So if Microsoft has an emulation environment with much lower overhead, then that is a significant development. Because even with third-party emulators available, most games aren't currently fully playable on them.

According to some friends of mine who analyzed it, it's actually the emulator that Microsoft used on the Xbox One/Xbox Series consoles as they run basically Windows 10 with a special shell on it. But that emulator is not emulating an OG Xbox. It's emulating an Xbox 360 - it's using the Backwards Compatibility mode that was built into the One/Series console. Then the Xbox 360 is running backwards compatibility to run the OG Xbox games.

So there's no technology being developed - Microsoft just took their existing backwards compatibility technology from the Xbox and brought it to PC. And that technology does both 360 and OG Xbox, so they're probably going to bring in the entire catalog forward of OG Xbox and 360 games.

I was waiting and waiting to play Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge!

I think MVG had it working across all the consoles - Xbox OG, Xbox 360 (Compatibility), Xbox One (Compatibility) and Xbox Series (Compatibilty). And they were all playing a LAN game showing that worked as well.

The problem is you can't make the screen from glass (less scratchable) as glass has a really huge bend radius before it shatters. While research continues on the front, there are just a lot of stresses in glass that make it hard to make bendable glass.

So you're going to have to use plastic, which allows for a really flexible sheet, but even it has its plastic limits and if you bend it too tightly it will crease because the radius stresses exceed the plastic deformation limits.

So in the end, you can get it without creases but you'll have to put up with a really thick bend in the middle or deal with the crease or with ways to enlarge the bend radius by putting empty space in the hinge.

Or come up with a new material that allows for bezel-less screens that can shove together without a dividing line.

Most apps are barely used and are garbage. They omit what apps were specifically caught proxying and the number of installations.
Was it any of the big ones such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu etc?

No it's not the big ones, because those have reputations to uphold.

It's always the questionable apps - you know the apps you see in ads and such, and there are almost always clones of everywhere. Especially if it's a paid app and suddenly there's a free clone of it.

And they're really there to offer exit nodes for VPN services that haven't been detected by things like Netflix or CloudFlare as hosting a VPN endpoint.

Part of the problem is that the Democrats also need to think long and hard about who they serve. Trump should have been *impossible*. In a healthy country nobody would have voted for a raging whackadoodle like him.

The problem is well, the non-Republican voters. Democrats win or lose by voter turnout - it's why the (R) side is trying to disenfranchise as many voters as possible.

You see, the voter turnout for the (R) side is basically constant - you have people who vote (R) and will always vote (R) every election. Doesn't matter who's on the ticket, as long as it's (R) it's who they vote for.

On the (D) side, it's a lot more variable - they are generally far more complacent. If they don't like who's on the ticket, they don't show up to vote.

Granted, there are small contingents of flip-flop voters - but in the overall scheme of things they don't usually matter too much. Sure they may have flipped a state, but it's debatable in the end if it mattered.(E.g., the LatinX vote went (R) in 2024, because they liked the whole "close the border" thing and "get rid of the immigrants". But of course, they didn't think things through because well, they were the immigrants).

So what matters in the end is the voting contingent - you have (R) when the (D)s don't vote. It's why talk of forcing voters to vote has died down - the (R)s realized that it was a completely bad idea that would have them lose the election because you're forcing basically the (D)s to come out to vote. That's also why there's talk of "steal the vote" and "voter ID" - because the goal is to make sure the (D)s don't vote.

(Incidentally, you can't be for things like "voter ID" and then believe the times when Trump was in power the vote was proper. Because it was improper in the past and thus the 2020 was stolen by Biden, but also 2016 and 2024 was stolen by Trump and thus every one of them was illegitimate without voter ID. Which we all know wasn't true, because the MAGA tried to steal the vote in California and failed miserably to the point of almost getting arrested for trying it. So either you need voter ID, and thus the vote for Trump was also illegitimate, or you don't, and Trump is rightfully the President.

