Android as well, the EROFS and F2FS file systems as well as UFS are now compatible with 16 KB, and a whole lot more things have been changed and refactored to make this transition as effortless as possible. Application developers do need to do a few things, though. They’ll need to recompile their binaries with 16 KB alignment, after which they’ll need to be tested in a 16 KB version of an Android device or emulator. To make this possible, starting with Android 15 QPR1, the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro will get a new develop option that will reboot the device in 16 KB mode. In addition, Android Studio will gain a 16 KB emulator target as well. The 16 KB page size is an ARM-only feature, so people running the emulator on x86 devices will emulate the 16 KB page size, in which “the Kernel runs in 4 KB mode, but all addresses exposed to applications are aligned to 16 KB”. Of course, Google urges Android developers to test for 16 KB page sizes as soon as possible.
All, in all, It was much easier to program for Windows using Turbo Pascal 7 than with anything else. Not only did it provide a programming model that matched the way the Windows user interface worked, the application itself had a Windows graphical interface – many Windows programming tools at that time actually ran under MSDOS, and were entirely text-based. TP 7 also had fully-graphical tools for designing the user interface elements, like menus and icons. Laying out a menu using a definition file with an obscure format, using Windows Notepad, was never an agreeable experience. Microsoft did produce graphical tools for this kind of operation, but Turbo Pascal combined them into a seamless IDE. All I had to do to build and run my programs was to hit the F7 key. I could even set breakpoints for the debugger, just by clicking a line of code. As I said, common enough today, but revolutionary for early Windows programming. ↫ Kevin Boone Even as a mere child who didn’t even know what programming was, I was aware of Turbo Pascal. It was a name that you just encountered all over the place as a DOS and Windows 3.x user, even if you didn’t know what it was. The author of this article, Kevin Boone, even claims Turbo Pascal “contributed to the widespread uptake, and eventual domination, of Microsoft Windows on desktop PCs”, which is not something I can verify because I was far too young, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it holds water. This article made me wonder if Pascal is easy to learn, and if someone wanting to learn programming can do worse than start with a Windows 3.x virtual machine and Turbo Pascal. Sure, it’s probably not very relevant today, but it might serve as a good, solid base to work from? I have no idea.
The history of Ethernet is fascinating. The reason why we have three different frame types is that DIX used the Ethernet II frame that is prevalent today, while IEEE intended to use a different frame format that could be used for different MAC layers, such as token bus, token ring, FDDI, and so on. The IEEE were also inspired by HDLC, and modeled their frame header more in alignment with the OSI reference model that had the concept of SAPs. When they discovered that the number of available SAPs weren’t enough, they made an addition to the 802 standard to support SNAP frames. In networks today, Ethernet II is dominant, but some control protocols may use LLC and/or SNAP frames. ↫ Daniel Dib I just smiled and nodded.
The conversation around gaming on Linux has changed significantly during the last several years. It’s a success story engineered by passionate developers working on the Linux kernel and the open-source graphics stack (and certainly bolstered by the Steam Deck). Many of them are employed by Valve and Red Hat. Many are enthusiasts volunteering their time to ensure Linux gaming continues to improve. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a history lesson, but it’s an appropriate way to introduce yet another performance victory Linux is claiming over Windows. I recently spent some time with the Framework 13 laptop, evaluating it with the new Intel Core Ultra 7 processor and the AMD Ryzen 7 7480U. It felt like the perfect opportunity to test how a handful of games ran on Windows 11 and Fedora 40. I was genuinely surprised by the results! ↫ Jason Evangelho I’m not surprised by these results. At all. I’ve been running exclusively Linux on my gaming PC for years now, and gaming has pretty much been a solved issue on Linux for a while now. I used to check ProtonDB before buying games on Steam without a native Linux version, but I haven’t done that in a long time, since stuff usually just works. In quite a few cases, we’ve even seen Windows games perform better on Linux through Proton than they do on Windows. An example that still makes me chuckle is that when Elden Ring was just released, it had consistent stutter issues on Windows that didn’t exist on Linux, because Valve’s Proton did a better job at caching textures. And now that the Steam Deck has been out for a while, people just expect Linux support from developers, and if it’s not there on launch, Steam reviews will reflect that. It’s been years since I bought a game that I’ve had to refund on Steam because it didn’t work properly on Linux. The one exception remains games that employ Windows rootkits for their anticheat functionality, such as League of Legends, which recently stopped working on Linux because the company behind the game added a rootkit to their anticheat tool. Those are definitely an exception, though, and honestly, you shouldn’t be running a rootkit on your computer anyway, Windows or not. For my League of Legends needs, I just grabbed some random spare parts and built a dedicated, throwaway Windows box that obviously has zero of my data on it, and pretty much just runs that one stupid game I’ve sadly been playing for like 14 years. We all have our guilty pleasures. Don’t kink-shame. Anyway, if only a few years ago you had told me or anyone else that gaming on Linux would be a non-story, a solved problem, and that most PC games just work on Linux without any issues, you’d be laughed out of the room. Times sure have changed due to the dedication and hard work of both the community and various companies like Valve.
