We have written articles in the past year about some of Microsoft’s different product launches, like how its first real hardware device was an add-in card for the Apple II, or its not-so-smartwatch platform, SPOT. However, many people may not be aware that Microsoft had a small involvement in a movement to create a standardized PC platform that evolved into a huge video game platform in Japan. The platform is called MSX, and on October 21, 1983, just over 40 years ago, the first such PC that used the platform went on sale in Japan, the Mitsubishi ML-8000. The launch price for the PC was 59,800 yen or close to $400. One of my oldest computer memories is using an MSX with a friend at his parents’ house. I must’ve been 7 years old or something like that. The MSX was weirdly popular in The Netherlands due to Philips building quite a few of them.
Do you know that the modern web browser can access real musical instruments? With the help of Web MIDI API, we can create a web application that can access MIDI devices connected to our computer. In this article, I will explain how I use Google Sheets as a music sequencer for composing and playing ambient music with a hardware synthesizer. Next thing you tell me browsers have an API for gamepads and joysticks connected through the game port.
Arm has traditionally targeted the low end of the power and performance curve, but just as Intel has been looking to expand into the low power market, ARM is looking to expand into higher power and performance segments. The Cortex X series is at the forefront of this effort. Here, we’ll be looking at the Cortex X2 as implemented in the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. This SoC features a single X2 core, alongside four Cortex A510 and three Cortex A710 cores. The Cortex X2 in this SoC typically runs at 2.8 GHz, although lscpu indicates its clock speed can range from 787.2 MHz to 3.187 GHz. An in-depth look at this performance ARM core.
Chip companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, and AMD are all either planning or said to be planning another attempt at making Arm chips for the consumer PC market. Qualcomm is leading the charge in mid-2024 with its Snapdragon X Elite and a new CPU architecture called Oryon. And Reuters reported earlier this week that Nvidia and AMD are targeting a 2025 release window for their own Arm chips for Windows PCs. If these companies successfully get their chips into PCs, it would mostly come at Intel’s expense. But Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger doesn’t seem worried about it yet, as he said on the company’s most recent earnings call. The biggest issue for Windows on ARM will be, as always, application compatibility. ARM applications haven’t exactly been pouring in for Windows, and translation layers in Windows haven’t been earth-shattering either. As long as this problem remains, Intel indeed has little to worry about. I’m just excited there’s finally some movement in ARM laptops, because Linux is exceptionally well positioned for the transition to ARM. Every major distribution has a fully functional ARM version, with pretty much full package repository support. There really is very little difference in running desktop Linux on ARM (or even POWER9, for that matter). The power of open source.
While Qualcomm has become wildly successful in the Arm SoC market for Android smartphones, their efforts to parlay that into success in other markets has eluded them so far. The company has produced several generations of chips for Windows-on-Arm laptops, and while each has incrementally improved on matters, it’s not been enough to dislodge a highly dominant Intel. And while the lack of success of Windows-on-Arm is far from solely being Qualcomm’s fault – there’s a lot to be said for the OS and software – silicon has certainly played a part. To make serious inroads on the market, it’s not enough to produce incrementally better chips – Qualcomm needs to make a major leap in performance. Now, after nearly three years of hard work, Qualcomm is getting ready to do just that. This morning, the company is previewing their upcoming Snapdragon X Elite SoC, their next-generation Arm SoC designed for Windows devices. Based on a brand-new Arm CPU core design from their Nuvia subsidiary dubbed “Oryon”, the Snapdragon X Elite is to be the tip of the iceberg for a new generation of Qualcom SoC designs. Not only is it the heart and soul of Qualcomm’s most important Windows-on-Arm SoC to date, but it will eventually be in smartphones and a whole lot more. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. For now let’s focus on the Snapdragon X Elite SoC and the Oryon cores underpinning it. Some more in-depth information about Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X Elite, this time from AnandTech.
My name is Matt Campbell, and I’m delighted to announce that I’m joining the GNOME accessibility team to develop a new accessibility architecture. After providing some brief background information on myself, I’ll describe what’s wrong with the current Linux desktop accessibility architecture, including a design flaw that has plagued assistive technology developers and users on multiple platforms, including GNOME, for decades. Then I’ll describe how two of the three current browser engines have solved this problem in their internal accessibility implementations, and discuss my proposal to extend this solution to a next-generation accessibility architecture for GNOME and other free desktops. No clever quips or snarky nonsense – just read the proposal, and contribute if you can.
