Veteran Microsoft engineer says original Task Manager was only 80KB so it could run smoothly on 90s computers — original utility used a smart technique to determine whether it was the only running instance

Dave Plummer used several clever techniques to ensure that Windows Task Manager will always run while cutting the performance hit on your hardware when when it’s opened.
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Linux 7.0 enables three new AI-specific keys for keyboards, an apparent expansion beyond the Copilot key — Google authors both the HID spec and the kernel patch

The Linux 7.0 kernel has merged support for three new keycodes intended for a coming wave of laptops with dedicated AI agent keys.
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Valve engineer shocks Linux community with game-changing VRAM hack for 8GB GPUs — breakthrough solution turbocharges gaming by prioritizing VRAM for games while background tasks take a back seat

Natalie Vock, a dev on Valve’s Linux graphics driver team has introduced new fixes that optimize VRAM usage for games in Linux. Previously, any background task could make the OS evict game data from VRAM and throw it into …

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Clippy, Microsoft’s hapless Office assistant, was retired 25 years ago today — its irritating spirit lives on in 100+ Copilots

Microsoft’s Clippy was put out to pasture a quarter century ago. This hapless, and some would add ‘irritating,’ productivity assistant would no longer be enabled by default in Office, starting April 11, 2001.
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Original Apollo 11 code open-sourced by NASA — original Command Module and Lunar Module code repos are now public domain resources

The historic computer software code that took Apollo 11 to the moon has been open-sourced and is available to anyone to read, download, and tinker with.
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Microsoft simplifies Windows Insider program — fewer channels, and switching without wiping your device

Microsoft is simplifying the Windows Insider program with fewer channels, making it easier to switch between them and enable the latest features.
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‘I want to cancel’: YouTube Premium quietly hikes its US prices for the first time in three years, forcing many users to consider the unthinkable

Google has aggravated YouTube Premium subscribers once again with an unexpected price hike.

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Microsoft has begun stripping out AI from Windows 11 — but it’s already being criticized for not going far enough

Notepad change shows a rebrand of AI tools, not a removal, and it has skeptics worried.

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French government says it’s ditching Windows for Linux — country accelerates plans to ditch US-based software in digital sovereignty push

France is accelerating its digital sovereignty plans. In an official press release this week, the country’s DINUM announced its “exit from Windows in favor of workstations running on the Linux operating system.”
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Ambitious hacker reduces worst-case memory latency by up to 93%, but with severe downsides — 1960s bottleneck overcome by hedging memory accesses to avoid running into DRAM refresh stalls

The clever software trick works on both x86 and Arm to radically reduce worst-case memory latency, but it has severe limitations, too.
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