OSnews

As some of you may undoubtedly know, I'm a bit of a sucker for Palm OS. These past few years, I've been busy collecting ROMs for the Palm OS emulator and simulator, making sure I have all the major Palm OS releases covered. There's really not much of a reason to do this - I have working devices which are a much better option than the emulators/simulators in most cases - other than to have a complete collection I can keep around forever.Perfection needs little evolution.From top left to bottom right, you're looking at Palm OS 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, 5.3 (a Palm Zire ROM), 5.4.9 (the last released version of Palm OS available on real devices), and Palm OS 6.1.0 Cobalt (the last version of Palm OS; no 6.x device has ever been released). This is a pretty complete collection, and while it doesn't contain every released version of Palm OS, it covers the most important ones, and provides a great overview of the development of the operating system.One important version is actually missing from this screenshot: Palm OS 5.5, whose official name is actually Garnet OS 5.5. Garnet OS 5.5 was developed by ACCESS (current owner of Palm OS and the associated IP), but was never released on or for devices - its sole function was to serve as the operating system running inside the Garnet VM. Garnet VM was a virtual machine developed to allow Palm OS applications to run on the ACCESS Linux Platform, a Linux-based mobile operating system that never gained any traction; no ALP devices were ever released.As some of you may remember, Garnet VM was also released for Nokia's Maemo. I have a Nokia N900 (maybe even two) that can run Garnet VM, and while it's no longer available from ACCESS itself, it's easy to find all around the web if you know where to look. I'm not sure if my N900 is properly set up (I think it is), but it would be trivial for me to install Garnet VM on it and play with it.So, between my Palm/CLIÉ devices and all these emulators/simulators, every major Palm OS version seems covered, right? Well, no - not entirely. There's quite a few exotic devices, such as the AlphaSmart Dana, the TapWave Zodiac, or the Fossil Palm OS smartwatch, but those are disproportionately hard to come by. Setting those aside, I thought I had all my bases covered.Turns out - as is so often the case - I was wrong. On Twitter, q3hardcore asked "do you have this?"As it turns out, and entirely unbeknownst to me, ACCESS actually released the Garnet VM for Linux and Windows. After coming to the conclusion that this piece of software was entirely impossible to find online (try it), q3hardcore came to the rescue once again, and uploaded his or her copy of the package online. Questionable legality aside, I didn't have to think twice.The purpose of the Garnet VM for Linux and Windows was to allow Palm OS application developers to test their Palm OS applications to see if they would run on the Garnet VM included in the ACCESS Linux Platform, and make changes if needed.This Garnet VM is an amazing piece of technology. It's the Palm OS userland - version 5.5.0 - running on a Linux kernel running on an ARM emulator running on Windows or Linux. The ARM emulator in question is called Janeiro, and it emulates a Zylonite (PXA320) development board, revision B1. As it boots up, there's zero indication that it's running a Linux kernel - the X 'cross' appears briefly (at least, it looks like the X cross), but that's it.The major difference between the Garnet VM and the Palm OS 5.x and 6.x simulators is that while the simulators run x86 Palm OS, Garnet VM runs an ARM Palm OS userland atop an ARM Linux kernel. This means - at least, in theory - that ARM Palm OS applications should run decently well on Garnet VM, something you can't do with the Palm OS simulator, because they would need to be recompiled to x86. I say 'in theory', because the Garnet VM documentation notes that not all Palm OS libraries and components are present, and that only "well-behaved" applications are compatible.I've only had access to the Garnet VM for Windows for a short while, and I haven't yet had the time to really dive into it. For instance, I've yet to figure out how to get applications to run inside the VM, since the usual methods don't seem to want to cooperate. I'll spend some more of my free time on playing with it over the coming weeks to better figure out how it all works.In any event, the Garnet VM for Windows and Linux is a unique piece of computing history, and I am absolutely delighted to be able to add it to my collection of Palm OS memorabilia. I've briefly considered zipping up all the emulators, simulators, and ROMs I have into a nice preconfigured, documented package for people to play with, but that's not something I can do for obvious copyright, trademark, and patent reasons. Most of this stuff isn't particularly hard to find, but it does require a bit of Palm experience to put it all together and document it. I don't think I'll ever get permission from ACCESS, so that's the end of that idea.Still, I think it's important that I continue to collect these Palm OS ROMs and emulators/simulators, because as the years go by, more and more Palm devices will start to break down or get lost, leaving us without to ability to experience this amazingly lovable operating system. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

A year ago, we set out to explore what web browsers might look like in years to come. Now, you can try Opera Neon - a concept browser that gives you a glimpse into the future of desktop browsers.A little too quirky for my tastes, but hats off to Opera for trying out new approaches -browsers feel dead and lifeless at the moment.

