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In a paper out this week in Science, researchers Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski report successfully using DNA to store and retrieve "a full computer operating system, movie, and other files".DNA has the potential to provide large-capacity information storage. However, current methods have only been able to use a fraction of the theoretical maximum. Erlich and Zielinski present a method, DNA Fountain, which approaches the theoretical maximum for information stored per nucleotide. They demonstrated efficient encoding of information - including a full computer operating system - into DNA that could be retrieved at scale after multiple rounds of polymerase chain reaction.Which operating system? Turns out it's KolibriOS, the all-assembler, floppy-based x86 operating system originally based on MenuetOS.

So I'd like to tell you my version of the story of Firefox OS, from the birth of the Boot to Gecko open source software project as a mailing list post and an empty GitHub repository in 2011, through its commercial launch as the Firefox OS mobile operating system, right up until the "transition" of millions of lines of code to the community in 2016.During this five year journey hundreds of members of the wider Mozilla community came together with a shared vision to disrupt the app ecosystem with the power of the open web. I'd like to reflect on our successes, our failures and the lessons we can learn from the experience of taking an open source browser based mobile operating system to market.

Apple is losing its grip on American classrooms, which technology companies have long used to hook students on their brands for life.Over the last three years, Apple's iPads and Mac notebooks - which accounted for about half of the mobile devices shipped to schools in the United States in 2013 - have steadily lost ground to Chromebooks, inexpensive laptops that run on Google's Chrome operating system and are produced by Samsung, Acer and other computer makers.Mobile devices that run on Apple's iOS and MacOS operating systems have now reached a new low, falling to third place behind both Google-powered laptops and Microsoft Windows devices, according to a report released on Thursday by Futuresource Consulting, a research company.That's got to sting. Out of the many reasons why ChromeBooks are way more successful than iPads in classrooms - they are cheaper, easier to manage, and so on - this is the one you're going to need to remember:Then there is the keyboard issue. While school administrators generally like the iPadâs touch screens for younger elementary school students, some said older students often needed laptops with built-in physical keyboards for writing and taking state assessment tests.My oh my, I wonder what Apple could do to remedy this.

The Switch is a console sandwiched between a bar of success lowered by the disaster of the Wii U and the considerable ground Nintendo must make up.Compared to the Wii U on its merits, the Switch is a slam dunk. It takes the basic concept of the Wii U, of a tablet-based console, and fulfills the promise of it in a way Nintendo simply wasnât capable of realizing in 2012. Itâs launching with a piece of software that, more than anything in the Wii Uâs first year, demonstrates its inherent capability of delivering what Nintendo says is one of the Switchâs primary missions: a big-budget, AAA game that exists across a handheld device and a television-connected portable. The hardware lives up to its name in how easily and smoothly it moves between those two worlds, in how dead simple it all is to make something pretty magical happen.I am genuinely excited by the Switch, and the prospects it brings to the table. I'm worried about the lineup of games - or lack thereof, really - so I'm not going to jump in straight away. The reviews of the device and its launch Zelda title are positive, though, so I'm looking forward to what Nintendo has in store for the Switch.

Android Studio 2.3 has been released.We are most excited about the quality improvements in Android Studio 2.3 but you will find a small set of new features in this release that integrate into each phase of your development flow. When designing your app, take advantage of the updated WebP support for your app images plus check out the updated ConstraintLayout library support and widget palette in the LayoutEditor. As you are developing, Android Studio has a new App Link Assistant which helps you build and have a consolidated view of your URIs in your app. While building and deploying your app, use the updated run buttons for a more intuitive and reliable Instant Run experience. Lastly, while testing your app with the Android Emulator, you now have proper copy & paste text support.I hear a lot of negativity regarding Android Studio, but since I'm not a developer, I can't really make heads or tails of it. Is it really as bad as some people make it out to be?