Apple is making additional changes to its app ecosystem in the European Union to comply with the terms of the Digital Markets Act. The default browser selection experience that’s already in place will be updated, Apple will allow EU users to set defaults for more types of apps, and core iOS apps like Messages and the App Store will also be deletable. iPhone owners in the EU can already set different defaults for the browser, mail app, app marketplace, and contactless payments, but Apple is going to allow users to select new defaults for phone calls, messaging, password managers, keyboards, call spam filters, navigation, and translation. That means, for example, that EU users will be able to choose an app like WhatsApp instead of Messages to be their default texting app, or a mapping app like Waze to be the default instead of Apple Maps. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors It’s clear by now that Apple’s malicious DMA compliance attempts have proven to be an abject failure. Apple continuously needs to backtrack and give in more and more to the European Commission, without the Commission even having to really do anything at all. Slowly but surely, Apple is complying with the DMA, all while its toddler tantrums have done serious damage to the company’s standing and reputation without having any of the desired effects for Apple. Whoever set out this toddler DMA strategy at Apple should probably be fired for incompetence. This latest round of additional changes to comply with the DMA are very welcome ones, and further solidify the EU version of iOS as the best version. Not only do iOS users in the European Union get different browser engines, they can also remove larger numbers of default applications, set more default applications, replace more Apple-services with third-party ones, and so on. Thanks to the DMA, iOS is finally becoming more of a real operating system, instead of a set of shackles designed primarily to lock users in. It’s only a matter of time before laws similar to the DMA spread to the rest of the world, and I honestly don’t think the United States is going to stay behind. Corruption in the US is widespread, but there’s only so much money can do, even in US politics.
When one thinks of modern technologies like Thunderbolt, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet and modern CPUs, one would associate them with modern operating systems. How about DOS? It might seem impossible, however I did an experiment on a relatively modern 2020 Thinkpad and found that it can still run MS-DOS 6.22. MS-DOS 6.22 is the last standalone version of DOS released by Microsoft in June 1994. This makes it 30 years old today. I shall share the steps and challenges in locating a modern laptop capable of doing so and making the 30-year-old OS work on it with audio and networking functions. This is likely among the final generation of laptops able to run DOS natively. ↫ Yeo Kheng Meng I was unaware that the legacy boot mode through a UEFI Compatibility Support Module (CSM) was being phased out on Intel systems (I can’t find anything definitive on what AMD is planning to do with CSM). This will definitely be an end-of-the-line kind of thing for people interested in running old, outdated operating systems on modern hardware, as doing so would require proper EFI support. I’m not actually salty about this at all by the way – there’s no place in modern PCs for something designed in 1981. We have ATX for that. Anyway, it turns out MS-DOS 6.22 actually runs pretty well on this 2020 Thinkpad X13 Gen 1. Of course you have to enable CSM, and disable secure boot and kernel DMA proection, but once that’s done, you can just install MS-DOS 6.22 like it’s 1994. Thanks to SBEMU, you can use modern sound cards in pure DOS mode, and due to various backwards compatibility affordances in network chipsets, you can even use some of those – even through Thunderbolt, which is just PCI over a cable, after all (more or less). Running MS-DOS on a modern laptop may not allow you to get the most out of your modern hardware, but at least you can run DOS games very well, as the benchmarks Meng ran show.
