This is not a fine, tho. It's just the amount that Apple would have paid in taxes, if the special deal didn't exist.
The EU is not imposing any fines on Apple. They're just ordering Ireland to collect the taxes owed to them (Ireland), since the tax deal was found to be unfair/illegal.
Yes. Which if you think about it, is doubly unfair. First Ireland reaped the benefits of keeping Apple in the country; then it gets paid Apple's taxes anyway.
Sure, this puts a stop to the practice and makes it much harder to sell such deals in the future, but for the moment Ireland had its apple cake and ate it, too.
One solution you could use to get around this weird design decision, is to use the reader mode in Firefox (I'm not sure what is the alternative for other browsers).
I think that's the wrong analogy. A more correct one would be "Should we blame a car company for a broken engine, that was modified after it was sold to you?".
A kernel level driver from a 3rd party is something that you willingly add to the OS, it wasn't there.
Just because windows allow you to do it, doesn't mean you should.
I mean, you can apply some dangerous mods to your car's engine, but you probably shouldn't, and if you do, it's your responsibility, not the car company.
If you had a support contract with Microsoft for your Windows installs and CrowdStrike is breaking your system they'll tell you to go talk to CrowdStrike, yes.
Ok I didn't realize that crowdstrike was more of competitor or maybe a hacky add-on (like a NOS). I was under the impression that it was something more in cooperation (not owned by or anything) but with Microsoft in terms of market support.
CrowdStrike absolutely is a competitor to Microsoft. Microsoft sells licensed software in the exact same market as CrowdStrike. Microsoft even sells Microsoft Defender for MacOS and Linux. They're direct competitors.
Google is not promising this out of the goodness of their heart. They're just getting ahead of what the EU is planning to mandate [0], and doing that to get some good marketing while they're at it.
So, while Google's track record leaves a lot to be desired, in this, I think they'll keep their promise, either because they actually care, or because the EU will force them to. Either way, we, the end users, will benefit from it.
And this will apply to all electronic device makers. That's probably why Samsung also increased their updates policy to five years as well.
>Google is not promising this out of the goodness of their heart. They're just getting ahead of what the EU is planning to mandate
If that was the case then why did Google exceed the requirement by 2 years? Additionally, Google is providing 7 years of OS upgrades and 7 years of security updates. Google could have easily just do what they did with the Pixel 7 and offer 3 years of OS upgrades and 5 years of security updates, thus, meeting these EU requirement of 5 years of updates. So to claim that Google offering an industry leading 7 years of OS upgrades and 7 years of security updates is not out of the "goodness of their heart" is being disingenuous IMO.
Microsoft could still work with their partners to implement this. Yes, the PC market tend to be fragmented, but what I assume would happen is that some ARM PCs will have the hardware acceleration, and for those it would lead to a much better performance. But, for the ones without hardware acceleration, it would just fallback to software emulation.
And as time goes on, more and more OEMs would probably favor adding the hardware support because people would prefer to buy the ones with faster x86 emulation.
I only know the dev environment on the Xbox up to 360 and the Playstation up to PS3, but both have OS APIs that differ quite a bit from their 'desktop counterparts'. E.g. even though the PS has a FreeBSD kernel, this has little relevance for development on the console, it's just a shortcut for Sony, but not for game devs (for instance the 3D rendering, sound, input etc... APIs are completely custom). On the Xbox it was the other way around the kernel was written from scratch (AFAIK) but had some stripped down Win32 and DirectX APIs layered on top to simplify porting, but in any case the system APIs were different enough that one couldn't simply move much existing code based over without at least some adjustments. Some game dev APIs originating on the Xbox were even moved to Windows, to simplify porting Xbox games back to Windows.
That is very true for the the consoles before the Xbox One and PS4.
However, since the release of those 2, seems like Microsoft and Sony use an off the shelf OS + their Shell and APIs (graphics, networking, matchmaking ...etc), which makes sense, especially for Microsoft, as they already develop a very capable x86 kernel, so why not use it.
Afaik, with the introduction of the Xbox one, they used the Windows 8 Core as part of their "One OS" strategy to unify all of their devices on the same platform/OS (eg. consoles, mobile, AR/RV, PCs ...etc).
The current version of the Xbox OS is based on Windows 11 [0].
Ofc, it's not exactly the same as Windows, but, it's largely based on it, at least as far as we know.
EDIT: Added the wikipedia link. It's the only source I could access from my work's network, but it show's the OS progression since the the first generation Xbox
Even if Intel was using "nm" like everyone else, Intel's naming was closer to reality then the rest of the industry. TSMC and Samsung's "nm" is more of a marketing term.
Intel's 10nm is relatively close to TSMC's 7nm in term of density. That's why Intel renamed it to "Intel 7".
Technically, even TSMC calls it N7, and not 7nm.
But as you said, those units are more or less meaningless. Its just marketing.
Intel have a different process that used to documetned and marketed as 7nm. That process since has been renamed to Intel 4.
Regardless of discussions about actual density and the meaningless, it's important to make the discussions between Intel 7 and 7nm (now Intel 4) to prevent confusion. Otherwise people might mistakenly think Alder Lake is on the process previously known as Intel 7nm.
Fortunately, once we get to Intel 4, it becomes unambitious again.
The EU is not imposing any fines on Apple. They're just ordering Ireland to collect the taxes owed to them (Ireland), since the tax deal was found to be unfair/illegal.