I don't think we'll ever see Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and the cliffhanger conclusion makes Half-Life 3 unlikely as well. The best chance of Half-Life getting a second wind will likely come if J. J. Abrams and Bad Robot can get the Half-Life film to screen. If that comes to fruition, and it doesn't bomb like almost every game movie before it, maybe, just maybe there's a chance of Gordon Freemanâs story continuing. Roll your eyes at the movie mention if you want, but how else will this franchise get a pulse again?The interview you are about to read sheds some insight into how Valve works as a developer. Yes, someone at Valve could just say, "Let's make another Half-Life" and do it, but there are huge risks and hurdles involved in doing that. Prior to this interview, I was in the camp of, "Valve just doesn't get it." Now I'm in the camp of, "Valve is probably doing the right thing, but it's disappointing." This interview opened my eyes to Valve's unique way of developing games, but also provided a bit of closure for someone who wants to see Half-Life continue. In the days before publishing this story, I reached out to Valve one last time for comment, but my request went unanswered. Without further delay, here's the interview.This is a must-read.

That's where the company's new software tool Qbsolv comes in. Qbsolv is designed to help developers program D-Wave machines without needing a background in quantum physics. A few of D-Wave's partners are already using the tool, but today the company released Qbsolv as open source, meaning anyone will be able to freely share and modify the software."Not everyone in the computer science community realizes the potential impact of quantum computing," says Fred Glover, a mathematician at the University of Colorado, Boulder who has been working with Qbsolv. "Qbsolv offers a tool that can make this impact graphically visible, by getting researchers and practitioners involved in charting the future directions of quantum computing developments."

VentureBeat has a great, in-depth sourced look at the rise of and fall of Ara, Google's modular phone project. One paragraph in particular stands out to me."One of the modules that we were working on was basically like a tiny aquarium for your phone," said the source. "It was a little tiny biome that would go inside of a module and it would have a microscope on the bottom part, and it would have live tardigrades and algae - some people call them water bears. They are the tiniest living organism. We had this idea to build a tardigrade module and we'd build a microscope with it. So you'd have this app on your phone and you could essentially look at the tardigrades up close and watch them floating around." Brooklyn-based art, design, and technology agency Midnight Commercial conceived the idea, and was commissioned by Google to build it, demonstrating the depth of what developers could create.If the people working on Ara had the guts to come up with and actually build things like this, they were on the right track. This is exactly the kind of crazy, outlandish stuff that would be a perfect fit and marketing gimmick for a crazy, outlandish product like Ara.I am incredibly sad that Ara has been cancelled. I realise full well it would never be the kind of massive product like the Galaxy series or the iPhone, but I don't care - I just really, really like the idea, the concept, and the possibilities, mass appeal be damned.

The beauty of the internet: there's always someone else who is also interested in the things you're interested in. It turns out, even people who are working on trying to bring Mac OS 9 to the PowerPC G5 can find each other online. Now, it's important to note that even the people themselves acknowledge that this project is a very, very long shot and unlikely to succeed - but that doesn't mean it isn't worth trying and learning something along the way.This project (we call it "CountDown G5") is ambitious, sure, and unlikely to succeed. But a few things make it worthwhile:I am learning a lot about low-level kernel programming, which I find fascinating as a hobby.We are crafting a build system in MPW, inspired by that source leak, for very low-level assembly and linking of a NewWorld ROM. This will be useful to other hackers in the future.We have an intermediate goal of increasing the usable logical address space on OS 9 to near the 2 GB hardware limit.The G5 isn't all that different. It has facilities for running 32-bit OSes, and early G5s thankfully left the Block Allocation Table mechanism intact.Be sure to follow the thread on the forum if you're interested in this type of exotic hacking.Meanwhile, also definitely 100% be sure to follow Steven Troughton-Smith, who, over the past few days, has been doing an absolutely crazy amount of work on things that go far beyond my comfort zone (he pointed the above thread out to me just now). He's been investigating all the work the Qemu people have been doing on PowerPC emulation, and he's trying to get all the early and often exotic Mac OS X builds to boot on Qemu. This includes things like altering and recompiling BootX, diving deep into Open Firmware to remove a number of 'fixes' put in place that prevented early OS X versions from booting, and tons of other things.

Jehanne is a new distributed operating system designed for programmers.The core values that lead the development are simplicity and security. Jehanne is a fork of Harvey (which in turn is a fork of Plan 9 from Bell Labs merged with Nix's kernel sources) but diverges from the design and conventions of its ancestors whenever they are at odds with its goals. Read about development progress made in 2016.

Today we are excited to be releasing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 15002 for PC to Windows Insiders in the Fast ring. This is a BIG update so please take time to look through all of the new changes we detail below.Usually, these new Windows 10 Insider Preview builds are a pretty low-key affair, but this one has a ton of changes, new features and fixes, and the blog post does a good job of summarising them. They cover things like improving resizing performance, various Edge updates, tile folders in the Start menu, a new share UI, and the first steps towards replacing the dreaded Character Map with a new, faster way of inputting special characters.It really feels like Microsoft is at the point where they can address the various relatively minor things that start adding up when you use Windows.