The AMD Zen/Ryzen reviews and benchmarks are hitting the web (Ars has a review and a look at the Zen architecture, Tom's Hardware has a review, and there's bound to be more), but as always, the one you want is AnandTech's (they also have an interview with AMD's CEO):For over two years the collective AMD vs Intel personal computer battle has been sitting on the edge of its seat. Back in 2014 when AMD first announced it was pursuing an all-new microarchitecture, old hands recalled the days when the battle between AMD and Intel was fun to be a part of, and users were happy that the competition led to innovation: not soon after, the Core microarchitecture became the dominant force in modern personal computing today. Through the various press release cycles from AMD stemming from that original Zen announcement, the industry is in a whipped frenzy waiting to see if AMD, through rehiring guru Jim Killer and laying the foundations of a wide and deep processor team for the next decade, can hold the incumbent to account. With AMDâs first use of a 14nm FinFET node on CPUs, today is the day Zen hits the shelves and benchmark results can be published: Game On!Gaming performance seems to lag behind Intel, while for workstation tasks, it has them beat. For me, an upgrade to Ryzen from my i5-4440 would amount to a total sum of about â¬900 (processor, motherboard, RAM, and cooling), so I'm going to wait it out for now - especially since gaming is what my processor is most used for. That being said - give it a year, and Ryzen will be up there on all fronts with Intel's best, but at a lower price point.AMD is definitely back, and I'm very excited to see what competition will bring to the market.

The just released version 17.02 of the Genode OS framework comes with greatly enhanced virtual file-system capabilities, eases the creation of dynamic system compositions, and adds a new facility for processing user input. Furthermore, the components have become binary-compatible across kernel boundaries by default such that entire system scenarios can be moved from one kernel to another without recompiling the components.Genode's virtual file-system (VFS) infrastructure has a twisted history. Originally created as a necessity for enabling command-line-based GNU programs to run within Genode's custom Unix runtime, the VFS was later extracted as a separate library. This library eventually became an optional and later intrinsic part of Genode's C runtime. It also happened to become the basis of a file-system-server component. If this sounds a bit confusing, it probably is. But the resulting design takes the notion of virtual file systems to an new level.First, instead of providing a system-wide VFS like Unix does, in Genode each component can have its own VFS. Technically, it is a library that turns a number of Genode sessions into a file-system representation according the component's configuration. Via those sessions, the component is able to access services provided by other components such as file systems, terminals, or block devices. Furthermore, several built-in file systems are provided locally from within the component. Since the VFS is local to each component, the view of the component's world can be shaped by its parent in arbitrary ways.By default, each component runs in isolation. Whenever two components are meant to share a certain part of their VFS with one another, both mount a file-system session of the same server into their local VFS. This sharing is a deliberate decision by the component's common parent and thereby subjected to the parent's security policy. One particularly interesting file-system server is the so-called VFS server. It uses an arbitrarily configured VFS internally and exports its content as a file-system service, which can then be mounted in other components. This way, the VFS server can be used to emulate a "global" VFS, or to multiplex access to any file-system types supported by the VFS.Speaking of supported file-system types, this is where the VFS becomes literally infinitely flexible. The VFS features a plugin interface that incorporates file system types provided in the form of shared libraries. If the VFS configuration refers to a file system type not known by the VFS, a corresponding plugin is loaded. For example, there exists a plugin for generating random numbers based of the jitter of CPU execution time. The file system, when mounted, hosts only a single read-only file that produces random numbers. But VFS plugins can become much more creative. Via the rump-kernel VFS plugin, one can incorporate the file systems of the NetBSD kernel into any VFS-using component. Genode 17.02 furthermore comes with a Plan-9-inspired VFS plugin that makes the Linux TCP/IP stack available as a file system. The C runtime then translates BSD-socket API calls to file-system operations on the socket file system, which, in turn, are handled by the Linux TCP/IP stack. The fascinating part is that this all happens within a single component. Such a component is in fact quite similar to a unikernel.If two applications ought to share the same TCP/IP stack, the VFS server comes in handy. The Linux TCP/IP stack is then mounted once in the VFS server, which, in turn, provides file-system sessions to the applications. Each application then accesses the TCP/IP stack indirectly through those file-system sessions. In this scenario, the VFS server suddenly becomes a network multiplexer.The VFS is not the only topic of the current release. Another highlight is the introduction of a application binary interface that makes all components binary compatible across kernel boundaries by default. Combined with the new kernel-independent build directories, it has become possible to move complete system scenarios from kernels as different as L4, NOVA, seL4, or Linux in matter of seconds. Further improvements of Genode 17.02 are the addition of a generic input-event processor, new SD-card drivers, the update to the version 0.8 of the Muen separation kernel, and a new mechanism for managing dynamic subsystems. All the improvements are described in detail in the release documentation.