A browser(/web) engine essentially takes in a URL(/etc) and gives you it rendered into a window for you to view and interact with. <shadow> does this too, almost entirely from scratch, made in JS. It runs in your browser! Node backend soon™ too? The host browser(/etc) is only used for networking (fetch) and renderer backend (<canvas>). I feel like I have opinions, but I can’t express them. This is equal parts genius and madness.
The device looks like a conventional computer monitor but opens up like a clam. The screen itself is a common flat panel liquid crystal display or LCD, a nearly translucent screen that is typically lit from behind by powered lights. For Eazeye, the backing lights are replaced with a bright white carbon fiber panel that can tip backwards up to 45 degrees. The panel bounces ambient light from the monitor’s surroundings through the LCD screen, which, under the right lighting conditions, provides enough illumination for the screen to be used like normal. I can see this working quite well in certain environments, like offices and well-lit rooms. It sure is a very interesting idea, and I like the design, too.
Google paid $26.3 billion to other companies to ensure its search engine was the default on web browsers and mobile phones, a top company executive testified during the Justice Department’s antitrust trial Friday. The amount of payments Alphabet Inc.’s Google made to other companies for the default status — such as Apple Inc. for placement on the iPhone and other devices — has more than tripled since 2014, according to Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior executive responsible for both search and advertising. Google’s search advertising brought in $146.4 billion in revenue in 2021, a number that has also climbed over the same years, Raghavan said. The payments for the default were the company’s biggest cost, he added. Utterly bananas. Is it any wonder, then, that nobody can compete with Google? How are you supposed to compete as a search engine when Google shells the entire nominal GPD of Bosnia and Herzegovina every year to be the default everywhere where it matters? And that’s 2021 – who knows how much it is now!
The Linux Mint project has announced that they’re finally working on bringing the Cinnamon desktop environment over to Wayland. The work started on Wayland. As mentioned earlier this year, this was identified as one of the major challenges our project had to tackle in the mid to long term. Priority had been given to ISO tools and Secureboot over new features for 21.3 already, we felt it was time to invest some resources into Wayland as well. We wanted to have a clear picture of the work involved, so we wanted to start now. In terms of timing we don’t think we need Wayland support to be fully ready (i.e. to be a better Cinnamon option for most people) before 2026 (Mint 23.x). That leaves us 2 years to identify and to fix all the issues. It’s something we’ll continue to work on. Whenever it happens, assuming it does, we’ll consider switching defaults. We’ll use the best tools to do the job and provide the best experience. Today that means Xorg. Tomorrow it might mean Wayland. We’ll be ready and compatible with both. I respect this position. Linux Mint has always been just a bit more conservative than many of the other desktop-focused distributions, and this has earned it a well-deserved reputation for being stable and reliable. I use Linux Mint on my gaming PC for that very reason (albeit with the Xanmod kernel) – during the little time I have to play games, I don’t want to deal with issues arising from using bleeding edge software.
Microsoft is starting to roll out new changes to Windows Ink that let you write anywhere you can type in Windows 11. After months of previewing the changes, the handwriting-to-text conversion now works inside search boxes and other elements of Windows 11 where you’d normally type your input. Microsoft has started rolling out the KB5031455 non-security update as a preview to Windows 11 users yesterday. You simply have to head to Windows Update and toggle the “Get the latest updates as soon as they’re available” setting to get this update before it’s available fully in the coming weeks. While my handwriting is not great and I never use it for any computing tasks, stuff like this has always been pretty cool. Microsoft has been working on this since Windows 3.1 for Pen Computing 1.0 from 1992, and the recognition is actually very, very good. Being able to input handwriting straight into text fields will be a boon for artists and note-takers who use Windows on tablets, though, so it’s definitely worth installing this update if you belong to that group.