Rux's goal is to become a safe general-purpose microkernel. It tries to take advantage of Rust's memory model - ownership and lifetime. While the kernel will be small, unsafe code should be kept minimal. This makes updating functionalities of the kernel hassle-free.Rux uses a design that is similar to seL4. While there won't be formal verification in the short term, it tries to address some design issues of seL4, for example, capability allocation.The code is very approachable for anyone interested in capability-based microkernel design.

Robigalia is a project with two goals:Build a robust Rust ecosystem around seL42. Create a highly reliable persistent capability OS, continuing the heritage of EROS and CoyotosThe year-in-review blogpost has a nice overview of where the project stands.

Back before all-digital music, back before the Digital Compact Cassette, back before even the Digital Audio Tape existed, there was a strange audio device that briefly captured the imagination of Hi-Fi freaks across the world. The Elcaset, as it was called, was an enlarged cassette that started in Japan, wove its hidden, spinning spools around the world, and then finished, appropriately enough, in Finland.As someone who swore by MiniDisc up until quite recently, I love obscure audio formats. This article is from the summer of last year, but I only came across it just now thanks to Atlas Obscura.

Viva Amiga is a wonderful look at the the history of the platform, the people who built it, and the users who loved it. The opening title says it all: "One Amazing Computer. One chance to save the company. One chance to win the PC wars." This message sets the stage nicely for a dramatic and passionate tale.You can watch the documentary online, but it isn't free.

In terms of hardware, the Nokia 6 offers a 5.5-inch Full HD display with 2.5D curved glass, Snapdragon 430 SoC, 4GB of RAM, 64GB storage, microSD slot, dual-SIM connectivity, 16MP camera at the back with PDAF, Dolby Atmos sound with stereo speakers, Bluetooth 4.1, LTE, 3000mAh battery, and a fingerprint sensor. The phone runs Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box.Not exactly the most exciting phone.

In short, Amazon is building the operating system of the home - its name is Alexa - and it has all of the qualities of an operating system you might expect:All kinds of hardware manufacturers are lining up to build Alexa-enabled devices, and will inevitably compete with each other to improve quality and lower prices.Even more devices and appliances are plugging into Alexa's easy-to-use and flexible framework, creating the conditions for a moat: appliances are a lot more expensive than software, and much longer lasting, which means everyone who buys something that works with Alexa is much less likely to switch.It's definitely an interesting case to make - and Ben Thomspon does it well - but I still have a very, very hard time seeing voice-driven interfaces as anything but a gimmick at this point in time. Every point I made about this subject in the Summer of 2016 still stands today - limited functionality, terrible speech recognition, inability to deal with dialects and accents, and the complete and utter lack of support for people who live multilingual lives.I can't hammer this last point home often enough: not a single one of the voice-driven interfaces we have today - Alexa, Siri, Google Now, Google Assistant, Cortana, whatever - support multilingual use. Some of them may allow you to go deep into a menu structure to change input language (while some, like smartwatches, even require a full wipe and reset), but that's not a solution to the problem of switching language sometimes even several times a minute, something multilingual people have to do dozens of times every day. And again - there are literally hundreds of millions of people who lead multilingual lives.Heck, Alexa is only available in English and German!If voice-driven interfaces are really as important as people make them out to be, they've got at least a decade of development ahead of them before they become actually useful and usable for the vast majority of the world.

Late last year we reported on Project NEON - the upcoming UI upgrade for Windows 10. Recently we managed a closer look at Microsoft's internal plans for Project NEON and the future of Windows 10's UI (user-interface). Right of the bat I don't want readers to be fooled by those who suggest this is a major or a complete overhaul of Windows 10's design language. In fact, it's a fairly minor update that builds on the current Windows 10 UI (aka MDL2).Nevertheless, change is always exciting, so here's an early look at NEON.Project NEON will heavily focus on animations, simplicity, and consistency - essentially bringing back Windows 7's Aero Glass and mixing it up with animations like the ones from the Windows Phone 8/7 era.This won't be the final design that makes it into Windows, but still - they should really fix that ridiculous border around the titlebar widgets. Other than that - it seems they want to make it less bright and colourful than Metro, which I guess a lot of people will be happy about. Question remains though - there are barely any Metro applications worth using today, so will this change anything?

Redox OS, a microkernel OS written in Rust, hast just released version 0.0.6, which includes bug fixes and and update to Rust.From the project's 2016 in review post:Today, we have a pretty mature project. It contains many core, usable components. It is already usable, but it is still not mature yet to be used as a replacement for Linux (like BSD is), but weâre slowly getting there.The kernel was rewritten, a memory allocator was added, rendering libc out of the dependency chain, several applications were added, a file system were added, a window manager and display server was implemented, and so on.

Redux OS, a microkernel OS written in Rust, hast just released version 0.0.6, which includes bug fixes and and update to Rust.From the project's 2016 in review post:Today, we have a pretty mature project. It contains many core, usable components. It is already usable, but it is still not mature yet to be used as a replacement for Linux (like BSD is), but weâre slowly getting there.The kernel was rewritten, a memory allocator was added, rendering libc out of the dependency chain, several applications were added, a file system were added, a window manager and display server was implemented, and so on.

