Monthly Archive:: June 2018

It's well-known that you should measure the performance of your code, and not rely only on the opcode's "cycle counts".

But how fast is an IBM PC 5150 compared to a PCjr? Or to a Tandy 1000? Or how fast is the Tandy 1000 HX in fast mode (7.16Mhz) compared to the slow mode (4.77Mhz)? Or how fast is a nop compared to a cwd?

I created a test (perf.asm) that measures the performance of different opcodes and run it on different Intel 8088 machines. I run the test multiple times just to make sure the results were stable enough. All interrupts were disabled, except the Timer (of course). And on the PCjr the NMI is disabled as well.

With the aim to protect the interests of copyright holders, Google is making 'pirate' sites more difficult for its users to find. This week the search engine revealed more information about the scope of this effort. Thus far, Google has downranked 65,000 sites, a measure that led to a 90% reduction in referrals from search results.

Over the past few months, the wildest rumors in video game industry circles haven't involved the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Two. The most interesting chatter has centered on a tech company that's been quietly making moves to tackle video games in a big way: Google, the conglomerate that operates our email, our internet browsers, and much more.

We haven't heard many specifics about Google's video game plans, but what we have heard is that it's a three-pronged approach: 1) Some sort of streaming platform, 2) some sort of hardware, and 3) an attempt to bring game developers under the Google umbrella, whether through aggressive recruiting or even major acquisitions. That's the word from five people who have either been briefed on Google's plans or heard about them secondhand.

Linux Mint 19 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2023. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop experience more comfortable.

In Linux Mint 19, the star of the show is Timeshift. Although it was introduced in Linux Mint 18.3 and backported to all Linux Mint releases, it is now at the center of Linux Mint's update strategy and communication.

Thanks to Timeshift you can go back in time and restore your computer to the last functional system snapshot. If anything breaks, you can go back to the previous snapshot and it's as if the problem never happened.

KaiOS Technologies Inc., developer of the emerging operating system for smart feature phones, KaiOS, today announced a $22M Series A investment from Google to help bring the internet to the next generation of users.

In addition to the investment, Google and KaiOS have also agreed to work together to make the Google Assistant, Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Search available to KaiOS users. These apps have been developed specifically for the KaiOS platform, which is entirely web-based, using open standards such as HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS.

Sets - a new Windows interface feature that was first previewed in November 2017 and will make every window into a tabbed window - has been removed from the latest Insider Preview build of Windows 10. Moreover, the Verge is reporting that the feature won't be coming back in this year's next major update, due in October.

This marks the second time that Sets have been included in a preview release only to be removed at a later stage prior to the release of an update. When first announcing Sets, Microsoft was careful to note that it wasn't promising Sets for any particular release - or possibly even ever, given the complexities of application compatibility and uncertainty about how people will actually use the feature.

A while back I was going through Dolphin's issues page out of sheer boredom.

I don’t know anything about coding to fix any of this stuff, but I do like to test really old issues sometimes to see if the hundreds of changes made over the years has produced any change or potentially even fixed some of the issues. After a few pages, I eventually came across issue 726 - Gamma setting has no effect. Out of curiosity, I clicked.

Duplex patiently waited for me to awkwardly stumble through my first ever table reservation while I sloppily wrote down the time and fumbled through a basic back and forth about Google's reservation for four people at 7pm on Thursday. Today's Google Assistant requires authoritative, direct, perfect speech in order to process a command. But Duplex handled my clumsy, distracted communication with the casual disinterest of a real person. It waited for me to write down its reservation requirements, and when I asked Duplex to repeat things I didn't catch the first time ("A reservation at what time?"), it did so without incident. When I told this robocaller the initial time it wanted wasn't available, it started negotiating times; it offered an acceptable time range and asked for a reservation somewhere in that time slot. I offered seven o'clock and Google accepted.

From the human end, Duplex's voice is absolutely stunning over the phone. It sounds real most of the time, nailing most of the prosodic features of human speech during normal talking. The bot "ums" and "uhs" when it has to recall something a human might have to think about for a minute. It gives affirmative "mmhmms" if you tell it to hold on a minute. Everything flows together smoothly, making it sound like something a generation better than the current Google Assistant voice.

One of the strangest (and most impressive) parts of Duplex is that there isn't a single "Duplex voice." For every call, Duplex would put on a new, distinct personality. Sometimes Duplex come across as male; sometimes female. Some voices were higher and younger sounding; some were nasally, and some even sounded cute.

Duplex conveyed politeness in the demos we saw. It paused with a little "mmhmm" when the called human asked it to wait, a pragmatic tactic Huffman called "conversational acknowledgement". It showed that Duplex was still on the line and listening, but would wait for the human to continue speaking.

