Xbox 1 emulation is in a so-so place right now. Xemu has pretty good compatibility (80% or so), but it is very, very slow.

To date no one has been able to develop an Xbox emulator using high-level emulation, so Xemu takes a low-level approach based around QEMU. Which makes the computational requirements much, much higher*. To the point where there are plenty of games that run at half-speed (or worse) even on the latest CPUs. The current emulators are heavily CPU limited (and to just a couple of threads at that), and CPUs aren't getting faster very quickly these days.

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.

* LLE extends to the GPU as well. So a lot of cycles are burnt emulating parts of the NV2A GPU and its 25 year old peculiarities

Amazon took nine years to reach profitability.

I'm not sure Amazon is a good example here. The company famously opted to reinvest its free cash flow into growing the business, rather than saving them and booking them as net income. They likely could have been profitable sooner otherwise.

Also, I am not aware of Amazon receiving billions in government support in the 1994-2001 timeframe.

This is the man that though it better to hide what was happening in Rotherham with the industrial scale rape of minors and now expects to be taken seriously when he gets on a soap box about something he does not understand. If a minor lies about their age the app they are using will believe they are old enough. The parents need to be more involved in what the children are doing and to know. Do not give them smart phones. Leave a desktop downstairs for supervised use etc.

Score one for K'Breel and the Council of Elders, I guess. We'll get you next time, you crafty Martians!

Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are still included with every Apple device. The current versions are fully up to date and are free for any device owner.

What Apple has done is put the AI features and licensed stock images behind a paywall. Which isn't great, but those weren't core features to begin with; the iWork apps existed long before they were added.

To quote Apple: "Yes. You can continue using Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform for free. And while these apps remain free for everyone, an Apple Creator Studio subscription offers premium templates, a library of high-quality, royalty-free photos and graphics, and powerful intelligence features."

Why would an otherwise routine software update even come with new EULA terms?

Off the top of my head, I can't recall an Office for Mac update ever coming with a new EULA.

While Office 2021 is affected by the expiring license, it's still under support until Oct 2026 and users just need to update. It only reverts to read-only if you don't update.

Thank you. I had been wondering about this precisely because Office 2021 is still receiving updates.

So this is really only an Office 2019 issue. Which still isn't great, but it is at least older.

And from the sounds of things, this only impacts the retail-licensed version of Office 2019. The volume licensed LTSC version doesn't rely on an activation server or certificates.

It's modded funny because OpenCL is all but dead for new projects. It got weighed down by industry infighting to the point that the big feature of OpenCL 3.0 in 2020 was undoing everything added to the spec after 2011.

So the idea of using OpenCL as a CUDA replacement, rather than something like ROCm or OneAPI, is funny. It's like rewriting C++ programs to use Pascal.

Per TFA:

These adjustments stem from Sonyâ(TM)s ongoing efforts to manage backend services and data feeds that support enhanced guide features on its Google TV-powered BRAVIA lineup.

It sounds like Sony is losing (or is not renewing) the contracts with their data brokers who providing the listing services for their TVs? In which case this is not necessarily expected, but it is par for the course.

There is no truly free source of OTA TV listings and other metadata in the US. The stations themselves do not provide this data over the air as an adjacent data stream (which is what a rational person would expect), so the only way to get listings is from third party providers such as Gracenote. Which as a technical solution works, but it means someone is always on the hook for paying for that service. And no one wants to pay for OTA metadata services, since the hallmark attribute of OTA TV is that it's free.

This is a problem that goes back to the earliest days of TiVo. Someone needs to pay for TV listings, but TVs and other STBs last too long; hardware manufacturers eventually tire of paying for an ever-increasing bill - it costs them money they don't get to make back if they give away the listings for free. And thus you eventually end up with required a monthly subscription just to have an OTA DVR.

The eventual death of linear TV should finally put an end to this nonsense. But until then we're all going to keep experiencing the same non-free listings issues we've had since the late 90s.

Huh. I am surprised to hear that Microsoft SQL Management Studio doesn't run. The usual problem children are either programs that are using specific x86 instructions (e.g. games with AVX2), or programs that need kernel mode drivers. MSMS doesn't fall into either of those categories.

This is an especially bad example.

The SN850X has been rebranded multiple times as SanDisk has slowly split from Western Digital (taking all the SSDs with them). They still sell it as the SN850X, but the full model and SKU numbers have changed over the years. As a result, prices for the old models have been volatile, as some vendors treat the newer iterations as the same product while others don't. Which means that for the latter, they see the old models as an item they aren't getting more stock of, and raise prices on the remaining stock accordingly.

Oldest Model: WDBB9H0020BNC-WRSN (The original Western Digital WD_BLACK product)
Mid Model: WDS200T2XHE-00BCA0 (The WD_BLACK By SanDisk product)
Newest Model: SDSP81200TAH-000E0 (The current SanDisk product)

The SN850X has been a very long-lived product from a manufacturer who supplies their own NAND and controller, so I can see why The Verge would want to use that as a tracking point for SSD prices. But the brand/SKU changes make it a poor choice. Samsung's drives are probably a better point of comparison here.

It's a bit of a moot point. Systems that aren't receiving general OS updates wouldn't receive updated bootloaders anyhow. So they wouldn't need the updated certificates that allow for bootloaders signed after June 2026.

It gets a bit tautological, but only systems that are getting updates need updates.

It lacks an appropriate number of ports and doesn't support DisplayPort.

USB DisplayPort alt mode says hello. Every rear USB-C port on the Mac Mini is also a DisplayPort. Just as it is on all of Apple's laptops.

Thunderbolt is a garbage, proprietary Apple standard.

Thunderbolt is an Intel standard. And in the case of Thunderbolt 4, it's just an additional set of feature requirements over base USB4, where those features are optional. In other words, TB4 is a superset of USB4.

Thank you for calling this out.

The fact that these one-liner installers are becoming an increasingly common method of installing software is utterly insane - and even more dangerous.

The solution (probably) isn't to lock down OSes to prevent this. But at a minimum, developers need to be tapped with a pitchfork for trying to officially distribute their software in this fashion. Doing so is normalizing bad habits.

One of many examples: the official installation instructions for the Deno JS runtime are one-liners for all three OSes: Linux, Windows, and macOS. It's equally stupid on all of them.

Does this mean the Martian Council of Elders has finally figured out how to disable our satellites in orbit?

Will our gelsacs be safe?!