Ahead of CES 2017, TCL teased that they would be offering a look at the first device to come out of their smartphone software and brand licensing deal with BlackBerry and they've now made good on that, though, they're keeping a lot of the finer details surrounding the phone secret for just a bit longer.It runs Android, and it's got a keyboard. What more do you need to know? The world needs more of these types of phones.

This has been the winter of our discontent. 2016 was the year the tone changed. There's always been a lot of criticism and griping about anything Apple does (and doesn't do - it can't win) but in 2016 I feel like the tone of the chatter about Apple changed and got a lot more negative.This is worrisome on a number of levels and I've been thinking about it a lot. I'm used to watching people kvetch about the company, but this seems - different. One reason: a lot of the criticisms are correct.Apple, for the first time in over a decade, simply isn't firing on all cylinders. Please don't interpret that as "Apple is doomed" because it's not, but there are things it's doing a lot less well than it could - and has. Apple's out of sync with itself.Here are a few of the things I think indicate Apple has gotten itself out of kilter and is in need of some course correction.This post by Chuq Von Rospach has been widely shared and debated all over the web, and it has some great insights into Apple's 2016. Note that Chuq Von Rospach is a former Apple (and Palm) employee, and certainly has the credentials to talk about these matters.

Me, almost seven years ago (2010), about the dearth of news about alternative operating systems:OSNews has moved on. As much as it saddens me to see the technology world settling on Macwinilux (don't flatter yourself, those three are pretty much the same), it's a fact I have to deal with. It's my job to fill OSNews with lots of interesting news to discuss, and even though I would love to be able to talk about how new and exciting operating systems are going to take over the desktop world, I have to be realistic too. Geeks (meaning you and I) have made a very clear choice, and it doesn't seem like anything's about to bring back those exciting early days of OSNews.Me, almost four years ago (2013), about why there are no mobile hobbyist operating systems:So, what is the cause? I personally think it has to do with how we perceive our smartphones and tablets. They are much more personal, and I think we are less open to messing with them than we were to messing with our PCs a decade ago. Most of us have only one modern smartphone, and we use it every day, so we can't live with a hobbyist operating system where, say, 3G doesn't work or WiFi disconnects every five seconds due to undocumented stuff in the chip. Android ROMs may sound like an exception, but they really aren't; virtually all of them support your hardware fully.With people unwilling to sacrifice their smartphone to play with alternative systems, it makes sense that fewer people are interested in developing these alternative systems. It is, perhaps, telling that Robert Szeleney, the programmer behind SkyOS, moved to developing mobile games. And that Wim Cools, the developer of TriangleOS, moved towards developing web applications for small businesses. Hard work that puts food on the table, sure, and as people get older priorities shift, but you would expect new people to step up to the plate and take over.So far, this hasn't happened. All we can hope for is that the mobile revolution is still young, and that we should give it some more time for a new, younger generation of gifted programmers to go for that grand slam.I sincerely hope so.I don't know, for some mysterious reason I figured I'd link to these seven and four year old stories.

Apple, maker of the ever-popular iPhone, is being sued on allegations that its FaceTime app contributed to the highway death of a 5-year-old girl named Moriah Modisette. In Denton County, Texas, on Christmas Eve 2014, a man smashed into the Modisette family's Toyota Camry as it stopped in traffic on southbound Interstate 35W. Police say that the driver was using the FaceTime application and never saw the brake lights ahead of him. In addition to the tragedy, father James, mother Bethany, and daughter Isabella all suffered non-fatal injuries during the crash two years ago.The Modisette family now wants Apple to pay damages for the mishap. The family alleges the Cupertino, California-based technology company had a duty to warn motorists against using the app and that it could have used patented technology to prohibit drivers from utilizing the app. I feel for the grieving family, of course, but this is, in no way, Apple's fault. The only person responsible for the horrible death is the driver using Facetime, and possibly - although that's probably quite a stretch - the person he was using FaceTime with, but that's it.

I'm going to use PICO-8, which its creator, Joseph "Zep" White, calls a 'fantasy console', but really it's like an indie-fied emulator of the computers I grew up with, like the BBC B. When you start it, you're presented with a 128 by 128 pixel display glitching into life, this little do-do-do-do! jingle, and a command prompt.Everything you need to make games is right there: a mini Lua code editor, sprite and map editors, and sound and music editors. It's reactive, instant to test to see if things work, and generally delightful. And the stuff people have made in it is extraordinary. Little short-form games: colourful, fun, immediate, varied. Type SPLORE into the command prompt and this little browser for games posted to the PICO-8 forum comes up. Since no game, including its graphics, is bigger than a 65K text file, you're playing them pretty much instantly. It's lovely.This is just the first article in a series.

