Monthly Archive:: September 2023

However almost every “circle” you can see in printed media (and most purely digital ones) are not, in fact, circles. Why is this? Since roughly the mid 80s all “high quality” print jobs have been done either in PostScript or, nowadays almost exclusively, in PDF. They use the same basic drawing model, which does not have a primitive for circles (or circle arcs). The only primitives they have are straight line segments, rectangles and Bézier curves. None of these can be used to express a circle accurately. You can only do an approximation of a circle but it is always slightly eccentric. The only way to create a proper circle is to have a raster image like the one above. Shouldn’t be that big of a deal, right? I’m sure nobody is using PDF for anything that would require the kind of precision needed for a perfect circle, like CAD drawings for laser cutters and similar machinery. Right? Again one might ask whether this has any practical impact. For this case, again, probably not. But did you know that one of the cases PDF is being considered (and, based on Internet rumors, is already being used) is as an interchange format for CAD drawings? Now it suddenly starts mattering. If you have any component where getting a really accurate circle shape is vital (like pistons and their holes), suddenly all your components are slightly misshaped. Which would not be fun. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Java 21 introduces the notion of sequenced collections, the Z Garbage Collector (ZGC) has been extended to maintain separate generations for young and old objects for improving Java app performance, virtual threads are now out of preview form, and the Windows 32-bit x86 port has been deprecated for removal. Java 21 also brings some new preview features including string templates, the latest iteration on the foreign function and memory API, unnamed classes and instance main methods, scoped values, and structured concurrency. You can find the GPL-licensed OpenJDK builds at the OpenJDK website, and the closed source builds from Oracle are also available.

In court documents from the FTC vs Microsoft case, Google Stadia’s former product lead Dov Zimring was called to discuss the cloud gaming platform and competition in the gaming space. This led to several comments on why Stadia couldn’t compete in the industry from Google’s own point-of-view. Exactly what you expected: lack of players led to a lack of games, which led to an even bigger lack of players, and so on. What surprises me most is not that this happened – but the fact they were surprised by this? I mean, getting a foothold in the gaming industry is incredibly hard, and requires you to be 110% in, and for the long haul at that. You have to be in all the way for the long term – anything less and you might as well not even try. I am baffled that nobody at Google was like – if we do this, we have to commit to at least ten years of perseverance, through lean times with few subscribers and massive investments and losses, only to recoup them later once the ball starts rolling. Consoles are sold at a loss for a reason.

There’s a certain community in tech that’s very vocal about their preference toward native apps. I share that sentiment, yet sometimes people take this idea too religiously. Unfortunately, the actual choice is about having an app or not, and I’d rather take something over nothing. I mean, sure, but that doesn’t negate the fact that web applications – or, more specifically, Electron and Electron-like applications – are just bad. Any time I see an Electron application offered, I instantly know the developers behind the project do not respect me as a user. They choose their own convenience over my experience as a user, and while that’s a perfectly valid choice they can make, it does mean I’m not going to use your service.

The Verge: Panos Panay has always been the force behind Microsoft’s Surface line. He helped bring Surface to life as a secret project more than 10 years ago. He’s presented the new devices onstage at events, showed up at malls to promote Surface hardware, and has steered Microsoft’s Surface tablets to success in the years since. Now, he’s leaving in a surprise departure announced just days before Microsoft’s next big Surface event. Panay will no longer be presenting at Microsoft’s showcase on Thursday but will remain at the company for another couple of weeks as part of a transition process. He’s reportedly joining Amazon to replace Dave Limp and lead Amazon’s Echo and Alexa push. Amazon is also holding its own hardware event on Wednesday. This sure is an odd and rather abrupt departure – only a few days before Panay was supposed to be present Microsoft’s Surface event – and I wonder what the full story is, and if we’ll ever get to hear it. I have mixed feelings about Panay’s tenure at Microsoft. As far as hardware goes, Surface devices are quite nice and pleasant, albeit often a tad bit out of date for the prices Microsoft is asking. Worse yet, Microsoft and Panay, despite halfhearted attempts, completely missed the boat on ARM, and Windows is still floundering there due to both poor ARM hardware (compared to Apple’s offerings) and Windows on ARM being an afterthought. As far as software goes – well, Windows is in a worse state than it’s ever been in. It’s the clown car of operating systems, and two decades of layering one user interface and API above another has turned the operating system into a layer cake that makes Hisarlik seem like a thin sheet of single-ply toilet paper. The ways in which Microsoft has jerked Windows from left to right are numerous, and Panay was at the head of it all for a long time. Maybe Microsoft’s relentless push for shoving AI down Windows’ users’ throats as the straw that broke Panay’s back?

‌iOS 17‌ expands on last year’s Lock Screen updates with the addition of interactive widgets and StandBy, a new feature that turns the ‌iPhone‌ into a mini home hub when it is charging. You can now see voicemail transcriptions in real time, and leave video messages in FaceTime. ‌FaceTime‌ also now works on the Apple TV with tvOS 17. Apple also released watchOS 10, tvOS 17, and HomePod 17 Software. Take a guess which one is the unwanted child.