It handled a bunch of interruptions, out of order questions, and even weird discursive statements pretty well. When a human sounded confused or flustered, Duplex took a tone that was almost apologetic. It really seems to be designed to be a super considerate and non-confrontational customer on the phone.

A month ago we saw Qualcomm release a new "upper mid-range" SoC with the announcement of the Snapdragon 710 - the emphasis was on the fact that this was a new market tier aiming slightly below the top-tier flagship chipsets. Today, we're seeing Qualcomm expand the traditional mid-tier and also what can be considered the low-end for smartphone devices. The Snapdragon 439 and 429 follow in the footsteps of the 435 and 425 and bring FinFET to the low-end; the Snapdragon 632 is more akin to the Snapdragon 652 as it's now the first time we see big cores brought down to the lower mid-tier successor to the Snapdragon 630.

Apple has dropped legacy frameworks very easily in the past though. But how exactly did that happen?

CPU changes. Once when MacOS went from PPC to Intel, and then once when MacOS went from 32 bit to 64 bit. Each time that transition happened Apple was able to say "OK, this legacy stuff just isn't going to be there on the new architecture". And since you had to recompile apps anyway to make them run on the new architecture, developers kind of shrugged and said "Well, yea. That's what I would have done too". It made sense.

So are we about to see 128 bit Intel processors anytime soon, to facilitate this change? I doubt it.

OK then, what about a new architecture?

Oh. Hello 64 bit ARM.

Opening ARM-based Macs to the iOS ecosystem to make one unified Apple platform, knowing what we know about Marzipan, makes so much sense that it becomes difficult to imagine it any other way. Apple finds itself completely unable to build the computers it wants to build with Intel.

Gomez isn't alone. She's one member of a vast, global community of people who revere the 46-year-old entrepreneur with a passion better suited to a megachurch pastor than a tech mogul. With followers like her, Elon Musk - the South African-born multibillionaire known for high-profile, risky investments such as Tesla (electric cars), SpaceX (private space travel), the Boring Company (underground travel), and Neuralink (neurotechnology) - has reaped the benefits of a culture in which fandom dominates nearly everything. While his detractors see him as another out-of-touch, inexpert rich guy who either can't or won't acknowledge the damage he and his companies are doing, to his fans, Musk is a visionary out to save humanity from itself. They gravitate toward his charisma and his intoxicating brew of extreme wealth, a grand vision for society - articulated through his companies, which he has an odd habit of launching with tweets - and an internet-friendly playfulness that sets him apart from the stodgier members of his economic class. Among his more than 22 million followers, all of this inspires a level of righteous devotion rarely glimpsed outside of the replies to a Taylor Swift tweet.

The most vocal of those fans have an impact: they're an army of irregulars waiting to be marshaled via a tweet and sent on the digital warpath against anything Musk decides he doesn't like, the iron fist in Musk's velvet glove. They've become known for haranguing people they believe have crossed him, journalists especially, with relentless fervor. The attacks are standard social media-era fare: free-for-all bombardment across social platforms by people who are not always vitriolic but who nevertheless barrage the perceived enemy with bad-faith questions.

As the first step in bringing Sailfish to Gemini, our friends at Planet Computers have today made the community edition of Sailfish OS 2.1 available for the Gemini PDA. This version has been tested and verified by both Jolla and Planet.

As it's a community initiative, the version is still somewhat limited, but essential features are supported. With this version you won't yet get software updates or support for Android apps. Also the overall support is limited to our community's efforts.

Wi-Fi Alliance introduces Wi-Fi WPA3, the next generation of Wi-Fi security, bringing new capabilities to enhance Wi-Fi protections in personal and enterprise networks. Building on the widespread adoption of WPA2 over more than a decade, WPA3 adds new features to simplify Wi-Fi security, enable more robust authentication, and deliver increased cryptographic strength for highly sensitive data markets. As the Wi-Fi industry transitions to WPA3 security, WPA2 devices will continue to interoperate and provide recognized security.

HMD announced a new slate of Nokia phones Tuesday. To go along with the previously announced Nokia 6.1, we have the Nokia 5.1, Nokia 3.1, and Nokia 2.1. The highest-end phone here starts at $220, and the price goes down from there.

Every Nokia phone is worth paying attention to, because they are all part of Google's Android One program. This means they run stock Android and get monthly security updates. Nokia promises two years of major OS updates and three years of security updates for everything. It's really hard to find good, cheap smartphones, and with this lineup (depending on distribution), HMD seems to have the market locked up.