Monthly Archive:: May 2025
This week’s This Week in GNOME mentions that Blueprint will become part of GNOME. Blueprint is now part of the GNOME Nightly SDK and is expected to be part of the GNOME 49 SDK. This means, apps relying on Blueprint won’t have to install it manually anymore. Blueprint is an alternative to defining GTK/Libadwaita user interface via .ui XML-files (GTK Builder files). The goal of blueprint is to provide UI definitions that require less boilerplate than XML and are easier to learn. Blueprint also provides a language server for IDE integration. ↫ Sophie Herold Quite a few applications already make use of Blueprint, and even some Core GNOME applications use it, so it seems logical to make it part of the default GNOME installation.
OSle is an incredibly small operating system, coming in at only 510 bytes, so it fits entirely into a boot sector. It runs in real-mode, and is written in assembly. Despite the small size, it has a shell, a read and write file system, process management, and more. It even has its own tiny SDK and some pre-built programs. The code’s available under the MIT license.
A European Union privacy watchdog fined TikTok 530 million euros ($600 million) on Friday after a four-year investigation found that the video sharing app’s data transfers to China put users at risk of spying, in breach of strict EU data privacy rules. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission also sanctioned TikTok for not being transparent with users about where their personal data was being sent and ordered the company to comply with the rules within six months. ↫ Kelvin Chan for AP News In case you’re wondering what Ireland’s specific role in this case is, TikTok’s European headquarters are located in Ireland, which means that any EU-wide privacy violations by TikTok are handled by Ireland’s privacy watchdog. Anyway, sounds like a big fine, right? Let’s do some math. TikTok’s global revenue last year is estimated at €20 billion. This means that a €530 million fine is 2.65% of TikTok’s global yearly revenue. Now let’s make this more relatable for us normal people. The yearly median income in Sweden is €34365 (pre-taxes), which means that if the median income Swede had to pay a fine with the same impact as the TikTok fine, they’d have to pay €910. That’s how utterly bullshit this fine is. €910 isn’t nothing if you make €34000 per year, but would you call this a true punishment for TikTok? Any time you read about any of these coporate fines, you should do math like this to get an idea of what the true impact of the fine really amounts to. You’ll be surprised to learn to just how utterly toothless they are.
Back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, if you installed a comprehensive office suite on Windows, such as Microsoft’s own Office or something like WordPerfect Office or IBM Lotus SmartSuite, it would often come with a little icon in the system tray or a floating toolbar to ensure the applications were preloaded upon logging into Windows. The idea was that this preloading would ensure that the applications would start faster. It’s 2025, and Microsoft is bring it back. In a message in the Microsoft 365 Message Center Archive, which is a real thing I didn’t make up, the company announced a new Startup Boost task that will preload Office applications on Windows to reduce loading times for the individual Office applications. We are introducing a new Startup Boost task from the Microsoft Office installer to optimize performance and load-time of experiences within Office applications. After the system performs the task, the app remains in a paused state until the app launches and the sequence resumes, or the system removes the app from memory to reclaim resources. The system can perform this task for an app after a device reboot and periodically as system conditions allow. ↫ MC1041470 – New Startup Boost task from Microsoft Office installer for Office applications This new task will automatically be added to the Task Scheduler, but only on PCs with 8GB of RAM or more and at least 5GB of available disk space. The task will run 10 minutes after logging into Windows, will be disabled if the Energy Saves feature is enabled, and will be removed if you haven’t used Office in a while. The initial rollout of this task will take place in May, and will cover Word only for now. The task can be disabled manually through Task Scheduler or in Word’s settings. Since this is Microsoft, every time Office is updated, the task will be re-enabled, which means that users who disable the feature will have to disable it again after each update. This particular behaviour can be disabled using Group Policy. Yes, the sound you’re hearing are all the “AI” text generators whirring into motion as they barf SEO spam onto the web about how to disable this feature to speed up your computer. I’m honestly rather curious who this is for. I have never found the current crop of Office applications to start up particularly slowly, but perhaps corporate PCs are so full of corpo-junkware they become slow again?
It has been well over two years since the last release of DragonFlyBSD, version 6.4.0, and today the project pushed out a small update, DragonFlyBSD 6.4.1. It fixes a few small, longstanding issues, but as the version number suggests, don’t expect any groundbreaking changes here. The legacy IDE/NATA driver had a memory leak fixed, the ca_root_nss package has been updated to support newer Let’s Encrypt certificates, the package update command will no longer delete an important configuration file that rendered the command unusable, and more small fixes like that. Existing users can update the usual way.
