Summary of the week of January 23, 2023

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Microsoft leaves VR bets behind

Among Microsoft's layoffs are the entire teams behind HoloLens, AltSpaceVR, and the Mixed Reality Toolkit, leading to the belief that the company has abandoned its virtual reality and augmented reality projects.

Atom Z520

Someone has brought in the slowest processor we have. It's a Bonnel (2008) with one core and HT. The Atom Z520 comes in last place in both single and multi-threading. Moreover, it achieves last place in multi-threading in all tests except for memory.

End of Windows 10 sales

Microsoft will stop selling versions of Windows 10 intended for home users on January 31. The operating system will no longer receive security updates starting in October 2025.

Doing OCR with a screenshot

Someone has found a way to do OCR on a screenshot using three tools available in any distro in a single line with the help of Linux pipes.

New Hardlimit blog

jordiqui has launched a blog on Hardlimit with a post where he explains everything you need to know about HP's Proliant servers, of which, by the way, he has sent us several validations from the test bench.

Samsung 990 Pro degrades very quickly

It seems that the Samsung 990 Pro SSDs are degrading much faster than normal. In some tests, someone has seen that after two days and normal use, the status has dropped to 98%. Samsung is investigating this problem.

GPU prices remain inflated

In this extensive article, they analyze the market for both new and used graphics cards. Prices are far from recovering to normal, but unlike in 2021, buyers are now willing to wait.

Mozilla turns 25

Yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of the creation of Mozilla. It happened just as Netscape began to lay off people en masse back in January 1998, at which point, it announced that it would release the source code of the legendary browser.

How Wine works

Wine allows Windows programs to run on various POSIX systems like Linux or MacOS. In this post, someone explains how it works and why it's not an emulator.

Apple throttles SSD performance in the low-end range

In the MacBook Pro and the lower-end M2 Mac Mini, the performance of the SSDs is worse than expected. It seems that previous versions of these computers with the same capacity as the current ones had much faster drives.

New split sensors from Canon

Canon has developed new sensors that can take HDR photos in a single shot. The 12.6 MP sensor is divided into 736 areas and each can have a different exposure time depending on the light conditions.

Wine 8.0 available

The eighth version of Wine has been released, which comes with the ability to call 64-bit Unix libraries from 32-bit PE executables, eliminating the need to have 32-bit libraries.

Rust continues to gain ground

The Rust programming language continues to gain followers. While there are more and more code fragments in this language in the Linux kernel, 33% of GStreamer has already migrated.

Miners selling GPUs with repainted chips

Apparently, one way to check if a graphics card is heavily used is to look for a yellow tint on the GPU or VRAM. But miners are repainting the VRAM chips to hide the brand and make the cards look new.