today's leftovers
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Daniel Stenberg ☛ Eighteen years of ABI stability
We know that once we adopt a change, we are stuck with it for decades to come. It makes us double-check every knot before we accept new changes.
Once accepted and shipped, we keep supporting code and features that we otherwise could have reconsidered and perhaps removed. Sometimes we think of a better way to do something after the initial merge, but by then it is too late to change. We can then always introduce new and better ways to do things, but we have to keep supporting the old way as well.
A most fundamental effect is that we can never shrink the list of options we support. We can never actually rename something. Doing new things and features consistently over this long time is hard if not impossible, as we learn new things and paradigms vary through the decades.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Document Foundation ☛ Host the LibreOffice Conference 2025 in your location!
LibreOffice Conference 2024 (Luxembourg) group photo Once a year, the LibreOffice community gathers for a global community event: the LibreOffice Conference. After a series of successful events – Paris, Berlin, Milan, Bern, Aarhus, Brno, Rome, Tirana, Almeria, two events online, Milan again, and Bucharest – it was held in Luxembourg in 2024.
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Chromium
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Wladimir Palant ☛ The Karma connection in Chrome Web Store
Somebody brought to my attention that the Hide YouTube Shorts extension for Chrome changed hands and turned malicious. I looked into it and could confirm that it contained two undisclosed components: one performing affiliate fraud and the other sending users’ every move to some Amazon cloud server. But that wasn’t all of it: I discovered eleven more extensions written by the same people. Some contained only the affiliate fraud component, some only the user tracking, some both. A few don’t appear to be malicious yet.
[...] Now only three still have an identical and completely bogus privacy policy. Sudoku on the Rocks happens to be among these three, and the same privacy policy is linked by the Sudoku on the Rocks mobile apps which are officially developed by Karma Shopping Ltd.
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FSF
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Databases
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Ruben Schade ☛ pgdoc.link is wildly useful
My “home page” is a single private Omake file of links to commonly accessed sites and documentation, so I can quickly access what I need and sync it easily across browsers and devices. I don’t update it that often, so when I do, it’s usually for something really useful.
This is one such occasion. I’ve had two dozen links to various Postgres docs, but depesz has just made navigating them all much easier with his new site pgdoc.link: [...]
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Open Access/Content
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Techdirt ☛ Where Open Access Has Failed To Reform Academic Publishing, Perhaps Antitrust Law Will Succeed
The open access movement has been trying for over 20 years to promote the widest access to knowledge. Sadly, as numerous Walled Culture posts have chronicled, what should be a matter of social justice has been subverted by clever and cynical moves from the academic publishing industry in order to retain their fabulous profit margins. As a result, the open access movement has failed to deliver cost-free access to academic papers, or to ease the process of sharing knowledge, at least on the scale that it initially aimed for. That makes a completely different approach to tackling the problems of academic publishing, using US antitrust laws, extremely interesting.
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Games
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ScummVM ☛ I don't need to remind you that this investigation is strictly unofficial
We are excited to announce that Rise of the Dragon is now ready for public testing. This is the first of a small number of games built using the DGDS (Dynamix Game Development System) engine.
The Dynamix name may be familiar – bought by Sierra in 1990, the Dynamix brand continued and became well known for action and puzzle games like The Incredible Machine, A10 Tank Killer, and Red Baron. They also made a few adventures using the custom DGDS engine.
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TechSpot ☛ Snapdragon 8 Elite arrives with Linux support, potentially unlocking PC gaming on phones and tablets
Apple has spent years trying to steer PC software developers from x86 to Arm, and Qualcomm recently joined the effort. Meanwhile, recent Linux software developments have made translating Windows software easier than ever. The trends might converge in a new generation of Snapdragon-powered mobile devices that support Linux out of the box.
Qualcomm engineering director Trilok Soni recently confirmed that the company's Linux team published Linux kernel updates for the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor. Qualcomm unveiled the SoC earlier this month, targeting a new generation of flagship phones and tablets supporting Android and Linux.
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