AMD says Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 11 version 24H2 update will improve performance for its new Zen 5 CPUs. The Ryzen 9000 series launched earlier this month, and failed to live up to AMD’s performance promises in most reviews. After rumors of a Windows bug, AMD has revealed that AMD-specific branch prediction code will be optimized in Windows 11 version 24H2, which is expected to ship next month. ↫ Tom Warren at The Verge It’s wild how seemingly small things can have a major impact on the launch of a new processor (or GPU) line these days. The main culprit behind the disappointing benchmarks upon launch of the Ryzen 9000 series turned out to be the 9000’s new branch prediction method, the code for which is not yet available in Windows. However, AMD ran their tests in “Admin mode”, which yielded results as if such code was actually present. AMD has said the branch prediction code needed to unlock the full potential of Ryzen 9000 chips in Windows and yield benchmark results comparable to AMD’s own internal tests and PR promiseswill be released next month as part of “Windows 11, version 24H2 in preview through the Windows Insider Program (Release Preview Channel – Build 26100) or by downloading the ISO here“. AMD claims this update will benefit users of previous Zen 5 and Zen 3 processors as well, but to a lesser degree. No word on if this issue affects Linux users in any way.
Ah, secure boot, the bane of many running anything other than Windows. While it’s already been found to be utterly useless by now, it’s still a requirement for Windows 11, and ever since it became part of PCs about a decade or so ago, it’s been causing headaches for people who don’t use Windows. Yesterday, Microsoft released a patch for a two-year-old vulnerability in the GRUB bootloader, and while the company claimed it would only be installed on single-boot Windows machines, that clearly wasn’t the case as right after its release, people dual-booting Linux and Windows found their Linux installations unbootable. Tuesday’s update left dual-boot devices—meaning those configured to run both Windows and Linux—no longer able to boot into the latter when Secure Boot was enforced. When users tried to load Linux, they received the message: “Verifying shim SBAT data failed: Security Policy Violation. Something has gone seriously wrong: SBAT self-check failed: Security Policy Violation.” Almost immediately support and discussion forums lit up with reports of the failure. ↫ Dan Goodin at Ars Technica The fix is both easy and hilarious: disable secure boot, and you’re good to go. You can also get a bit more technical and remove the SBAT installed by this update, but while that will allow you to keep booting with secure boot enabled, it will leave you vulnerable to the issue the SBAT was supposed to fix. The efficacy of secure boot in home environments is debatable, at best, and while I’m not going to advise anyone to just turn it off and forget about it, I think most OSNews readers can make an informed decision about secure boot by themselves. If you’re using corporate machines managed by your employer’s IT department, you obviously need to refer to them. Microsoft itself has not yet commented on this issue, and is not responding to questions from press outlets, so we’re currently in the dark about how such a game-breaking update got out in the wild. Regardless, this once again shows just how annoying secure boot is. In many cases, the boot problems people trying out Linux run into caused by secure boot, but of course, the blame is placed squarely on Linux, and not on secure boot itself being a hot mess.
One feature I couldn’t live without anymore is snapshots. As system administrators, we often find ourselves in situations where we’ve made a mistake, need to revert to a previous state, or need access to a log that has been rotated and disappeared. Since I started using ZFS, all of this has become incredibly simple, and I feel much more at ease when making any modifications. However, since I don’t always remember to create a manual snapshot before starting to work, I use an automatic snapshot system. For this type of snapshot, I use the excellent zfs-autobackup tool – which I also use for backups. The goal is to have a single, flexible, and configurable tool without having to learn different syntaxes. ↫ Stefano Marinelli I’m always a little sad about the fact that the kind of advanced features modern file systems like ZFS, btrfs, and others offer are so inaccessible to mere desktop users like myself. While I understand they’re primarily designed for server use, they’re still making their way to desktops – my Fedora installations all default to btrfs – and I’d love to be able to make use of their advanced features straight from within KDE (or GNOME or whatever it is you use). Of course, that’s neither here or there for the article at hand, which will be quite useful for people administering FreeBSD and/or Linux systems, and who would like to get the most out of ZFS by automating some of its functionality.
This article is targeted at embedded engineers who are familiar with microcontrollers but not with microprocessors or Linux, so I wanted to put together something with a quick primer on why you’d want to run embedded Linux, a broad overview of what’s involved in designing around application processors, and then a dive into some specific parts you should check out — and others you should avoid — for entry-level embedded Linux systems. ↫ Jay Carlson Quite the detailed guide about embedded Linux.
