Microsoft’s new era of AI PCs will need a Copilot key, says Intel

Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and AMD have all been pushing the idea of an “AI PC” for months now as we head toward more AI-powered features in Windows. While we’re still waiting to hear the finer details from Microsoft on its big plans for AI in Windows, Intel has started sharing Microsoft’s requirements for OEMs to build an AI PC — and one of the main ones is that an AI PC must have Microsoft’s Copilot key.

↫ Tom Warren at The Verge

I lack the words in any of the languages I know to describe the utter disdain I have for this.

Phil Spencer wants Epic Games Store and others on Xbox consoles

In an interview with Microsoft’s CEO of Gaming during the annual Game Developers Conference, Spencer told Polygon about the ways he’d like to break down the walled gardens that have historically limited players to making purchases through the first-party stores tied to each console. Or, in layperson terms, why you should be able to buy games from other stores on Xbox — not just the official storefront.

Spencer mentioned his frustrations with closed ecosystems, so we asked for clarity. Could he really see a future where stores like Itch.io and Epic Games Store existed on Xbox? Was it just a matter of figuring out mountains of paperwork to get there?

↫ Chris Plante at Polygon

The answer is yes, Spencer claims. I don’t know how realistic any of this is, but to me it makes perfect sense, and the gaming world has been moving towards it for a while now. At the moment, I’m doing something thought unthinkable until very recently: I’m playing a major Sony PlayStation exclusive, Horizon: Forbidden West, on PC, through Steam on Linux. Sony has been making its major exclusives available on Steam in recent years, and while seeing these games on Xbox might be a bit too much to ask, I wouldn’t be surprised to see storefronts from companies who don’t make game consoles pop up on the Xbox and PlayStation.

Games have become so expensive to make that limiting them to a single console just doesn’t make any commercial sense. Why limit your audience?

Qualcomm quietly demos Baldur’s Gate 3 and Control on Snapdragon X Elite laptops

If you read my scoop last week, I bet you’ve been wondering — how well could a Snapdragon chip actually run Windows games? At the 2024 Game Developers Conference, the company claimed Arm could run those titles at close to x86/64 speed, but how fast is fast?

With medium-weight games like Control and Baldur’s Gate 3, it looks like the target might be: 30 frames per second at 1080p screen resolution, medium settings, possibly with AMD’s FSR 1.0 spatial upscaling enabled.

↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge

Those are some rough numbers for machines Qualcomm claims can run x86 games at “close to full speed“.

Why x86 doesn’t need to die

Hackaday recently published an article titled “Why x86 Needs to Die” – the latest addition in a long-running RISC vs CISC debate. Rather than x86 needing to die, I believe the RISC vs CISC debate needs to die. It should’ve died a long time ago. And by long, I mean really long.

About a decade ago, a college professor asked if I knew about the RISC vs CISC debate. I did not. When I asked further, he said RISC aimed for simpler instructions in the hope that simpler hardware implementations would run faster. While my memory of this short, ancient conversation is not perfect, I do recall that he also mentioned the whole debate had already become irrelevant by then: ISA differences were swept aside by the resources a company could put behind designing a chip. This is the fundamental reason why the RISC vs CISC debate remains irrelevant today. Architecture design and implementation matter so much more than the instruction set in play.

↫ Chips and Cheese

The number of instruction sets killed by x86 is high, and the number of times people have wrongly predicted the death of x86 – most recently, after Apple announced its first ARM processors – is even higher. It seems people are still holding on to what x86 was like in the ’80s and early ’90s, completely forgetting that the x86 we have today is a very, very different beast. As Chips and Cheese details in this article, the differences between x86 and, say, ARM, aren’t nearly as big and fundamental as people think they are.

I’m a huge fan of computers running anything other than x86, not because I hate or dislike the architecture, but because I like things that are different, and the competition they bring. That’s why I love POWER9 machines, and can’t wait for competitive non-Apple ARM machines to come along. If you try to promote non-x86 ISAs out of hatred or dislike of x86, history shows you’ll eventually lose.

FuryGpu: a hardware GPU implemented on an FPGA

FuryGpu is a real hardware GPU implemented on a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ FPGA, built on a custom PCB and connected to the host computer using PCIe. Supporting hardware features equivalent to a high-end graphics card of the mid 1990s and a full modern Windows software driver stack, it can render real games of that era at beyond real-time frame rates.

↫ FuryGpu

A really cool project, undertaking by a single person – who also wrote the Windows drivers for it, which was apparently the hardest part of the project, as the announcement blog post details. Another blog post explains how the texture units work.

