Monthly Archive:: April 2023
I come bearing great news for everyone waiting for Star64 – the SBC will be available for purchase on April 4th. Due to some last-minute logistics issues we failed to make the March launch date announced in February – our apologies for the slight delay. The boards have now finally been delivered and getting packaged and ready for dispatch. Let me just quickly reiterate the Star64 features: Quad core 64bit RISC-V, HDMI video output, 4x DSI and 4x CSI lates, i2c touch panel connector, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth, as well as 1x native USB3.0 port, 3x shared USB2.0 ports, PCIe x1 open-ended slot and GPIO bus pins (i2c, SPI and UART). The board also features 128M QSPI flash and eMMC and microSD card slots. The board will be available in two different RAM configurations – with 4GB and 8GB LPDDR4 memory for $69.99 and $89.99 respectively. I’ll await some reviews first, but this seems like a very obvious buy if performance is at least reasonable. I really want to support RISC-V hardware, but so far, it’s been rather slim pickings. Here’s top hoping it gets better soon.
FORTH is an early programming language developed by Charles H. Moore in the late 1960s. More developed FORTH on an IBM 1130 minicomputer, which had a 16-bit CPU and only 8 KB of RAM. To keep things simple and reduce memory consumption, he implemented FORTH as a stack-based virtual machine using the Reverse Polish Notation (RPN). But FORTH is much more than just a programming language. Because FORTH has a built-in interpreter, compiler and disk I/O support, a computer running FORTH is also called a “Forth system”. My4TH is such a Forth system. You can develop and debug your Forth programs directly on My4TH. You can enter your source code with the built-in text editor and store it in the on-board EEPROM memory. From there you can compile and run it directly on the My4TH board. This is well beyond my capabilities, but it seems like an incredibly cool piece of hardware. Niche, sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you were into this sort of thing.
So, there is basically little you can do with Windows out of the box but buy subscriptions and log into pre-installed social media apps. One thing I knew right on the spot: That’s not an environment I want my kid to make his first steps “on a real computer.” Not in a hundred years. Never. Some people recommended tools to me which can be used to switch most of those things off. But honestly: How do you trust a system (or its manufacturer) if you can’t even know if those settings, which you deliberately chose, persist? What if I remove app x for a reason, and it suddenly pops up again after the next Windows update? Or the news section in the search menu? No way. I can no longer see a good use case for it, at least not in my home. Windows 11 is a dystopian experience.
With the benefit of hindsight, seems misconceived on just about every level. Six years in development, it was repeatedly delayed and when it was finally launched it was too slow and hardly sold at all. It was officially cancelled in 19861, just five years after it first went on sale. It’s not an exaggeration to call it a commercial disaster. So whilst it’s interesting to look at the reasons why the iAPX432 failed, it’s also useful to consider why Intel’s senior management thought it would work and why they got it wrong. If they could make these mistakes, then anyone could. We’ll look at the story of the iAPX432, examine some of its technical innovations and failures, and then try to understand why Intel got it wrong. An excellent deep dive into iAPX432, an architecture most of us will have zero experience with. Considering the recent passing of Gordon Moore, take some time to understand one of his company’s major bets that didn’t work out.
The project is codenamed CorePC and is designed to be a modular and customizable variant of Windows for Microsoft to leverage different form factors with. Not all Windows PCs need the full breadth of legacy Win32 app support, and CorePC will allow Microsoft to configure “editions” of Windows with varying levels of feature and app compatibility. The big change with CorePC versus the current shipping version of Windows is that CorePC is state separated, just like Windows Core OS. State separation enables faster updates and a more secure platform via read-only partitions that are inaccessible to the user and third-party apps, just like on iPadOS or Android. That’s definitely pretty cool and if they can pull it off, it will greatly improve the Windows update experience. That being said, Microsoft’s track record at modernising Windows hasn’t been exactly littered with success, and it often comes with major hiccups, problems, and upset users (Vista, Windows 8, Windows on ARM). I would love for them to succeed with this one, because in the end, it would benefit a lot of users.
