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Microsoft's new Media Player in Windows eleven is drawing sharp criticism tonight. Benchmarks show it consuming three and a half times more RAM than its predecessor, and the app now charges users for access to popular video codecs that were previously free. It's a reminder that software bloat and quiet monetization often arrive together.
On a more inventive note, someone has brought the ancient X eleven windowing system into the era of spatial computing. UHF X eleven is a new app that runs the decades-old Unix display protocol natively on Apple Vision Pro and VisionOS. It's a strange and fascinating collision of computing eras, and the Hacker News crowd has taken genuine notice, with over a hundred seventy points and thirty comments.
And keeping an eye on the AI race, a new analysis tracking model release cadence across the major labs finds that two of them are meaningfully accelerating their pace of releases while three others appear to be holding steady. It's an early but telling signal about where competitive pressure is actually building, and where it may not be.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
