Monthly Archive:: April 2023

Under the European Union’s new Digital Markets Act (DMA), which aims to increase competition, large online platforms, including Apple, must open up their devices to third-party app stores. While the consensus is that this provision of the law is good for users and even Apple, it’s unclear how the regulation will affect application developers. The question is what do app developers think about these new regulations? Will they actually be beneficial to EU based developers and what will be the short and long term impact on the EU’s app market? We spoke with a few to find out. In short, they’re actually interested in the effects of this legislation, because sideloading and alternative application stores on iOS will give developers more options, and these options will in turn put pressure on Apple to lower its fees as well. Competition is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

The consumer-facing tech and EV companies all proclaim there’s no artisanally mined cobalt or child cobalt in their supply chains. So don’t fret, consumer. Don’t fret, shareholder. If that’s true, where’s all the cobalt going? Last year, almost 75 percent of global cobalt production was from Congo. It’s impossible for these companies to say they don’t have Congolese cobalt. And if it’s impossible to say they don’t have Congolese cobalt, it’s impossible to say they don’t have cobalt that’s not been tainted by child labor, forced labor, environmental destruction, public health catastrophes from mining pollution. Full stop. Rarely in history has the practice of preying on the weak been so severe, generated such profit, and touched the lives of so many. Every level of the chain is preying on some of the poorest and most heavily exploited people in the world. The world pays a hefty price for our way of life. And yes, I modified the title slightly.

But Windows isn’t an ideal operating system for the Steam Deck, at least not out of the box. Its mouse-and-keyboard-oriented user interface isn’t comfortable or convenient to use on a small handheld system like the Steam Deck. Windows 11 makes some allowances for touchscreens, but its buttons and menus can still be hard to tap on such a small screen. The controller doesn’t work outside of Steam, including on Windows’ touchscreen keyboard, and installing drivers and launching games for the first time can be a pain. Microsoft is aware of the problems running Windows on the Steam Deck and other similar handheld Windows PCs, and at least some developers inside the company have spent time thinking of ways to address them. That’s the thrust of a leaked presentation (posted in two parts by Twitter user _h0x0d_) about a new “Handheld Mode” for Windows, developed as part of an internal Microsoft hackathon in September 2022. Windows just isn’t a great operating system choice for these handheld PC gaming devices, and slapping a skin on it is not going to change that. Valve can integrate Linux and Proton with the hardware of the Steam Deck, and fine tune both down to the very source code – and considering Valve’s many contributions to open source, that’s exactly what it’s doing. Meanwhile, if you’re one of those companies making Steam Deck competitors running Windows – you’re shit out of luck. All you can do is add crapware left and right to hide the Windows of it all, but in the end, you just can’t optimise the software for the hardware in the same way Valve can.

I ran into an odd out-of-memory problem the other day when attempting to debug an iOS app on device. The app consistently crashed shortly after launch, preventing me from investigating the bug. To unblock myself, I learned a lot about the iOS virtual memory implementation and journaled my findings (including a fix!) here. Nothing to add – exactly what it says on the tin.

If your laptop has a dedicated Print Screen key, you can press it to instantly take a screenshot of the screen and save it to the clipboard. You can paste the screenshot into any app like Paint and do whatever you want to. This has always been the default behaviour of the Print Screen key (PrtSc). KB5025310 is changing the default behaviour for everyone. After installing this or a newer update, your Print Screen key will open the new Snipping Tool. For those unaware, Windows 11’s new Snipping Tool replaces the legacy Snipping Tool and Snip & Sketch app and combines the best features. It’s always strange how even the smallest of changes to Windows can make people upset, so considering the Print Screen key has worked the same way since Windows 95, changing its behaviour is going to make a lot of people unhappy. I honestly think it’s the right move – but if this really upsets you, you can change the behaviour back to the old way. Fun side note: the name of the key comes from the fact that under e.g. MS-DOS, the Print Screen key would literally print the contents of the screen by sending it the default printer port.

Loongson’s 3A5000 is the most promising domestic Chinese CPU we’ve seen so far. Compared to the Zhaoxin KX-6640MA and Phytium D2000, Loongson’s 3A5000 is a wide core with a better balanced backend and a better cache hierarchy. But it suffers the same fundamental issues as the other two in its quest to be a general purpose CPU. Loongson’s LA464 simply cannot deliver performance in the same class as any recent Intel or AMD architecture. Compared to its western counterparts, LA464’s architecture is smaller, the L2 and L3 caches are worse, and the DDR4 memory controller is embarrassingly bad. Even though Loongson has gotten their cores up from 1 GHz to 2.5 GHz, no one runs desktop or even laptop CPUs at clocks that low. Because of its massive clock speed deficiency, Loongson can’t even get in to the same performance ballpark as recent desktop CPUs. It even struggles against Neoverse N1 running at 3 GHz. This is a far more detailed looking at these processors than we posted a few days ago.

Most people have two eyes, allowing for a stereoscopic view of reality. Nevertheless, video games are generally designed to run on monitors with a single screen, viewed from a distance, so three-dimensional effects have to be done with perspective and other techniques. But of course, many ways have been made to give a true stereoscopic view; from the 3DTV fad of the early 2010s, to the Nintendo 3DS’ glasses-free parallax barrier. But how did systems in the primitive days of 8-bit consoles do it? Let’s ask Sega! It always strangely surprises me for how many decades now people have been trying to sell us on 3D or VR glasses, and this one is no exception – I had no idea Sega already tried this with the Master System. It’s a basic active shutter system, so the real magic happens in software, which is amazing considering the hardware we’re talking about. This article goes into great detail how the software and hardware inside the Master System makes this work.

