Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
US guitarist and singer Tito Jackson, an original member of the legendary Jackson 5 group and older brother of pop superstars Michael and Janet, has died at the age of 70, his sons said late Sunday.
🪦
The “Windows emulator” half of retrowin32 is an implementation of the Windows API, which means it provides implementations of functions exposed by Windows. I’ve recently changed how calls from emulated code into these native implementations works and this post gives background on how and why.
Pretty nifty exploration of parts of a Rust based implementation of the Windows API.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told corporate staffers in a memo on Monday that they needed to return to the office five days a week by Jan. 2.
COVID changed so much and many folks made big life changes as part of it. I know a number of folks who moved out of Virginia back to their home states or tried a new state altogether. I know of one person who decided to get an RV and travel. He’s still working, just not at the office or a permanent home. That’s the dream.
Anywho, I digress. It makes me wonder how many folks will decide to leave Amazon because of this?
It also makes me wonder if WillowTree will follow suit? Folks who work in the office currently go in three days a week, I believe Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Will we follow suit? Will we cancel all remote work and go back to five days in the office? I kind of doubt it but the thought has crept into my head from time to time.
According to a Guardian analysis, from 2020 to 2022 the real emissions from the “in-house” or company-owned data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple are likely about 662% – or 7.62 times – higher than officially reported.
If these number are accurate regulation is needed to force these companies to build their own power plants using green sources. Wind, sun, and yes, nuclear.
That leads us to the next link.
Microsoft signs deal to revive Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to help power data centers
This is a good move and I’m happy to see Microsoft taking the lead here. Something I don’t see in the article is how does Microsoft intend to transmit the power to their data centers? Do they really use it directly or is it all indirect usage and they’re replacing it on the grid using Three Mile Island?
An option would be to do like Amazon Web Services and build a data center near the power plant.
Perhaps these companies should form a consortium to work toward building out clean energy power plants to service their needs and the wider community? I know, too altruistic.
The Rust programming language is best-known for its memory-related type system features that encode ownership and borrowing: these ensure memory safety (no dangling pointers), and also enforce a kind of “mutual exclusion” discipline that allows for provably safe parallelism. It’s fantastic stuff; but it can also be utterly maddening when one attempts to twist the borrow checker in a direction it doesn’t want to go.
This entire piece is deep enough I need to read it again and again.
Something that made me laugh was the bit about using handles to provide indirect access to memory. Back in the pre-NT days Windows used handles to resources so it could be moved around or paged out as needed. Remember, Windows began life on resource constrained Intel boxes. My first Windows computer was a 286 with 1MB of RAM and a giant 40MB hard drive. You didn’t dare allocate fixed memory, of course some folks would.
You use GlobalAlloc to allocate memory and GlobalLock to access it so you could operate on it. The you’d do a GlobalUnlock when you were done accessing it and finally a GlobalFree to return it to the system.
Those API’s still work today but are largely unnecessary given modern architectures.
Here’s a link to read up on Global and Local Functions.
Rust interests me more and more everyday. Swift is, of course, also memory safe and it is now being used cross platform. That may be a better way for me to venture given I use Swift everyday. Yeah, yeah, I’m doing more React Native these days but I still do Swift dev daily. 😀
Thankfully, there’s plenty to like in iOS 18 even without Apple Intelligence, especially if, like yours truly, you’re the kind of MacStories reader who cares about apps, minor system tweaks, and making your Home Screen look nice.
I’m pointing to Federico’s piece mainly because of the hand drawn illustrations he commissioned. They’re beautiful and completely hand drawn. No AI involved. That’s a beautiful thing.
You do not read history. For God’s sake, reread or read Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism(or at least listen to the podcast). You fail to cite history for your readers, explaining the context of what is occurring, because you insist on thinking you are writing your “first draft of history.” What hubris.
We are at such a dangerous time in our nations history and the press shouldn’t be doing their both sides thing. The NY Times and Washington Post should be reporting on the threat Donal Trump poses. I don’t want an authoritarian in office. We’ve never had a King. We don’t need a King or benevolent dictator.
Our nation is about freedom, governed by laws of, by, and for the people.
LFG! 🇺🇸
Everyone says Chrome devastates Mac battery life, but does it? I tested for 36 hours to find out.
Love it. An independent study conducted by a regular person, not a corporation with interests in seeing it go a certain way.
If folks are curious how their browser use affects their computer go make a test that follows your patterns and get to work.
I’m too lazy to do something like that but maybe you’re not? 😂
Martin Truex Jr. has voiced his frustration over what he describes as “ridiculous” racing tactics following a chaotic conclusion to the race at Watkins Glen International on Sunday. After finishing P20, his best result in over two months, Truex was less than complimentary of 2021 champion Kyle Larson, especially during the late-race restarts.
The notion of racing etiquette has been talked about a lot recently, especially after Austin Dillion dumped Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin in Richmond. The right hook of Hamlin was especially egregious and his hit on the wall was over 40 G. Ouch! 🤕
These Next Generation cars are super tough and a set of younger drivers take full advantage of them by beating and banging competition harder than ever.
Truex retires at the end of the season and he’s just done with it.
Next up, possibly the most entertaining file of them all — App Store Click Activity.csv — 39 megabytes for every tap I’ve made inside the App Store since 2022. It’s simply mind-boggling; this file can’t even be opened in macOS preview!
That’s a shocking about of data collected for a tap of the screen. So much so it’s hard to believe anyone would do it, much less Apple. 😳