That's really what it boiled down to. Bust Jr. was elected because Gore lost Florida because of potentially uncounted votes.

In the end, all that matters is getting the vote out. All the (D)s though Kamala Harris had it in the bag and stayed home. It's why if anyone claims "they don't bother to vote" or "I don't care" your answer is "so you voted for Trump then". Not voting is the same voting for the winner - if you wanted Harris to win, you'd have gone and voted. If you didn't care, you basically voted for Trump.

"It appears that the agency has an offline copy of the wiped data"

Well, like, duh. Had they not, they should all be immediately fired. And never work in IT again.

I don't mean that in a demeaning way. Z80 assembly language was my first professional programming job and I spent some years being the department SME. I'm very interested in this, but I don't currently have a use case. In the present time, where we have 64 bit Raspberry Pis, I'm sad to say that I'm not sure there is one.

I'd love to be wrong about this.

Unfortunately, the software I need to be able to run makes heavy use of the GPU. I don't think Windows VMs have that level of compatibility yet.

I think the hot setup is to run it in an AWS instance. That way I could have access to the software from pretty much anywhere. But I don't expect that to work either.

I learned assembly on the Z80, it is super accessible and fun to use. So glad future generations will get to experience the push and pop of a memory stack firsthand.

Zilog still makes Z80 based things. They only ended production of the DIP40 package for the Z80. They have various SoCs and microcontrollers using the Z80 processor core. It's a little less convenient if you want to build a Z80 based computer.

The other alternative is the 6502 which is still available in DIP package as WDC (western design corporation) still makes them. They also have a synthesizable core for FPGAs as well.

And they are used - the Z80, 6502 and 8051 are still used in many things that need a tiny bit of intelligence (may USB hubs, for example, contain an 8051 core to manage it).

Though I suspect a lot of that is simply being around for the sake of being around because ARM is slowly taking over the intelligent device market. I don't know why RISC-V isn't appearing more in low end microcontrollers, but ARM certainly is. Which is fine, even though ARM isn't designed to be manually programmed by humans (they designed it more for compilers), it's instruction set is relatively simple and orthogonal so it's relatively easy to learn.

The problem is the energy produced by a solar panel on a car is really low. It's likely not even worth the added cost. Sure, solar cells are cheap, but boxy cars are something we left behind in the 70s. You could go all fancy with flexible cells, but their efficiency is even worse.

In the end, the energy collected from this is even less than a level 1 charger. And many people can't fathom that an EV on a level 1 charger is even practical (for a lot of use cases, it is).

A level 1 charger can charge 3-5 miles in an hour, and if you leave your car overnight for 10 hours charging that's 30-50 miles of range. Even the best solar panels are only 400W in full direct sunlight making the 1.5kW from a level 1 twice as fast. And not having to come to blazing hot car because you had to park in the sunny spot in the parking lot.

You want solar powered cars? Start putting roofs on parking lots and then putting solar panels on those. Cars are parked under shade, and you have plenty of electricity to charge EVs coming from the solar panels.

Solar panels on cars is about as good an idea as solar panels on roads. There's just so many random surfaces that very few cells will be positioned optimally. And anyone who's done solar knows if you do not plan out your strings right, a single branch casting a shadow hurts the entire string.

Yes, exactly.

Nor will my mom's machine, mother-in-law's machine, and wife's machine.

As I depend on a software suite that doesn't yet run on Linux, I'm kinda trapped. My machine is studly and in fine shape. I'm not going to replace it at this time.

So, Microsoft can continue clutching their pearls.

Or.... they could perhaps come out with a version of Windows that doesn't depend on TPM 2.

Or, I could bite the bullet and switch to Linux. I already have Mint running on a laptop, and it's pretty nifty.

Flash memory is dirt cheap. Optical media are more expensive

Flash media is cheap if bought blank. It's expensive if you have to program it.

Optical media is expensive individually, but dirt cheap when you can press them by the thousands per hour.