Infinite Mac: turning to the dark side

About a year ago I came across the Previous emulator – it appeared to be a faithful simulation of the NeXT hardware and thus capable of running NeXTStep. While including it in Infinite Mac would be scope-creep, NeXT’s legacy is in many ways more relevant to today’s macOS than classic Mac OS. It also helped that it’s under active development by its original creator (see the epic thread in the NeXT Computers forums), and thus a modern, living codebase.

Previous is the fifth emulator that I’ve ported to WebAssembly/Emscripten and the Infinite Mac runtime, and it’s gotten easier. As I’m doing this work, I’m developing more and more empathy for those doing Mac game ports – some things are really easy and others become yak shaves due to the unintended consequences of choices made by the original developers. Previous is available on multiple platforms and has good abstractions, so overall it was a pretty pleasant experience.

↫ Mihai Parparita

By porting previous to WebAssembly/Emscripten, Infinite Mac now offers access to a whole slew of NeXTSTEP releases, from the earliest known release to the last one from 1997. There’s also a ton of applications added to make the experience feel more realistic. This makes Infinite Mac even more useful than it already was, ensuring it’s one of the best and easiest ways to experience old macOS and now NeXTSTEP releases through virtual machines (real ones, this time), available in your browser.

I’ll be spending some time with these new additions for sure, since I’ve very little experience with NeXTSTEP other than whatever I vicariously gleamed through Steven Troughton-Smith‘s toots on the subject over the years. Mihai Parparita is doing incredibly important work through Infinite Mac, and he deserves credit and praise for all he’s doing here.

Happy birthday APFS, 7 years old today

Seven years ago, on 27 March 2017, Apple introduced one of the most fundamental changes in its operating systems since Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah was released 16 years earlier. On that day, those who updated iOS to version 10.3 had their iPhone’s storage silently converted to the first release of Apple File System, APFS. Six months later, with the release of macOS 10.13 High Sierra on 25 September, Mac users followed suit.

↫ Howard Oakley

The migration from HFS+ to APFS is still an amazing feat for Apple to have pulled off. Hundreds of millions devices converted from one filesystem to another, and barely anyone noticed – no matter how you look at it, that’s an impressive achievement, and the engineers who made it possible deserve all the praise they’re getting.

Plasma 5: the early years

With KDE’s 6th Mega Release finally out the door, let’s reflect on the outgoing Plasma 5 that has served us well over the years. Can you believe it has been almost ten years since Plasma 5.0 was released? Join me on a trip down memory lane and let me tell you how it all began. This coincidentally continues pretty much where my previous retrospective blog post concluded.

↫ Kai Uwe

It took them a few years after the release of Plasma 5.0, but eventually they won me over, and I’m now solid in the KDE camp, after well over a decade of either GNOME or Cinnamon. GNOME has strayed far too much away from just being a traditional desktop user interface, and Cinnamon is dragging its heels with Wayland support, but luckily KDE has spent a long time now clearing up so many of the paper cuts that used to plague them every time I tried KDE.

That’s all in the past now. They’ve done a solid job cleaning up a lot of the oddities and inconsistencies during Plasma 5’s lifecycle, and I can’t wait until Fedora 40 hits the streets with Plasma 6 in tow. In the desktop Linux world, I feel KDE and Qt will always play a little bit of second fiddle to the (seemingly) much more popular GNOME and GTK+, but that’s okay – this kind of diversity and friendly competition is what makes each of these desktops better for their respective users.

And this is the Linux world, after all – you’re not tied down to anything your current desktop environment does, and you’re free to switch to whatever else at a moment’s notice if some new update doesn’t sit well with you. I can’t imagine using something like macOS or Windows where you have to just accept whatever garbage they throw at you with nowhere to go.

Google launches Arm-optimized Chrome for Windows, teases Snapdragon X Elite boost

Following testing in Canary earlier this year, Google today announced that the Arm/Snapdragon version of Chrome for Windows is now rolling out to stable. 

Google says this version of Chrome is “fully optimized for your PC’s hardware and operating system to make browsing the web faster and smoother.” People that have been testing it report significant performance improvements over the emulated version.

↫ Abner Li at 9To5Google

A big Windows on Snapdragon Elite X is about to tumble through the tech media landscape, and this Chrome release fits right into the puzzle.

Canonical expands Long Term Support to 12 years starting with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Today, Canonical announced the general availability of Legacy Support, an Ubuntu Pro add-on that expands security and support coverage for Ubuntu LTS releases to 12 years. The add-on will be available for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS onwards. 

Long term supported Ubuntu releases get five years of standard security maintenance on the main Ubuntu repository. Ubuntu Pro expands that commitment to 10 years on both the main and universe repositories, providing enterprises and end users alike access to a vast secure open source software library. The subscription also comes with a phone and ticket support tier. Ubuntu Pro paying customers can purchase an extra two years of security maintenance and support with the new Legacy Support add-on.