The FreeBSD project has published its latest quarterly status report, and there’s a lot in there. The most prominent effort listed in the report is a close collaboration between FreeBSD and AMD on an IOMMU driver for AMD’s server processors. Work continued on a joint project between Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and The FreeBSD Foundation to develop a complete FreeBSD AMD IOMMU driver. This work will allow FreeBSD to fully support greater than 256 cores with features such as CPU mapping and will also include bhyve integration. Konstantin Belousov has been working on various parts of the project, including driver attachment, register definitions, an ACPI table parser, and utility functions. Two key components that need to be completed are context handling, which is mostly a generalization of Intel DMAR code, and page table creation. After this, the AMD driver’s enable bit can be turned on for testing. ↫ FreeBSD status report page It’s great to see AMD and FreeBSD working together like this, and it highlights that FreeBSD is a serious player in the server space. Other things mentioned in the status report are continued work in improving the audio experience, wireless networking, RISC-V support, OpenZFS, and more. Through the work of Tom Jones, FreeBSD is also getting the Vector Packet Processor, a userspace networking stack that delivers fast packet processing suitable for software-defined networking and network function virtualization applications. Of course, this is just a selection, and there’s way more listed in the report. I would also like to highlight the ongoing, neverending work of improving the experience of using KDE on FreeBSD. The FreeBSD KDE team notes that due to the massive release of KDE 6, and the associated flurry of follow-up releases, requiring a lot of work and testing, KDE on FreeBSD still hasn’t fully caught up with the latest releases. KDE Frameworks is currently at 6.3.0 (6.5.0 is current), KDE Plasma Desktop is currently 6.0.3 (6.1.4 is current), and KDE Gear 6 hasn’t been ported at all yet. In other words, while progress is being made, it’s clear the team could use a hand, too.
Google now displays convenient artificial intelligence-based answers at the top of its search pages — meaning users may never click through to the websites whose data is being used to power those results. But many site owners say they can’t afford to block Google’s AI from summarizing their content. That’s because the Google tool that sifts through web content to come up with its AI answers is the same one that keeps track of web pages for search results, according to publishers. Blocking Alphabet Inc.’s Google the way sites have blocked some of its AI competitors would also hamper a site’s ability to be discovered online. ↫ Julia Love and Davey Alba OSNews still relies partially on advertising right now, and thus Google continues to play a role in our survival. You can help by reducing our dependency on Google by supporting us through Patreon, making donations using Ko-Fi, or buying our merch. The more of you support us, the closer to reality the dream of an ad-free OSNews not dependent on Google becomes. OSNews is my sole source of income, and if that does not work out, OSNews will cease to exist if I’m forced to find another job. Due to Google’s utter dominance on the internet, websites and publishers have no choice but to accept whatever Google decides to do. Not being indexed by the most popular search engine on the web with like 90% market share is a death sentence, but feeding Google’s machine learning algorithms will be a slow death by a thousands cuts, too, for many publishers. The more content is fed to Google’s AI tools, the better they’ll get at simply copying your style to a T, and the better they’ll get at showing just the little paragraph or line that matters as a Google result, meaning you won’t have to visit the site in question. It’s also not great for Google in the long-term, either. Google Search relies on humans making content for people to find; if there’s no more quality content for people to find, people aren’t going to be using Google as much anymore. In what is typical of the search giant, it seems they’re not really looking ahead very far into the future, chasing short-term profits riding the AI hype train, while long-term profits take a back seat. Maybe I’m just too stupid to understand the Silicon Valley galaxy brain business boys, but to a simple man like me it seems rather stupid to starve the very websites, publishers, authors, and so on that your main product relies on to be useful in the first place. I honestly don’t even know how much of OSNews’ traffic comes from Google, so I don’t know how much it would even affect us were we to tell Google’s crawlers to get bent. My guess is that search traffic is still a sizable portion of our traffic, so I’m definitely not going to gamble the future of OSNews. Luckily we’re quite small and I doubt many people are interested in AI generating my writing style and the topics I cover anyway, so I don’t think I have to worry as much as some of the larger tech websites do.
There’s been a few new releases since the last time we talked about MenuetOS, back in March of this year when version 1.50.00 was released, so I figured it was time to take a look at what the project’s been up to. And just in case you don’t remember – MenuetOS is 64 bit operating system written in assembly that fits on a single 1.44 MB floppy disk. There’s also a 32 bit version that’s no longer being developed – I think. Weirdly enough, the 1.50.00 released is no longer listed, but recent changes include Mplayer being part of the disk image, further updates to the included X-Window Server, the usual bugfixes, and a few more things. The X server is quite cool – with it, you can run, say, Firefox on your Linux installation, but have the MenuetOS X server render the UI. In addition, thanks to MenuetOS now including a basic POSIX layer, it’s possible to create basic applications that run unmodified on both MenuetOS and a Linux distribution like Ubuntu. Neat.
