SirMittens

This is not a fine, tho. It's just the amount that Apple would have paid in taxes, if the special deal didn't exist.

The EU is not imposing any fines on Apple. They're just ordering Ireland to collect the taxes owed to them (Ireland), since the tax deal was found to be unfair/illegal.

One solution you could use to get around this weird design decision, is to use the reader mode in Firefox (I'm not sure what is the alternative for other browsers).

I think that's the wrong analogy. A more correct one would be "Should we blame a car company for a broken engine, that was modified after it was sold to you?".

A kernel level driver from a 3rd party is something that you willingly add to the OS, it wasn't there.

Just because windows allow you to do it, doesn't mean you should.

I mean, you can apply some dangerous mods to your car's engine, but you probably shouldn't, and if you do, it's your responsibility, not the car company.

I assume parent probably meant that the worse you can do in rust (e.g use of unsafe... etc) would just put you back at C level of memory safety.

> Google: promises

Google is not promising this out of the goodness of their heart. They're just getting ahead of what the EU is planning to mandate [0], and doing that to get some good marketing while they're at it.

So, while Google's track record leaves a lot to be desired, in this, I think they'll keep their promise, either because they actually care, or because the EU will force them to. Either way, we, the end users, will benefit from it.

And this will apply to all electronic device makers. That's probably why Samsung also increased their updates policy to five years as well.

[0]: https://www.insideprivacy.com/cybersecurity-2/eu-publishes-d...

> "The requirements apply for the lifetime of a product or five years from its placement on the market, whichever is shorter."

Microsoft could still work with their partners to implement this. Yes, the PC market tend to be fragmented, but what I assume would happen is that some ARM PCs will have the hardware acceleration, and for those it would lead to a much better performance. But, for the ones without hardware acceleration, it would just fallback to software emulation.

And as time goes on, more and more OEMs would probably favor adding the hardware support because people would prefer to buy the ones with faster x86 emulation.

There is Turing Complete [0], although it's still somewhat in development, but it is very much playable.

[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/

That is very true for the the consoles before the Xbox One and PS4.

However, since the release of those 2, seems like Microsoft and Sony use an off the shelf OS + their Shell and APIs (graphics, networking, matchmaking ...etc), which makes sense, especially for Microsoft, as they already develop a very capable x86 kernel, so why not use it.

Afaik, with the introduction of the Xbox one, they used the Windows 8 Core as part of their "One OS" strategy to unify all of their devices on the same platform/OS (eg. consoles, mobile, AR/RV, PCs ...etc).

The current version of the Xbox OS is based on Windows 11 [0].

Ofc, it's not exactly the same as Windows, but, it's largely based on it, at least as far as we know.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_system_software

EDIT: Added the wikipedia link. It's the only source I could access from my work's network, but it show's the OS progression since the the first generation Xbox

Afaik,

- Xbox is basically using Windows Core + the xbox shell and runs the games in virtual machines.

- The PS4/5 use FreeBSD with their shell and libraries on top.

- The Steam Desk ships Linux and a shell on top of it (Steam Big Picture + Proton).

modern consoles are just PCs using PC OSs with custom UIs that fit the control scheme.

The only one that I could think of that's heavily modified is the Switch.

Even if Intel was using "nm" like everyone else, Intel's naming was closer to reality then the rest of the industry. TSMC and Samsung's "nm" is more of a marketing term.

Intel's 10nm is relatively close to TSMC's 7nm in term of density. That's why Intel renamed it to "Intel 7".

Technically, even TSMC calls it N7, and not 7nm.

But as you said, those units are more or less meaningless. Its just marketing.