That's why optical media hangs around - a CD can be stamped in about a second - it's basically just a more precise form of injection molding. The same applies for DVDs and Blu-Rays - they can stamped out in seconds.

But flash memory cannot. If you go with the cheap flash memory devices, programming 1GB will take about a minute. You can make it go faster by parallelizing the operation but approaching the speed of a single CD stamper is very expensive. The more expensive flash memory that's faster can probably do it in a few seconds, but then the media costs jump dramatically - it's why you can buy 128GB thumbdrives for a couple of bucks, but a 1TB SSD costs hundreds.

Plus, flash memory has power off lifetimes - if you don't use it, it gradually forgets over a period of a few years. CDs generally last as long as the coating doesn't rot.

Honestly, AI is useful here for a lot of the mechanical bits.

Darwin is BSD userland so most of the porting for the NetBSD would be just mechanical bits of changing Makefiles and other things. And AI is really, really, really good at that. Anything that really is just a mechanical transformation is a good candidate for AI assistance. It can mean you can easily port most of the Darwin userspace over with very little effort.

And the parts that aren't so easy can be assisted or done by humans. If you have 1000 packages that need to be ported over, AI can probably help you doing 950 of them in a few hours. The remaining 50 are ones a human probably can do in a few days, so you can have something up and running quick.

Or you can force a human to do 1000 packages, and they can probably do it in a couple of weeks but likely will run out of steam by the first week because it's boring work.

I'm no AI promoter, but I can see when tools are well, tools. Let AI do the boring stuff while you work on the stuff that scratches your itch. Isn't that what open-source was supposed to be about?

It sounds a lot like putting speakers in EVs to make vroom vroom noises. Whatever affection people have to it, the manual gearbox worked around a technical problem with engines and isn't in any way superior for driving. Yes having control over the engine is important, but the best option for that is pedal shifters. This seems like Ferrari chasing a nostalgia market rather than developing a performance car.

But then this is the same Ferrari that just released the Luce so that would track.

No, it makes complete sense.

You can't have your traditional H shifter anymore - it's just too impractical because honestly the modern engine and gearbox has 8+ gears to deal with. Sure truckers have dealt with it with their 10 to 18 speed gearboxes, though usually the 10 speed is a 5 speed with a high and low lever, while the 18 speed is a 6 speed with a 3 speed tied together so you have multiple shifters. It's just a lot of manual hand flailing.

Modern race vehicles know shift speeds are basically it, and the manual gearbox is no more for them - it's all computer controlled shifting and the driver paddle shifts because that's really the only way you can go between gears in sub-100ms.

For today's cars, automatics have basically taken over because 6 speed autos are basically standard, and many now coming with 8, 10 or 12 gears. Some can still be bought with a manual option, but compressing 10 gears down to 6 means very tall gears and basically lousier gas mileage because your gears are not ideal.

So basically getting it to an automatic gearbox - be it a standard automatic, or a dual clutch standard box with a computer controlled shifting that can be controlled from paddles is basically the way to go.

Ferrari is not doing it for nostalgia - they have to do paddle shifters because a 12 speed gearbox cannot be shifted traditionally with an H shifter. Meanwhile having the control paddles affords can avoid a lot of the guessing. While modern computer controlled transmissions are very good at picking the right gear, there are still some circumstances that it's not as ideal so a way to manually control the transmission can help (usually during extreme weather - snow, heavy rain, etc).

That is the way the industry has to go - Ferrari is showing you cannot take advantage of their cars unless you let the computer do the shift, while the logic of when to shift remains with you the driver. And that's perfectly fine, though purists probably won't call it a "manual transmission". But it's what the industry recognizes is happening.

Heck, even in trucking many new trucks are coming with automatic transmissions - likely with some sort of manual up/down in case you need to pick a better gear. More gears makes the engine more efficient and fast computer shifts mean very smooth rides. In a modern luxury vehicle you cannot feel it shifting - it's so silky smooth the only thing you notice is the tachometer needle moved.