↫ Canonical blog

Assuming all of this respects the open source licenses of the countless software packages that make up Ubuntu, this seems like a reasonable way to offer quite a long support lifecycle for those that really need it. Such support doesn’t come free, and it I think it’s entirely reasonable to try and get compensated for the work required in maintaining that level of support for 10 or 12 years.

If you want this kind of longevity from your Linux installation without paying for it, you’ll have to maintain it yourself. Seems reasonable to me.

Sega Saturn architecture: a practical analysis by Rodrigo Copetti

Welcome to the 3D era! Well… sorta. Sega enjoyed quite a success with the Mega Drive so there’s no reason to force developers to write 3D games right now.

Just in case developers want the extra dimension, Sega adapted some bits of the hardware to enable polygon drawing as well. Hopefully, the result didn’t get out of hand!

↫ Rodrigo Copetti

These in-depth analyses by Copetti are always a treat, and the Saturn one is no exception.

Friends don’t let friends export to CSV

I worked for a few years in the intersection between data science and software engineering. On the whole, it was a really enjoyable time and I’d like to have the chance to do so again at some point. One of the least enjoyable experiences from that time was to deal with big CSV exports. Unfortunately, this file format is still very common in the data science space. It is easy to understand why — it seems to be ubiquitous, present everywhere, it’s human-readable, it’s less verbose than options like JSON and XML, it’s super easy to produce from almost any tool. What’s not to like?

↫ Robin Kåveland

I’m not going to pretend to be some sort of expert on this matter, but even as a casual it seems CSV isn’t exactly scalable to large data sets. It seems to work great for smaller exports and imports for personal use, but any more complicated matters it seems wholly unsuited for.

Run Windows 95 to XP, Mac OS 8.6 to 10.4 in your browser, sort of

Complete desktops contain all operating system components as well as Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Where possible, I have tried to include built in file transfer programs (Web Publishing Wizard, Web Folders), useful system tools (System File Checker, System Restore) and certain wizards (Network Setup Wizard, Internet Connection Wizard). As a result, some of the desktops are quite large and can take some time to load.

↫ VirtualDesktop.org

These are easily loaded virtual machines [correction: they’re not virtual machines – they’re more like fancy interactive screenshot-like things? Still interesting, but they’re not virtual machine like I thought. Apologies!] inside your browser, for various versions of Windows and macOS. There’s more and more of these websites now, and while I don’t use them for anything, they’re still quite handy in a pinch. And let’s face it – it’s still kind of magical to see entire operating systems running inside a browser.

The website also has several virtual machines without applications, and application-specific virtual machines, too, focused on browsers and mail clients.

Google’s first Tensor processing unit: architecture

In Google’s First Tensor Processing Unit – Origins, we saw why and how Google developed the first Tensor Processing Unit (or TPU v1) in just 15 months, starting in late 2013.

Today’s post will look in more detail at the architecture that emerged from that work and at its performance.

↫ The Chip Letter

People forget that Google is probably one of the largest hardware manufacturers out of the major technology companies. Sadly, we rarely get good insights into what, exactly, these machines are capable of, as they rarely make it to places like eBay so people can disseminate them.

SysV init 3.09 released

Most of the Linux world has moved to systemd by now, but there are still quite a few popular other init systems, too. One of those is the venerable SysV init, which saw a brand new release yesterday. The biggest improvement also seems like it’ll enable a match made in heaven: SysVinit, but with musl.

On Linux distributions which use the musl C library (instead of glibc) we can now build properly. Specifically, the hddown helper program now builds on musl C systems.

↫ SysVinit 3.09 release notes

It’s important init systems like SysV init and runit don’t just die off or lose steam because of the systemd juggernaut, as competition, alternatives, and different ideas are what makes open source what it is.

C64 OS gets hidden files, here’s how it works

Version 1.06 is a more modest release than 1.05 or 1.04. But I think that’s okay. v1.06 includes one new Application, three new Utilities and new features and improvements to several existing Apps and Utilities, and even some new low-level features in the KERNAL and libraries.

This latest release makes use of a combination of all of the above to provide a handy new feature for users and a potentially powerful and useful feature for developers, when put to creative uses at a low-level. Discussions of just this nature have already been spurred on in the developer forums on the C64 OS Discord server.

That feature is: Hidden Files.

↫ Greg Naçu

C64 OS is a marvel of engineering, and what the developers are managing to squeeze out of the C64 is stunning. This article delves deep into how hidden files were implemented in the latest release.