Chips and Cheese takes a very detailed look at the latest processor design from Zhaoxin, the Chinese company that inherited VIA’s x86 license and has been making new x86 chips ever since. Their latest design, 世纪大道 (Century Avenue), tries to take yet another step closer to current designs chips form Intel and AMD, and while falling way short, that’s not really the point here. Ultimately performance is what matters to an end-user. In that respect, the KX-7000 sometimes falls behind Bulldozer in multithreaded workloads. It’s disappointing from the perspective that Bulldozer is a 2011-era design, with pairs of hardware thread sharing a frontend and floating point unit. Single-threaded performance is similarly unimpressive. It roughly matches Bulldozer there, but the FX-8150’s single-threaded performance was one of its greatest weaknesses even back in 2011. But of course, the KX-7000 isn’t trying to impress western consumers. It’s trying to provide a usable experience without relying on foreign companies. In that respect, Bulldozer-level single-threaded performance is plenty. And while Century Avenue lacks the balance and sophistication that a modern AMD, Arm, or Intel core is likely to display, it’s a good step in Zhaoxin’s effort to break into higher performance targets. ↫ Chester Lam at Chips and Cheese I find Chinese processors, like the x86-based ones from Zhaoxin or the recent LoongArch processors (which you can buy on AliExpress), incredibly fascinating, and would absolutely love to get my hands on one. A board with two of the most recent LoongArch processors – the 3c6000 – goes for about €4000 at the moment, and I’m keeping my eye on that price to see if there’s ever going to be a sharp drop. This is prime OSNews material, after all. No, they’re not competitive with the latest offerings from Intel, AMD, or ARM, but I don’t really care – they interest me as a computer enthusiast, and since it’s highly unlikely we’re going to see anyone seriously threaten Intel, AMD, and ARM here in the west, you’re going to have to look at China if you’re interested in weird architectures and unique processors.
If RISC-V ever manages to take off, this is going to be an important tool in RISC-V users’ toolbox: felix86 is an x86-64 userspace emulator for RISC-V. felix86 emulates an x86-64 CPU running in userspace, which is to say it is not a virtual machine like VMware, rather it directly translates the instructions of an application and mostly uses the host Linux kernel to handle syscalls. Currently, translation happens during execution time, also known as just-in-time (JIT) recompilation. The JIT recompiler in felix86 is focused on fast compilation speed and performs minimal optimizations. It utilizes extensions found on the host system such as the vector extension for SIMD operations, or the B extension for emulating bit manipulation extensions like BMI. The only mandatory extensions for felix86 are G, which every RISC-V general purpose computer should already have, and v1.0 of the standard vector extension. ↫ felix86 website The project is still in early development, but a number of popular games already work, which is quite impressive. The code’s on GitHub under the MIT license.
Way back in 2021, in the Epic v. Apple court case, judge US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered Apple to allow third-party developers to tell users how to make payments inside iOS applications without going through Apple’s App Store. As we have come to expect from Apple, the company maliciously complied, lowering the commission on purchases outside of its ecosystem from 30% to 27%, while also adding a whole bunch of hoops and hurdles, like scare screens with doom-and-gloom language to, well, scare consumers into staying within Apple’s ecosystem for in-app payments. Well, it turns out Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is furious, giving Apple, Tim Cook, and its other executives what can only be described as a beatdown – even highlighting how one of Apple’s executives, under orders from Tim Cook, lied under oath several times. Gonzalez is referring this to the District Attorney for Northern California “to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.” In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein, more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate. ↫ US District Judge Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers Gonzalez’ entire ruling is scathing, seething with rage, and will probably do more reputational damage to Apple, Tim Cook, and his executive team than any bendgate or antennagate could ever do. Judge Gonzalez: This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction. Effective immediately Apple will no longer impede developers’ ability to communicate with users nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases. Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover-up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple. ↫ US District Judge Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers Gonzalez effectively destroyed any ability for Apple to charge commissions on purchases made inside iOS applications but outside Apple’s App Store, and this order will definitely find its way to the European Union as well, where it will serve as further evidence of Tim Cook’s and Apple’s continuous, never-ending contempt for the law and courts that uphold it. For its part, Apple has stated they’re going to appeal. Good luck with that.