But last month, that hand-me-down network was dealt a blow when Happiest Baby, the company that makes Snoo, began charging for access to some of the bassinet’s premium features — features that used to be available to Snoo users indefinitely, at no extra cost. Now, access to the app needed to lock in the bassinet’s rocking level, to track the baby’s sleep and to use the so-called weaning mode, among other features, will cost parents $20 a month. The change has angered secondhand users and original buyers alike. On Reddit, the new subscription model has prompted review bombs, group brainstorms for collective action and detailed instructions for outraged parents seeking recourse. Some have taken to filing complaints with the Federal Trade Commission, Better Business Bureau and state-run consumer protection offices. ↫ Sandra E. Garcia and Rachel Sherman at The New York Times My wife had our first baby a little over three years ago, and our second one a little over a year ago, and let me tell you – the amount of “smart” and “connected” stuff they sell targeted at babies and young parents is insane. The only “smart” thing we got was a camera that pipes sound to my phone and detects movement, and sends a notification to our phone so we can take a peek and see if everything’s alright. Our oldest has outgrown it, and our youngest doesn’t really need it, so it’s just being useless at the moment, fitted to the wall. It definitely improved our nights, though, since it made sure we would never have to get up for no reason. Other than that, we are very analog. I had heard of “smart” bassinets, but we didn’t think we needed one. That’s just our decision, though, and you can rightfully argue that using a camera and open microphone is not that different. All of these new “smart” tools are just that, tools, and can be useful and make your life just a little bit easier, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Being a parent of a newborn is hard enough as it is without outsiders judging you and pressuring you into doing things you don’t think are right, especially since you know your own newborn – and yourself – better than some random outsiders do. The Snoo is one of the more popular smart bassinets, apparently, and at an entry price of 1700 dollars it’s bonkers expensive. The thing is, though, as a new parent you know a lot of the stuff you buy has a relatively limited shelf life – they grow so fast – so you kind of take into account that you’ll be selling some of the more expensive stuff down the line to recoup some of the costs. We have an insanely expensive stroller from a Norwegian brand, because it needed to be able to handle the Arctic climate and its endless snow, including specialised wheels and tires for trudging through the snow. The resale value of these is quite decent, so we know we’ll get a decent part of the initial cost back, especially since we take extremely good care of it. And this is where the company that makes the Snoo, Happiest Baby, decided to screw over its customers. The company clearly realised the theoretical loss of revenue from the used market, and came up with this subscription model to lock in some of that theoretical revenue. However, since Happiest Baby always promised all of its features would work perpetually, this came as a huge shock to both buyers of used Snoo bassinets, as well as to parents intending to sell their Snoo, who now see their resale value plummet. The reasoning behind the sudden subscription model given by the company is absolutely wild. Harvey Karp, the founder and chief executive of Happiest Baby, defended the move as a business necessity. “We don’t have any dollar from the government, we don’t have a dollar from a university,” said Dr. Karp, a former pediatrician who created the Snoo after becoming frustrated with the lack of progress in reducing rates of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. “We have to sell products and bring in revenue to be able to get to this goal.” That goal, according to Dr. Karp, is “that everyone will have access to this, and it will be paid for not by your friend, but it will be paid for by your corporation, the government or your insurance company,” the way breast pumps are often covered. He also pointed to Happiest Baby’s efforts to make the Snoo available “in the inner city and in rural areas.” For many parents, however, paying into that ideal is of little comfort to their bottom line. ↫ Sandra E. Garcia and Rachel Sherman at The New York Times He’s basically stating that because he doesn’t get free money from the government, universities, customers’ employers, or insurance companies, he can’t make any profit off the Snoo products. He’s arguing that a $1700 bassinet with some sensors and chips is not a profitable product, which sounds absolutely like a flat-out lie to me. If he really can’t make a profit with such a price for such a product, there’s clearly something else wrong with the way the company is spending its money. Anyone who has ever watched Last Week Tonight with Jon Oliver knows just how many healthcare-related markets and businesses in the United States rely almost exclusively on government money through programs like Medicare and Medicaid, leading to an insane amount of scams and wasted money because there aren’t even remotely enough inspectors and related personnel to ensure such money is effectively spent, made worse by the fact such tasks are delegated to the states. This whole Snoo thing almost make me think Karp intended to profit off these often nebulous government money streams, but somehow failed to do so. I feel for the parents, though. They bought a product that didn’t include a hint of a subscription or paywalled features, and now they have