Before the ubiquity of the Internet, before WiFi, even before Ethernet was affordable, there was the LocalTalk physical layer and cabling system and its companion suite of protocols called AppleTalk. A network ahead of its time in terms of plug-and-play, but not quite as fast as 10mbit/s Ethernet at 230.4 kbit/s. This article goes into great detail about setting up an AppleTalk network today.

The spread of Mastodon clients to alternative platforms is continuing, and today, it’s OS/2’s – the one that got away – time in the spotlight. Robert Roland is working on a Mastodon client targeting OS/2, eComStation, and ArcaOS, but it’s all still early in development. The first bits of code were only uploaded yesterday, so there’s a long way yet to go – but if you want to follow along, you can go to Roland’s Mastodon account, and of course, if you want to help out, I’m sure he’d be delighted. I love OS/2 – in the form of the modern ArcaOS – and a working Mastodon client is something that’s quite high on my wish list. Who knows – maybe one of you nerds can help out with this project.

But little was said at the time about connectivity and networking. It could IR-beam (consuming the battery) and sync, but other than muted complaints about missing Bluetooth (which would have consumed even more battery), no one said anything one way or the other about getting it on the Internet. And I’m all about Palm devices on the Internet. It turns out there’s a reason for that, and we’re going to patch the operating system so we can make the Fossil Wrist PDA into what may be the smallest (and first wrist-mounted) Gopher client. That also required an update to the Overbite Palm Gopher client (which you’ll want for your 68K Palm anyway), and then there’s the matter of the battery refusing to charge as well. And finally, we want to make all of this portable! This makes my heart flutter and my tummy somersault.

Phoenix is the latest addition to AMD’s long line of APUs (chips with integrated graphics). Ever since Picasso launched with Zen cores and Vega graphics, AMD’s APUs saw massive improvements from generation to generations. That’s largely because AMD started from so far behind. But Zen 2 and Zen 3 APUs were already very solid products, so Phoenix’s improvements make it a very dangerous competitor. AMD has put a lot of focus into reducing power consumption across every area of the chip. Zen 4 cores do an excellent job on the CPU side, while RDNA 3 provides strong graphics performance. Hardware offload helps power efficiency on specialized AI and audio processing workloads. To support all this, Infinity Fabric gets lower power states and very flexible clock behavior. Phoenix ends up being able to perform well across a wide range of form factors and power targets. These are the kinds of chips powering the current slew of mobile gaming devices like the Steam Deck and its various competitors. It’s great to see this market segment take off, mostly thanks to AMD and Valve, but I’m going to hold off just one or two generations more before jumping in. If AMD’s pace of improvement continues, these handheld devices are going to become even thinner and lighter. That being said, I’d still love to review a Steam Deck for OSNews, specifically because of its Linux base. Maybe I’ll run into an acceptable deal at some point soon.

I had no idea that Vim started on the Amiga, and I doubt many people do.

At WWDC earlier this year, Apple announced that upcoming versions of iOS and macOS would ship with a new feature powered by “a Transformer language model” that will give users “predictive text recommendations inline as they type.” Upon hearing this announcement, I was pretty curious about how this feature works. Apple hasn’t deployed many language models of their own, despite most of their competitors going all-in on large language models over the last couple years. I see this as a result of Apple generally priding themselves on polish and perfection, while language models are fairly unpolished and imperfect. As a result, this may be one of the first Transformer-based models that Apple will ship in one of its operating systems, or at least one of the first that they’ve acknowledged publicly. This left me with some questions about the feature. Jack Cook did some digging into this new feature and the language model it uses, and came up with some very interesting findings. He also details his process, and of course, the code he wrote to do all of this is available on Github.

Pineapple ONE is a functioning (macro) processor, that is based on an open-source architecture RISC-V. This architecture is becoming very popular these days, and it is well, open-source, so we chose to build a cpu only out of discrete, off-the-shelf components. You heard it right, there is no FPGA nor any microcontroller, there are just logic gates and memories. Our goal is to prove that designing a “modern” CPU isn’t that hard, so we have released our schematics and made it open source as well. You can check out our GitHub repository for more information. If there would be enough interest, maybe we could make a DIY kit, so anybody interested with soldering skills would be able to make their own Pineapple ONE! Don’t think you can run Crysis on this though – it runs at 500 kHz, has a 512 kB program memory and 512 kB of RAM, and a black and white graphics card with 200×150 pixels. It’s no speed demon, but who cares – this is quite the feat.

In short, no, I’m not making it up, I did make a virus back in 1990. I don’t have the source code, unfortunately, for two reasons. It was over thirty years ago. I’m a chronic hoarder, but seemingly not that chronic. The floppy discs containing the code were confiscated. No, my mum wasn’t proud, indeed she didn’t even know about this episode at the time, and still doesn’t. Not that she’d understand what a computer virus is, even if I attempted to explain it to her. What a great story.