Amid the push for technology independence, Chinese companies are pushing out more products to satisfy the need for the rapidly soaring demand for domestic data processing silicon. Today, we have information that Chinese Loongson has launched a 3D5000 CPU with as many as 32 cores. Utilizing chiplet technology, the 3D5000 represents a combination of two 16-core 3C5000 processors based on LA464 cores, based on LoongArch ISA that follows the combination of RISC and MIPS ISA design principles. The new chip features 64 MB of L3 cache, supports eight-channel DDR4-3200 ECC memory achieving 50 GB/s, and has five HyperTransport (HT) 3.0 interfaces. The TDP configuration of the chip is officially 300 Watts; however, normal operation is usually at around 150 Watts, with LA464 cores running at 2 GHz. China’s rapid improvement in microprocessors isn’t really all that interesting for us in other parts of the world, because chips from companies like Loongson don’t really make their way over here. What is interesting about this, however, is the implications this continued trend will have for the geopolitical state of the world. A China not dependent on Taiwan’s TSMC for its chips is a China that can more freely invade Taiwan.

Outlook on Windows has very much been the Internet Explorer of email clients. The Outlook desktop app on Windows, along with the Windows Mail app, were the only reason developers had to continue building emails with HTML tables. (Outlook apps on macOS, iOS, and Android are unproblematic.) Tables within tables within tables… It’s well past time that Outlook got a proper update, and it’s finally here. The new Outlook switches rendering engines from Microsoft Word to Edge. Support for CSS features in the new Outlook application appears to be identical to that of outlook.com, which is a great leap forward. I had to read that quite a few times before I really internalised that yes, Outlook for Windows used Microsoft Word to render HTML emails.

OpenBSD 7.3 has been released. As usual, there’s no nice write-up of the major new features and changes – as befits OpenBSD as a project, I’m not complaining – and since I’m not too well-versed in the world of OpenBSD, I don’t really know which of the massive list of changes impact the average OpenBSD user the most.

Google announced today that it would enable WebGPU support in its Chrome browser by default starting in version 113, currently in beta. In development since 2017, WebGPU is a next-generation graphics API that aims to bring the benefits of low-overhead APIs like Microsoft’s Direct3D 12, Apple’s Metal, and Vulkan to web browsers and other apps. WebGPU support has been available but off by default in Chrome for a while now, because the API wasn’t finalized and things could break from update to update. Google says that Mozilla and Apple will eventually support WebGPU in Firefox and Safari, and browsers like Microsoft Edge and Opera that rely on the Chromium browser engine can presumably choose to switch it on just as Google has. Chrome 113 supports WebGPU on Windows, macOS, and ChromeOS to start, with “support for other platforms” like Linux and Android “coming later this year.” This browser version should roll out to all Chrome users sometime in May. I’ve never really needed any advanced 3D rendering in my day-to-day browsing, but that might just be a case of the chicken and the egg.

Java technology has been moving forward much faster in recent years with more frequent updates. Java 17 Long Term Support (LTS) was introduced in September 2021 and will be followed by Java 21 LTS in September 2023. With HaikuDepotServer (HDS) still on Java 11 introduced in September 2018, it was time to upgrade to 17 and then also make the transition from Spring 5 to SpringBoot 3 which was released in November 2022. Spring is a base technology for SpringBoot with SpringBoot providing more configuration and functionality by convention. These upgrades will bring HDS up to date with the current state of the art in backend Java and allow HDS to be maintained more easily going forward. An interesting look at the steps taken during this upgrade process. There’s also a brand new Haiku activity report with tons and tons of fixes, new features, and updates.

The Verge: In other words, the impressive PSVR 2 hasn’t been as popular as Sony may have hoped, Meta Quest Pro sales barely scratch the surface of the Quest 2’s nearly 20 million units sold, and the ByteDance-owned Pico is struggling, too. There have already been some signs that high-end VR isn’t taking, especially Meta’s decision to cut the Quest Pro’s price from $1,500 to $1,000 just over four months after the product first launched. But given that Apple’s headset is rumored to cost around $3,000 — double the Quest Pro’s starting price — the iPhone maker could have a steep road ahead as it tries to get traction for its headset. I have my sincerest doubts about consumer VR/AR goggles, but at the same time – it’s generally not a good idea to bet against Apple.

Nintendo has agreed to offer free lifetime repairs of Nintendo Switch controllers experiencing the dreaded “Joy-Con drift” to consumers across the European Union. The move comes in response to years of organized complaints and a pressure campaign from the European Consumer Organization (BEUC). In a 2021 report, that organization logged “nearly 25,000 complaints” from European Switch owners regarding Joy-Con drift, which causes a Switch joystick to register phantom inputs even when it is untouched in the “neutral” position. The BEUC’s formal complaint cited the Joy-Con hardware for “premature obsolescence” and said that it’s “high time for companies to stop putting products onto the market that break too early.” It’s absolutely crazy that it has taken Nintendo this long to formally address this issue. It’s incredibly widespread – we, too, have drift on both of our Switches – and a clear, unambiguous design flaw that could be solved in a variety of ways. We’ve personally considered buying new Joy-Cons, but that just feels bad, as if we’re rewarding Nintendo’s incompetence and malice with more money. Instead, we may opt to buy and install third-arty hall effect sticks instead, to avoid the problem from returning altogether.