“Temporary” disk formatting UI from 1994 still lives on in Windows 11

Windows 11 has done a lot to update and modernize long-neglected parts of Windows’ user interface, including many Settings menus and venerable apps like Notepad and Paint. But if you dig deep enough, you’ll still find parts of the user interface that look and work like they did in the mid-’90s, either for compatibility reasons or because no one ever thought to go back and update them.

Former Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer shared some history about one of those finely aged bits: the Format dialogue box, which is still used in fully updated Windows 11 installs to this day when you format a disk using Windows Explorer.

↫ Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica

There’s a lot of old stuff left inside Windows, which is basically a layer cake of various user interface themes Microsoft fancied over the years. I delved into the history of another old Windows program 9 years ago: the Character Map.

EU opens non-compliance investigations against Alphabet, Apple and Meta under the Digital Markets Act

It turns out Apple, Facebook, and Google were not as clever with their malicious compliance with the European Union’s DMA as they thought they were, as the European Commission has opened investigations into their compliance plans. Especially Apple, who has been most public about its malicious compliance, seems to be the target.

Today, the Commission has opened non-compliance investigations under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) into Alphabet’s rules on steering in Google Play and self-preferencing on Google Search, Apple’s rules on steering in the App Store and the choice screen for Safari and Meta’s “pay or consent model”.

The Commission suspects that the measures put in place by these gatekeepers fall short of effective compliance of their obligations under the DMA.

In addition, the Commission has launched investigatory steps relating to Apple’s new fee structure for alternative app stores and Amazon’s ranking practices on its marketplace. Finally, the Commission has ordered gatekeepers to retain certain documents to monitor the effective implementation and compliance with their obligations.

↫ European Commission press release

This is entirely unsurprising. Google’s and Facebook’s compliance plans were less scrutinised in the press, but all still raised questions about whether they would pass mustard. Apple’s plans, meanwhile, were universally seen as deeply malicious and not compliant, and it seems the European Commission agrees. Apple’s continuous wild, flailing attacks on the EU and the DMA certainly aren’t helping, either.

There’s no denying Apple’s behaviour has been deeply unprofessional and anti-European Union, which contrasts strongly with how Apple and Tim Cook operate in China, where they face much stricter rules than they do in the EU. Tim Cook is currently in China praising and buttering up to the Chinese totalitarian regime, while the company has been attacking the European Union and DMA almost non-stop for months now. It really shows where Apple’s priorities lie.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s pay-for-privacy model was always going to be a hard sell at €10 a month, and as such, the company already announced it was going to cut that cost in half. Google’s plans are a bit more nebulous, since it’s a bit more difficult to see tangible results from things like search rankings, but it seems here, too, the European Commission has its worries about compliance.

The European Commission intends to complete its investigations within a year, and if found in violation of the law, companies can be fined for up to 10% of their worldwide turnover, which can grow up to 20% for repeated infringements.

Floorp Firefox fork makes its modifications closed source due to forks

Update: a short notice on the blog post now reads that “Floorp’s code is now fully public again.” It seems the developer has reversed course, which is good news. The original article continues below.

Recently, a few people suggested I give the browser Floorp a try, a Firefox fork with some additional UI changes and additions. Since it was based on Firefox ESR, however, I saw no point in even trying it, because I prefer to be on the latest Firefox release. It seems I accidentally made the right choice, since yesterday the developers behind Floorp decided to take their modifications closed source.

The appearance of Floorp forks – which, may I remind you, is a fork itself – seems to be the cause.

I know it’s not nice of me to say, but Floorp has been in too much demand. It am surprise to me that companies and organizations would fork a fork that I had created when I was still a teenager, and at first I was happy about it, but it was not beneficial to me, and on the contrary, it was mentally draining.

There were forks that wanted to hide the fact that they were Floorp forks, forks that did not want to contribute to Floorp at all, forks that used the code for life and just changed the name of Floorp, and many other forks were born.

↫ Floorp blog

It seems the developer of Floorp is rather young, and started the project as a teenager, and as such, I don’t think we should be too harsh on them – I did some dumb things as a teenager – but complaining about forks of your own fork seems a bit disingenuous, regardless of how young and inexperienced you are. I understand seeing your work forked into competing browsers can be frustrating, but it’s a core part of the open source world, especially if you yourself owe your product to forking, too.

Sources: iOS 18 lets users customize layout of home screen app icons

While app icons will likely remain locked to an invisible grid system on the Home Screen, to ensure there is some uniformity, our sources say that users will be able to arrange icons more freely on iOS 18. For example, we expect that the update will introduce the ability to create blank spaces, rows, and columns between app icons.

↫ Joe Rossignol at MacRumors

It’s 2024 and iOS’ Springboard is slowly catching up to the Palm OS launcher. I’m drowning in the innovation here.