Google quietly planned to put a lid on Apple’s search ambitions. The company looked for ways to undercut Spotlight by producing its own version for iPhones and to persuade more iPhone users to use Google’s Chrome web browser instead of Apple’s Safari browser, according to internal Google documents reviewed by The New York Times. At the same time, Google studied how to pry open Apple’s control of the iPhone by leveraging a new European law intended to help small companies compete with Big Tech. Google’s anti-Apple plan illustrated the importance that its executives placed on maintaining dominance in the search business. It also provides insight into the company’s complex relationship with Apple, a competitor in consumer gadgets and software that has been an instrumental partner in Google’s mobile ads business for more than a decade. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and this is clear example of that – a rare case where Google’s means line up with consumers’ needs to actually own their devices, including the ability to install whatever browser (engine) one wants and set it as default on your phone. That being said – seeing Google squirm over whatever Apple’s plans for its own possibly search engine are is highly entertaining and mildly satisfying. Apple switching iOS over to something other than Google will have some major fallout for the ad giant, and that alone would be fun to watch, in a let-it-burn kind of way.
Virtualization of Microsoft Windows 9x systems is a bit problematic due to 2 major bugs: TLB invalidation bug and CPU speed limit bug. This program contains a set of patches to fix these bugs, and can be booted from a floppy on a virtual machine. It either applies the patch to the installed system, or it patches the installation files in order to create (relatively) bug-free installation media. A must-have for your Windows 95/98/ME virtual machines.
But even without filing lawsuits, artists have a chance to fight back against AI using tech. MIT Technology Review got an exclusive look at a new open source tool still in development called Nightshade, which can be added by artists to their imagery before they upload it to the web, altering pixels in a way invisible to the human eye, but that “poisons” the art for any AI models seeking to train on it. Excellent. This is exactly the kind of clever thinking we need to stop major corporations from stealing everyone’s creative works for their own further gain. I hope we can develop these poisons further, to the point of making these “AI” tools entirely useless. Get permission, or get poisoned.
While most X.Org Developers Conference talks are around graphics drivers / infrastructure work itself, one of the other interesting XDC 2023 talks was Alexandros Frantzis around the ongoing work of providing a native Wine Wayland driver so that this open-source project can interact directly with Wayland and so Windows games/applications running under Linux will no longer need to go through XWayland. The entire presentation is available on YouTube.
So you ended up with this JavaScript quirk where it was possible to create unique URLs that ran a bit of JavaScript on whatever page you happened to be looking at. It could even make changes to that page. Move things around. Replace words. Open links. And pretty early on, people realized that these JavaScript URLs were also bookmarkable, just like any other URL. And, crucially, easily shareable as links. I had almost forgotten about these things.
As generative AI models become more widely available, you may be integrating them into your apps. In line with Google’s commitment to responsible AI practices, we want to help ensure AI-generated content is safe for people and that their feedback is incorporated. Early next year, we’ll be requiring developers to provide the ability to report or flag offensive AI-generated content without needing to exit the app. You should utilize these reports to inform content filtering and moderation in your apps – similar to the in-app reporting system required today under our User Generated Content policies. I like that this will be a system-wide requirement, which will slowly make it a common sight on Android, and thus, something users expect and know how to work with. In the same blog post announcing this new generative “AI” policy, Google also announced tighter rules around certain broad application permissions, limiting full-screen notifications, and more/
Last weekend, we noticed that an attempt to download Google Chrome using Microsoft Edge results in the latter opening its sidebar with a poll, asking you to explain to Microsoft how you could dare try downloading Google Chrome. Of course, the exact wording is more tame, but you get the idea. Now, besides dismissing several banners and a full-size ad injected on the Chrome website, Edge wants you to answer a questionnaire with the following options. Frequently bought together.
Apple is releasing a slew of updates for its latest operating systems today, including iOS and iPadOS 17.1, macOS Sonoma 14.1, watchOS 10.1, and others. The company is also releasing security updates for a few previous-generation operating systems, so that people who aren’t ready to upgrade (and older devices that can’t upgrade) will still be protected from new exploits. If you have a bunch of Apple devices, it’s going to be a busy day. You might also want to take a look at your Apple subscriptions, because the company massively increased its prices across the board without advance notice.
A director from the White House announced that Apple plans to significantly expand access to device repairs for independent repair shops and consumers across the United States. The move is part of the Biden administration’s push for “right to repair” reforms. According to a statement by National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard (via Reuters), Apple will make parts, tools, and documentation needed for repairs available to independent repair shops and consumers nationwide. This will allow third-party technicians and do-it-yourselfers to fix Apple products at fair and reasonable prices quickly. There’s going to be a gotcha. With Apple, there always is.
