The SOC is quite a bit more powerful than anything on any phones. Its roughly on par with the Nvidia RTX 3050.

Totally! I'm not worried about the opinions of a few people that only read a release note and think they know the entire ecosystem. I fully understand that wifi has lagged behind in FreeBSD, but other areas such as storage management and security are a decade ahead of Linux (inb4 haters try to argue with me because they don't even know cool shit going on w/ FreeBSD like Capsicum as one of many examples)

Small BSD based routers already exist: look into devices that ship w/ pfSense or OPNsense. Devices that do routing and devices that do wifi access points don't have to be the same device, which is how my networks are setup (quite nice if you want a solid mesh wifi setup by the way!)

The note there about Wi-Fi doesn't convey just how large of an improvement that actually is.

From testing tonight, I went from ~10-15mbps on Wi-Fi on 14.2 to about 250mbps on 14.3.

This is a massive overhaul of the entire Wi-Fi subsystem within FreeBSD, and its continuing to be improved upon even further on FreeBSD 15 in development right now.

Yeah, this isn't breaking any benchmarks with its current performance, but it certainly went from "absolutely sluggish and rubbish" to "perfectly usable for daily tasks" in a single revision.

Sure, this sounds like a great idea up front, but the requirements hurt the ecosystem for bespoke designs.

The FrameWork 16 for instance has 6x USB-C ports on it for its modular connectivity. By Microsoft's new requirement, ALL 6 ports must have charging capabilities, video capabilities, and because they're above the 40gbps threshold, support PCIe connectivity too.

This sounds -great- on the surface, but what is the level of complexity and monetary cost to have SIX charging ports on a single laptop? Where is the practicality in that anyways? Additionally, the cost of the muxes to push video to all of those ports, and PCIe to all of those ports.

Does your desktop have 6 display output ports? Probably not.

Thanks to these requirements, the FrameWork 16 is essentially dead in the water for Microsoft Windows certification, along with any other vendor that wants more than 4x ports on their devices.

We're either going to have a limited number of ports, or regress back to the slop of USB-A, USB-C, (mini)DP, HDMI, and whatever slop a company wants to accommodate more connectivity, instead of a single port that has a few optional specs turned on/off depending how its wired internally.

Yeah, I totally get it and would love to have a world where there is truly a single port. But even with this new spec requirement, it still isn't standardized entirely. There is the above 40gbps spec and below 40gbps spec with different requirements for each. There is a difference between "has video" and "has GOOD video", as well as "has PCIe/Thunderbolt" and "doesn't have PCIe/Thunderbolt"

Vendors having the choice between driving up per-port costs for all this optional stuff that almost nobody will ever use vs not having the ports at all? Welcome to the Apple world of only having 2 USB-C ports.

Don't worry, AI workers will replace the normal workers, and these AI workers will be the ones to create the AI morality filters. And since these are all cloud computer based infrastructure, the AI will give it a cunning pun of a name, something to do with networks in the sky.

Instagram has allowed non-square photos for years. And their UI browser even allowed a non-square layout of photos on a user's profile for at least a year as well. What's changed? They formally announced a feature that's been there forever now?

Proof that nobody even bothered to read the fucking summary.

"it makes much more sense for the state to invest in, or collaborate with, decentralized social media networks based on free and interoperable software"

Yeah, the government investing in this would so totally be "big brother watching" heh....

Steam Deck: "we're shipping with eMMC"
Valve to others: "YOU MUST HAVE NVME!"

Granted, its been a few years now, and I whole heatedly agree with the "you should be on NVMe" idea.

Don't get me wrong, I love the concept of RISC-V. I have that very P550 sitting on my desk right now.

But calling it a "high performance" platform? The thing trades blows with a Raspberry Pi 4, and is absolutely destroyed by a Raspberry Pi 5.

Its really really cool to see RISC-V getting more and more love, just like ARM has gotten. But please dont over-sell yourself that much in terms of a particular piece of hardware's capabilities.

On my Win11 workstation, an empty Notepad.exe instance uses 55MB of RAM. BTW this is more than the total amount of RAM consumed by 1990's operating systems in their entirety, which included Notepad. The exe is only "small" because all the libraries are shared libraries, but they still consume resources.

As a comparison here of active running things on this workstation that use -LESS- RAM than an empty freshly launched Notepad instance: Windows Explorer, the Intel ARC control panel, multiple WebView components, fucking MACAFEE SECURITY SHIT (don't ask, its a work laptop), Sublime Text (with many large documents open), and countless more things.

Notepad is bloated as shit now.

But how else will the big evil corp be able to inflate the "number of users" for their AI bullshit to their investors to prove its "Worth it" to invest, without the big evil corp making it in every single aspect of our daily lives, effectively inflating the numbers to the moon !?

That first one at least, USB floppy drives? Are absolute DOGHSIT for quality. I would NOT want any production system relying on them. Hell, not even my home systems as a hobby. I purchased one a while back, and the "drive CD" was actually shipped and stuck inside the floppy drive, requiring me to open up the drive just to get the CD out. But besides this, this reading/writing reliability of the head was absolute trash. "Oh, maybe USB isn't powerful enough" - well, turns out it actually is! I built a greaseweazle, which is a bog standard 3.5in floppy drive with a custom USB controller board, and this thing has been absolutely rock solid. I've been working on an archival project of old DOS and Win31/9x utilities that will be landing on the Internet Archive here sometime soon once I get the 400+ discs all imaged and labels scanned in. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fkeirf%2Fgreas...

only replying to say: 'when did slashdot break the 10mil UID mark!?'

not sure if shitstain bots, or actual humans being shitstains tho.

I understand the usage of the term "virtual memory" here, as its been incorrectly correlated to swapping memory to disk since its inception really... but i do hope at some point the realization in the broader community that "virtual memory" literally means all memory on a modern operating system's user space. this is how we can get multiple instances of the same application running at once, as they're using the same virtual memory addresses that are then translated over to physical addresses by the memory controller, which is controlled by the operating system. This memory is handled in chunks called "pages", and those individual pages can be moved around to different physical memory addresses without changing their virtual memory addresses within the user space application. these physical addresses can also land on disk, which is where the "swap" comes from, also sometimes called the "pagefile" - but the term "virtual memory" has been used so long by so many people to reference just swap/page file space on disk, at this point its real meaning sadly has been lost and i personally think that sucks.