Software is the umbrella term for computer programs and libraries, the coded logic that makes our machines tick. At the root of all software is the code, the instructions that enable a human to tell a machine what to do. This code is written in one of the hundreds of different programming languages - such as C, Java, or Python - each of which has its own eccentricities and context-dependent advantages.Yet regardless of the programming language being used, the functionality, logic, and efficiency of the language are always paramount - unless, of course, you're talking about

Ending this year, Ron G. Minnich has got Harvey running in RISC-V architecture, booting Harvey on Spike (ISA Simulator) and running rc shell on it. But he never rests and now is working on bringing it to QEMU and to FPGA. It's a big step for Harvey because we fixed some multiarch issues across the source and Ron found some bugs in timer interrupts in the hardware, so we all learned something.What is Harvey OS?Harvey is an effort to provide a modern, distributed, 64 bit operating system. A different environment for researching and finding new lines of work. It can be built with gcc and clang and has an ANSI/POSIX compliant subsystem.Two news items about alternative operating systems in a row?The year's off to a good start.

Hyperion Entertainment is proud to announce the immediate release of AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 1 for all supported systems including PowerPC equipped 68K Amiga machines. Building on the existing AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition platform, Update 1 is the culmination of many man-months of work by our dedicated team of AmigaOS developers, translators and beta testers. It delivers a selection of new features and a host of bug fixes.The naming scheme still confuses me.

Marcan42 of Fail0verflow fame was at the CCC33 event this year, to explain how Fail0verflow exploited the PS4 hardware in order to run Linux on the PS4.The presentation goes back to all the pain the hackers had to go through in order to make Linux compatible with the PS4 architecture, which Marcan42 described several times throughout the presentation as "not being a PC" as it lacks lots of the legacy architecture bits required for a computer to constitute what is known today as an IBM compatible PC.Be sure to watch the actual presentation. It's quite informative and detailed.

Marcan42 of Fail0verflow fame was at the CCC33 event this year, to explain how Fail0verflow exploited the PS4 hardware in order to run Linux on the PS4.The presentation goes back to all the pain the hackers had to go through in order to make Linux compatible with the PS4 architecture, which Marcan42 described several times throughout the presentation as "not being a PC" as it lacks lots of the legacy architecture bits required for a computer to constitute what is known today as an IBM compatible PC.Be sure to watch the actual presentation. It's quite informative and detailed.

Last October at the Windows 10 event in New York City, Microsoft officially unveiled the Windows 10 Creators Update, codenamed "Redstone 2". At the event, Microsoft stated that the update will be released in "early 2017" but we didn't know when exactly the update will arrive.Until now, anyway.Per my sources, Microsoft will be releasing the Windows 10 Creators Update this April.The more regular, smaller updates Windows gets now is such a huge step up from the monolithic releases of yore.

The third and most important thing to consider is this is the only device you can buy right now that supports Google Tango. Tango is Google-made software that, combined with specific hardware, offers advanced 3D sensing. If basic augmented reality creates a flat layer of digital information on your smartphone screen - think Pokémon Go, with the game content built on top of your real world - Tango goes beyond that, to the point where it interprets and measures spaces and objects around you and then lets you interact with digital things as though they're really, physically there.Tango sits in that category of technologies like Google Glass and virtual reality in that you can see it takes a lot of research and innovation to build, but that's hard to see a use for in my personal life. It makes much more sense in countless professional environments, but it'll need a lot more work - judging by this review - before it'd be ready for that.

The well-choreographed customs routine is part of a hidden bounty of perks, tax breaks and subsidies in China that supports the world's biggest iPhone factory, according to confidential government records reviewed by The New York Times, as well as more than 100 interviews with factory workers, logistics handlers, truck drivers, tax specialists and current and former Apple executives. The package of sweeteners and incentives, worth billions of dollars, is central to the production of the iPhone, Apple's best-selling and most profitable product.Fascinating look at what the local Chinese governments do to entice Foxconn.

The trouble with being a former typesetter is that every day online is a new adventure in torture. Take the shape of quotation marks. These humble symbols are a dagger in my eye when a straight, or typewriter-style, pair appears in the midst of what is often otherwise typographic beauty. It's a small, infuriating difference: "this" versus âthis.âI'll stop replacing curly quotes with straight quotes on OSNews the day the tech industry gives me back my Dutch quotation marks (âLike soâ, he said) and adds multilingual support to Google Now and Siri and so on (which right now require a full wipe to change languages, making them useless for hundreds of millions of people who live bilingual lives).Yes, I can be petty.

