news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Development Leftovers
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Liam Proven ☛ Why FOSS OSes often don't have power management as good as proprietary ones
(Especially Haiku.)
It may seem odd but it's not.
Haiku is a recreation of a late-1990s OS. News for you: in the 1990s and until then, computers didn't do power management.
The US government had to institute a whole big programme to get companies to add power management.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Star
Aggressive power management is only a thing because silicon vendors lie to their customers. Yes, seriously.
From the mid-1970s for about 30 years, adding more transistors meant computers got faster. CPUs went from 4-bit to 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit, then there was a pause while they gained onboard memory management (Intel 80386/Motorola 68030 generation) then scalar execution and onboard hardware floating point (80486/68040 generation), then onboard L1 cache (Pentium), then superscalar execution and near-board L2 cache (Pentium II), then onboard L2 (Pentium III), then they ran out of ideas to spend CPU transistors on, so the transistor budget went on RAM instead, meaning we needed 64-bit CPUs to track it.
The Pentium 4 was an attempt to crank this as high as it would go by running as fast as possible and accepting a low IPC (instructions per clock).
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla ☛ Mozilla Addons Blog: Rethinking Extension Data Consent: Clarity, Consistency, and Control
Hello, extension developers! I’m Alan, the Product Manager at Mozilla responsible for the Firefox add-ons ecosystem.
I wanted to share news about a project we’re working on that will streamline how extension developers implement user data consent experiences.
Firefox extension data collection policies protect our users
Today, our Add-on policies dictate that any extension that collects or transmits user data must create and display a data consent dialog. This consent dialog must clearly state what type of data is being collected and inform the user about the impact of accepting or declining the data collection.
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Programming/Development
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KDAB ☛ Model/View Drag and Drop in Qt - Part 3
In this third blog post of the Model/View Drag and Drop series (part 1 and part 2), the idea is to implement dropping onto items, rather than in between items. QListWidget and QTableWidget have out of the box support for replacing the value of existing items when doing that, but there aren't many use cases for that. What is much more common is to associate a custom semantic to such a drop. For instance, the examples detailed below show email folders and their contents, and dropping an email onto another folder will move (or copy) the email into that folder.
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Python
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Qt ☛ Year of the Snake: Qt for Python 6.9 is out!
2025 is the year of the snake! 🐍 and for that we are happy to tell you that the Qt for Python development keeps moving forward, by improving our modules PySide6 and shiboken6, but also envisioning the future of Qt and Python integrations.
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Rust
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LWN ☛ Rust 1.86.0 released
Version
1.86.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include support
for trait upcasting, the ability to index multiple elements of HashMaps and
slices mutably, and a number of stabilized APIs.
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