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Backward-compatible Xbox 360 games will still be available for purchase on the Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S stores, Microsoft says.

So no, presumably Microsoft just doesn’t want to deal with the tangle of close to 20-year-old code that holds up the Xbox 360’s store interfaces.

What an idiot. The Mouse does not forgive. The Mouse does not forget. DeSantis can’t surely believe Disney are just going to give up and walk away after he threw down the gauntlet.

Well, five times zero women checks out.

The undocked Switch is in the same ballpark for raw power as the 360 and PS3, so as long as they’ve managed to sufficiently unfuck the game’s nightmare spaghetti code, should be just fine.

Well, the ones based on Chromium aren’t, anyway. I’ve heard some major criticisms of Safari in the last few years, for what that’s worth.

The NHS’ virtual appointment service in the UK doesn’t support Firefox either, only Chrome, Safari and Edge. The dark days of “please view this website in Internet Explorer 6” are creeping closer to the present again. I hate the modern internet.

Funnily enough, one of the few legitimately impactful non-enterprise uses of AVX512 I’m aware of is that it does a really good job of accelerating emulation of the Cell SPUs in RPCS3. But you’re absolutely right, those things are very funky and implementing their functions is by far the most difficult part of PS3 emulation.

Luckily, I think most games either didn’t do much with them or left programming for them to middleware, so it would mostly be first- and second-party games that would need super-extensive customisation and testing. Sony could probably figure it out, if they were convinced there was sufficient demand and potential profit on the other side.

The Xbox 360 was based on the same weird, in-order PowerPC 970 derived CPU as the PS3, it just had three of them stuck together instead of one of them tied to seven weird Cell units. The TL;DR of how Xbox backwards compatibility has been achieved is that Microsoft’s whole approach with the Xbox has always been to create a PC-like environment which makes porting games to or from the Xbox simpler.

The real star of the show here is the Windows NT kernel and DirectX. Microsoft’s core APIs have been designed to be portable and platform-agnostic since the beginning of the NT days (of course, that isn’t necessarily true of the rest of the Windows operating system we use on our PCs). Developers could still program their games mostly as though they were targeting a Windows PC using DirectX since all the same high-level APIs worked in basically the same way, just with less memory and some platform-specific optimisations to keep in mind (stuff like the 10MB of eDRAM, or that you could always assume three 3.2GHz in-order CPU cores with 2-way SMT).

Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One seem to be run through something akin to Dolphin’s “Übershaders” - in this case, per-game optimised modifications of an entire Xenon GPU stack implemented in software running alongside the entire Xbox 360 operating environment in a hypervisor. This is aided by the integration of hardware-level support for certain texture and audio formats common in Xbox 360 games into the Xbox One’s CPU design, similarly to how Apple’s M-series SoCs integrate support for x86-style memory ordering to greatly accelerate Rosetta 2.

Microsoft’s APIs for developers to target tend to be fairly platform-agnostic - see Windows CE, which could run on anything from ARM handhelds to the Hitachi SH-4 powered Sega Dreamcast. This enables developers who are mostly experienced in coding for x86 PCs running Windows to relatively easily start writing programs (or games) for other platforms using those APIs. This also has the beneficial side-effect of allowing Microsoft to, with their collective first-hand knowledge of those APIs, create compatibility layers on an x86 system that can run code targeted at a different platform.

We’ve gone from “work from home” back to “live from work” at an astounding pace. That’s… good? No, wait, the opposite. Fuck this society and the parasitic husks who direct it in this manner.

At this point they’ve literally just developed a carcinogenic spray that happens to be a hydrocarbon. What the fuck. This cannot be allowed to reach the market.

A Libertarian candidate for the US Senate back in 2018 proposed giving shotguns to homeless people for self-defence.

They already have alt-tech, which had kind of a headstart on the Fediverse.

The Fediverse is home to a lot of young, tech-minded people distrustful of major corporations. The younger generations are more likely to come out as transgender due to greater awareness and acceptance of gender identity and dysphoria, and a decentralised, open platform is naturally going to appeal to communists, syndicalists and other left-wingers who don’t want some billionaire buying the next website they get comfortable on. And funnily enough, there are a surprising number of trans people in the tech sector, to the point where trans-flag socks have become a meme among programmers.

This is the first I’ve heard of the JPEG XL format, but it sounds pretty good!

Hopefully it doesn’t get misused by websites to mangle lossless compressed images with so much compression they’re barely visible to save a few kilobytes, though.

Been using LineageOS with microG on my phone for the last couple of years out of a general distrust for Google, using open-source apps in place of the Google ones. My phone stopped getting OEM updates after Android 12, so being able to use Android 13 through LineageOS is a plus. Main downsides are that some apps don’t play nice with microG and that unlocking the bootloader makes banking apps stop working.

All it takes is enough people who aren’t fully committed Trump voters in swing states finding it difficult to vote, or ending up not voting out of apathy. Or those states picking electors who will give the votes to Trump regardless of who wins the vote. A Trump victory can’t be ruled out even with what should be several major disqualifying factors running against him. That’s more an indictment of America than a credit to the strength of his candidacy, frankly.

I’m so glad we prevented all those abortions so the unwanted or unhealthy kids could instead die in more painful ways such as congenital defects, poverty and neglect. Virtue signalling is bad, unless it causes preventable suffering to children in which case apparently Supply-Side Jesus is all for it.

Remember the 10-year-old rape victim who had to travel out-of-state for an abortion, and poor Milo Evan Dorbert, who lived a short life of 99 minutes before dying painfully of Potter syndrome, which left him without functioning kidneys. There are many other rape victims and babies with invariably-fatal conditions who have needlessly suffered for political reasons.

This is a total affront to the ethos of the web and everyone involved in drafting this awful proposal should be publicly shamed. Stick sandwich boards on each of them saying “I tried to build the Torment Nexus”, chain them together and march them through the streets while ringing a bell and chanting “shame”.

In the case of the Surface Go family, there isn’t really anything comparable from other companies. It’s unironically the best compact tablet I’m aware of that you can put Linux on, and it runs Pop!_OS without issue once you disable Secure Boot. The only better Linux tablet for me would be an iPad Mini, but you can’t put Linux on one of those and even if you could it’s ARM-based so most proprietary apps won’t work on it.

In general, your tablet options for something smaller and handier than full-size 2-in-1s are pretty limited if you don’t want to be running iPadOS, so excluding Microsoft’s devices from the running if you want to put Linux on your tablet is pointless. Yeah, buying a Surface Laptop to put Linux on there is a bit weird, but I can see the Surface Pro family yielding a good ARM Linux tablet some day.

On the flip side, it’s a rolling-release distro, so you don’t have to play a game of “what broke?” whenever you do a major version upgrade or do a clean install to avoid it, because there are no major version updates. And the AUR is pretty much the reason to use Arch outside of being at the cutting edge (which is mainly useful for using brand new hardware that hasn’t got the best support in the more conventional distros yet, like a new laptop).