kbity

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.

Kbin. Kbity. Like kitty but kbin. Kbity!

Well, five times zero women checks out.

Great value for him, maybe.

Before adding “@@*$redirect-rule” to uBlock Origin filters:

• With uMatrix enabled: 99%, everything except ads-api.twitter.com and ads.youtube.com was blocked.
• With uMatrix disabled: 83%, 125/150 blocked.

After adding “@@*$redirect-rule” to uBlock Origin filters:

• With uMatrix enabled: 100%, 150/150 blocked.
• With uMatrix disabled: 85%, 127/150 blocked.

Using Firefox with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and some others.

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.

That’s incredible. Certified “Directive #4” moment.

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.

There’s even rumours that the next version of Windows is going to inject a bunch of AI buzzword stuff into the operating system. Like, how is that going to make the user experience any more intuitive? Sounds like you’re just going to have to fight an overconfident ChatGPT wannabe that thinks it knows what you want to do better than you do, every time you try opening a program or saving a document.

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.

The biggest problem people have with systemd is that it’s constantly growing, taking on more functions and becoming a dependency of more software (for example, the Snap packaging system basically requires it). People joke that some day you won’t be using Linux anymore, but GNU/systemd, (or as they’ve taken to calling it, GNU plus systemd) because it’s ever-growing from a simple init daemon into a significant percentage of an entire operating system. People worry that some day, you won’t be able to run a Linux system that’s compatible with much of the software developed for Linux without using systemd.

Whether that’s a realistic worry or not I don’t know, and I don’t really have a horse in the systemd VS not-systemd race (I’m using a systemd-based distro but that wasn’t a factor in my decision), but I can appreciate being worried that systemd might end up becoming a hard requirement for a Linux system in a way that nothing else really is - you can substitute GNOME for KDE, X11 for Wayland (or Mir, I guess), PulseAudio for PipeWire and most stuff will still work, so the idea that systemd could become as non-negotiable an element of a Linux system as the Linux kernel itself rubs people the wrong way, as it functionally makes Linux with systemd a different target platform entirely to Linux with another init daemon.

Peter Thiel is interested.

Works pretty well. Reader Mode is great at unfucking user-hostile site designs like this.

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.

Unless they plan on programming all of Mosaic law into all of their algorithms going forward, that’s a whole lot of hot air. And in any case it’s a serious violation of the Establishment Clause, if not veering into “and domestic”.

Yeah, federated network things.