Microsoft knows this, and have announced at WinHEC that they are looking at making the use of Precision Touchpads a requirement for devices part of the Hardware Compatibility Program, for future versions of Windows 10 after the Creators Update. This, in theory, would mean hardware makers would have no choice but to implement Precision Touchpads rather than touchpads from Synaptics or some other 3rd party trackpad maker if they wish to preload Windows 10 on their devices.I get the impression that most Windows laptops have perfectly decent trackpad hardware, but they just really suck at the software aspect of the story. More often than not, trackpads will function like a PS/2 mouse, with little to no regard for them actually being surfaces instead of rolling balls or bouncing lasers. Even when laptop makers include terrible third-party drivers with horrid configuration applications, the end result is still garbage.I've never actually used one of these fabled Precision Trackpads before, so I can't attest to their quality, but from what I hear, they're almost Apple-level in terms of quality.And honestly - even a potato would be better than the average Windows trackpad.

Clearly there was something extraordinary about Word for Windows. Part of its success was due to Microsoft's marketing acumen. But it was also a stunning technical achievement, and its ability to run on ordinary PCs created the first popular vanguard of the new graphics-oriented style of document preparation.Remember, this was a time when a typical personal computer might have an 8 Mhz processor, 1 megabyte of memory, a 20 megabyte hard disk, and a floppy disk drive. How did Word accomplish so much with so little?There's only one way to understand the magic in detail: read the code. With the permission of Microsoft Corporation, the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code of Word for Windows version 1.1a as it was on January 10, 1991.Quite amazing that we're getting access to the source code for pivotal software like this.

PIXEL represents our best guess as to what the majority of users are looking for in a desktop environment: a clean, modern user interface; a curated suite of productivity software and programming tools, both free and proprietary; and the Chromium web browser with useful plugins, including Adobe Flash, preinstalled. And all of this is built on top of Debian, providing instant access to thousands of free applications.Put simply, it's the GNU/Linux we would want to use.The Raspberry Pi's "own" Linux distribution is now also available for Windows and Mac - i.e., a live image you can run on your PC.

This text is a practical guide to writing your own x86 operating system. It is designed to give enough help with the technical details while at the same time not reveal too much with samples and code excerpts. We've tried to collect parts of the vast (and often excellent) expanse of material and tutorials available, on the web and otherwise, and add our own insights into the problems we encountered and struggled with.

Apple removed the "battery time remaining" indicator from the battery status menu in the latest version 10.12.2 of macOS. Apparently it wasn't accurate.Did you know that MacBook batteries have a dedicated chip that keeps track of how much energy goes in and out of the battery during all times? For example, the 13" MacBook Pro from 2015 uses a BQ20Z451 "battery fuel gauge chip" from Texas Instruments.

The FreeDOS 1.2 release is an updated, more modern FreeDOS. You'll see that we changed many of the packages. Some packages were replaced, deprecated by newer and better packages. We also added other packages. And we expanded what we should include in the FreeDOS distribution. Where FreeDOS 1.0 and 1.1 where fairly spartan distributions with only "core" packages and software sets, the FreeDOS 1.2 distribution includes a rich set of additional packages. We even include games.But the biggest change you are likely to notice in FreeDOS 1.2 is the updated installer. Jerome Shidel wrote an entirely new FreeDOS install program, and it looks great! We focused on keeping the new installer simple and easy to use. While many DOS users in 2016 are experienced DOS programmers and DOS power users, we often see many new users to FreeDOS, and I wanted to make the install process pleasant for them. The default mode for the installer is very straightforward, and you only have to answer a few questions to install FreeDOS on your system. There's also an "Advanced" mode where power users can tweak the install and customize the experience.Great Christmas gift.

Every technology embodies the values of the age in which it was created. When the atomic bomb was being developed in the mid-nineteen-forties, the destruction of cities and the deliberate targeting of civilians was just another military tactic. It was championed as a means to victory. The Geneva Conventions later classified those practices as war crimes - and yet nuclear weapons have no other real use. They threaten and endanger noncombatants for the sake of deterrence. Conventional weapons can now be employed to destroy every kind of military target, and twenty-first-century warfare puts an emphasis on precision strikes, cyberweapons, and minimizing civilian casualties. As a technology, nuclear weapons have become obsolete. What worries me most isnât the possibility of a cyberattack, a technical glitch, or a misunderstanding starting a nuclear war sometime next week. My greatest concern is the lack of public awareness about this existential threat, the absence of a vigorous public debate about the nuclear-war plans of Russia and the United States, the silent consent to the roughly fifteen thousand nuclear weapons in the world. These machines have been carefully and ingeniously designed to kill us. Complacency increases the odds that, some day, they will. The âTitanic Effectâ is a term used by software designers to explain how things can quietly go wrong in a complex technological system: the safer you assume the system to be, the more dangerous it is becoming.Donald Trump, the next president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world, said in a tweet this week: "The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes". He also told a TV host "let there be an arms race".In response to these remarks by the next president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world, Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation and supreme commander-in-chief of the other most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world, said "We need to strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces, especially with missile complexes that can reliably penetrate any existing and prospective missile defence systems".Sleep tight, and merry Christmas.

The implosion of Cyanogen, Inc., has reached its zenith. The company is shutting down all services related to CyanogenMod, effectively killing the open source community project, and since Cyanogen, Inc., owns all the trademarks regarding Cyanogen, the community project can't continue operating as-is.As a result, CyanogenMod has forked itself into LineageOS, and plans to continue doing what it does best.Embracing that spirit, we the community of developers, designers, device maintainers and translators have taken the steps necessary to produce a fork of the CM source code and pending patches. This is more than just a 'rebrand'. This fork will return to the grassroots community effort that used to define CM while maintaining the professional quality and reliability you have come to expect more recently.I hate saying "I told you so" but... Who am I kidding - I love saying "I told you so".I told you so.

On Monday, an angry Apple appealed against an August ruling by the European Commission ordering the company to pay Ireland some â¬13 billion in back taxes, plus interest. Disappointingly, the Silicon Valley tech giant failed to address the fundamentals of the case, relying instead on a series of ad hominem attacks and procedural objections. If this is the best the company has to offer, it deserves to lose its case and pay its bills in full.The problem for Apple (and Ireland) is that the company has no leg to stand on - so it has to resort to flat-out lies, like stating laws are being applied retroactively (not true - the treaties and laws applied are much older than this case) or that the case is unprecedented and Apple is being singled out (not true - dozes of companies all across the EU have been punished for the same thing) or that it's just anti-American rhetoric (not true - many of the punished companies are European).What's even worse for Apple - this thing is a PR nightmare, at least here in Europe. In many European countries, we're used to relatively high taxes (compared to other parts of the world), so large corporations, be they American, European or otherwise, paying an effective tax rate of only 0,005 (no joke!), doesn't exactly sit well with European citizens.It's really hard to swallow for people in a EU net contributor country like The Netherlands to see our tax money sent to Ireland in the form of bailouts - Ireland received a â¬64 billion bailout from the EU after the 2008 banking crisis - while Ireland then proceeds to illegally give Apple one of the biggest tax breaks in history. It's a little populist to frame it this way, but here it goes: I pay taxes to my government in the assumption they would go to maintaining services in my own country and all across Europe (I'd like other nations to come to our aid, too, if we were ever in such a position), while in reality, a part of it went to Tim Cook. That irks me.Apple is not going to win this case. The EU's case is strong, detailed, and built on a solid base of legal precedent. And this brings us to Trump's meeting with technology leaders last week. During that meeting, Tim Cook also got some one-on-one-one time with Trump (and Elon Musk), something not all attendees were granted. When asked by Apple employees why Tim Cook attended the meeting, he had this to say (among other things):We have other things that are more business-centric - like tax reform - and something we've long advocated for: a simple system. And weâd like intellectual property reform to try to stop the people suing when they donât do anything as a company.Apple has several hundred billion dollars sitting in foreign, non-US bank accounts. If it were to repatriate that money, Apple would have to pay the United States corporate tax, which amounts to about 39.6%. Apple obviously doesn't want to pay those taxes, so that's why it keeps its massive cash pile in foreign bank accounts.Apple wants a tax holiday. It wants the US government to give Apple a special tax deal wherein it can repatriate those more than 200 billion dollars at a much, much lower tax rate, and with a Republican president, Senate, and House, such a deal seems a lot closer than it was before. However, the Trump administration is, obviously, not going to declare such a tax holiday out of the goodness of their hearts. This is politics, this is business; nothing comes for free.This means Apple will have to give the Trump administration something it wants, and if you look at Trump's campaign, one of the first things that could come to mind is Apple bringing manufacturing back to the US. The problem here is that bringing manufacturing back to the US is a multi-decade undertaking of strengthening, improving, and expanding vocational education, construction of factories, and the development of brand new manufacturing lines (assuming it's even possible at all, which is a big assumption). Tim Cook can't just snap his fingers and magically recreate Foxconn in the US - this will take decades, and far outlive Trump's four-year or even eight-year term, at which point some other president will take credit for it.Trump will want something else - and it's going to be Apple's cooperation in the fields of anti-terrorism and homeland security - big, big issues during Trump's campaign. During the campaign, Trump called for a boycott of Apple because the company refused to assist the FBI in breaking into a terrorist's iPhone. Admirably, Apple and Tim Cook took a very principled stand against it, standing up for encryption and user privacy.And here we have it. I wouldn't be surprised if over the coming years, Apple will be forced to choose between a tax holiday for its 200+ billion dollars stored in foreign bank accounts on the one side, and encryption and user privacy on the other. How do you think shareholders will react when they hear Apple can repatriate more than 200 billion dollars at a very low tax rate... And all they have to do is give in on encryption and user privacy? Do you think shareholders will be able to resist that? Do you think Tim Cook will be able to resist that?The coming years will be a massive test for Apple and Tim Cook. How much is their loudly proclaimed morality - and by extension, that of their customers - worth? Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

GCC 6.3 is a bug-fix release from the GCC 6 branch containing important fixes for regressions and serious bugs in GCC 6.2 with more than 79 bugs fixed since the previous release.

The European Union has ruled that the "general and and indiscriminate" collection of computer data by governments is only permitted when used to fight serious crime. The decision, handed down today by the European Court of Justice, directly challenges the UK's recently-passed surveillance legislation, which includes plans to retain every citizen's mobile and desktop browser history for up to a year.The Court notes that the collection of such data means citizens feel they are under "constant surveillance" and allows governments to draw "very precise conclusions" about their private lives. "Only the objective of fighting serious crime is capable of justifying such interference," said the Court, adding that legislation like the UK's "exceeds the limits of what is strictly necessary and cannot be considered to be justified within a democratic society."While I have my reservations about many of the EU's institutions (I'm actually a proponent of the concept of the EU - just not the current execution), the EU courts have consistently been a stalwart ally in citizen's rights.

Mark Gurman, trustworthy and extremely reliable Apple reporters with uncannily good sources inside Apple, paints a grim picture of the future of the Mac.Interviews with people familiar with Apple's inner workings reveal that the Mac is getting far less attention than it once did. They say the Mac team has lost clout with the famed industrial design group led by Jony Ive and the company's software team. They also describe a lack of clear direction from senior management, departures of key people working on Mac hardware and technical challenges that have delayed the roll-out of new computers.And just in case you're one of the people who ridiculed or attacked me for stating OS X is effectively dead and iOS is Apple's future, this nugget might interest you - emphasis mine.In another sign that the company has prioritized the iPhone, Apple re-organized its software engineering department so there's no longer a dedicated Mac operating system team. There is now just one team, and most of the engineers are iOS first, giving the people working on the iPhone and iPad more power.It's been clear to anyone with an unbiased, open mind towards Apple's past few years that the Mac simply has no or low priority within Apple, and this only further solidifies it.

Tim Cook, in a posting to Apple's internal messaging board:The desktop is very strategic for us. It's unique compared to the notebook because you can pack a lot more performance in a desktop - the largest screens, the most memory and storage, a greater variety of I/O, and fastest performance. So there are many different reasons why desktops are really important, and in some cases critical, to people.The current generation iMac is the best desktop we have ever made and its beautiful Retina 5K display is the best desktop display in the world. Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we're committed to desktops. If there's any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.When a CEO has to go out and say the company is committed to X, the company is probably not committed to X.

A while back I decided to try to write a Game Boy emulator in Common Lisp based on this series of articles. I made some good progress but eventually got bogged down because I was trying to learn a bunch of complex new things at once.[...]Instead of dragging on, I decided to take a break and try something simpler: a CHIP-8 emulator/interpreter. The CHIP-8 is much simpler than the Game Boy, which made it easier to experiment with the rest of the infrastructure.In this post and a couple of future ones I'll walk through all of my CHIP-8 emulator implementation.

The GNU project has released GNU Hurd 0.9, GNU Mach 1.8, and GNU MIG 1.8. Hurd has been in development for a long time, and is supposed to - eventually - be the official kernel for the GNU operating system, a role currently unofficially filled by the Linux kernel. GNU Mach is a little bit different.GNU Mach is the GNU distribution of the Mach microkernel, upon which a GNU Hurd system is based. The microkernel provides an Inter Process Communication (IPC) mechanism that the Hurd uses to define interfaces for implementing in a distributed multi-server fashion the services a traditional operating system kernel provides.

This is one of those projects that's just all around cool: Anders Granlund is bringing Wolfenstein 3D to the GameBoy Color, and since the GBC is quite hardware-constrained, he needs to employ some extreme measures to accomplish this. One of these measures is to add a co-processor into the game cartridge.

As some may have noticed, my UEFI branch got merged in November, purely by accident too! However, until now, we still haven't been able to boot to the desktop. Whilst still in development, the addition of a simple framebuffer driver and a crucial fix by Henry has enabled Haiku to now boot all the way to the desktop using QEMU.In today's world, an important milestone.

It has often been told how the Bell Labs law department became the first non-research department to use Unix, displacing a newly acquired stand-alone word-processing system that fell short of the department's hopes because it couldn't number the lines on patent applications, as USPTO required. When Joe Ossanna heard of this, he told them about roff and promised to give it line-numbering capability the next day. They tried it and were hooked. Patent secretaries became remote members of the fellowship of the Unix lab. In due time the law department got its own machine.Fascinating bit of Unix history.

FBI director James Comey has signed on to a previously reported CIA assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin directly intervened in the US presidential election in aid of Donald Trump, according to an internal CIA memo obtained by the Associated Press and Washington Post. The report has also been endorsed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, giving it the unanimous support of US intelligence agencies.While the hack focused on the DNC and not the actual voting machines (I think Trump would've won even without the DNC hack), this is exactly the reason why The Netherlands ditched electronic voting machines roughly 15 years ago, and went back to the traditional paper ballot and red pencil. In today's world, any democracy worth its salt should ditch electronic voting.Meanwhile, the Obama administration was aware of the hack before the elections took place, but didn't want to be seen interfering with the election process, because they thought Clinton would win. Yes.