Tim Cook, during a shareholder meeting, when asked about a possible future convergence of macOS and iOS:"Expect us to do more and more where people will view [the iPad] as a laptop replacement, but not a Mac replacement - the Mac does so much more," he said. "To merge these worlds, you would lose the simplicity of one, and the power of the other."Oh really now.

The Republican-controlled FCC on Thursday suspended the net neutrality transparency requirements for broadband providers with fewer than 250,000 subscribers. Critics called the decision anticonsumer.The transparency rule, waived for five years in a 2-1 party-line vote Thursday, requires broadband providers to explain to customers their pricing models and fees as well as their network management practices and the impact on broadband service.The commission had previously exempted ISPs with fewer than 100,000 subscribers, but Thursday's decision expands the number of ISPs not required to inform customers. Only about 20 U.S. ISPs have more than 250,000 subscribers.What could possibly go wrong?The five-year waiver may be moot, however. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and Republicans in Congress are considering ways to scrap a large chunk of the net neutrality regulations approved by the agency just two years ago.Is it just me, or is the undoing of the opposing party's policies every 4-8 years a really terrible way to run a country?

From the EFF:On February 23rd, a joint team from the CWI Amsterdam and Google announced that they had generated the first ever collision in the SHA-1 cryptographic hashing algorithm. SHA-1 has long been considered theoretically insecure by cryptanalysts due to weaknesses in the algorithm design, but this marks the first time researchers were actually able to demonstrate a real-world example of the insecurity. In addition to being a powerful Proof of Concept (POC), the computing power that went into generating the proof was notable.So what's the big deal?Unfortunately, the migration away from SHA-1 has not been universal. Some programs, such as the version control system Git, have SHA-1 hard-baked into its code. This makes it difficult for projects which rely on Git to ditch the algorithm altogether. The encrypted e-mail system PGP also relies on it in certain places.

The latest Windows 10 Insider Preview build doesn't add much in the way of features - it's mostly just bug fixes - but one small new feature has been spotted, and it could be contentious. Vitor Mikaelson noticed that the latest build lets you restrict the installation of applications built using the Win32 API.The Settings app has three positions: allow apps from anywhere (the default), allow apps from anywhere but prefer apps from the Store, and only allow apps from the Store. Put in its most restrictive third position, this setting will block the installation of traditional Win32 applications; only those shipped through the Store using the Project Centennial technology will work. Interestingly, the switch only appears to govern installation. Changing the setting to "Store apps only" will allow existing Win32 applications to work, only preventing new ones from being installed.You can feel both Apple and Microsoft struggling with the balance between store-only and free-for-all.

In this article we'll walk through an example of how to interpret a closed source program, how to analyze its behavior, and how to ultimately alter that behavior to do what we want. These techniques are well known within many circles, but few tutorials exist to help people get started. The context for this example investigation is the linker's subsystem field generation, but the techniques can be applied to other problems that seem interesting.

The Apple engineers were smart when they were building their MessagePads. The MessagePad required an immense 8MB of storage for the Newton operating system. In the 90's, flash memory was extremely expensive, so they had to use ROM chips that were mass-produced and could never be updated. But they knew that they would have changes to their firmware until release day, and they would need to able to fix bugs even after the machine was sold.They came up with three solutions.[...]If all else fails, MessagePads have their ROM chips sitting on a daughter board, a small additional cicuit board that is fitted into a common (at that time) connector and can be changed without tools after opening the case.[...]Anyway, wouldn't it be fantastic to create a souped-up ROM board? 8MB Flash and 8MB NewtonOS, also in Flash, being able to patch it, fix it, extend it, have fun. Maybe have even more that 16MB if that is possible. Is it possible? How can we find out?An early draft of the licensee information for this ROM card exists, but it is not detailed enough to build such a card. Before starting a patch wire solution, I wanted to know how the original board worked, and then fill in the missing information in that draft.Well, I went all the way and reverse engineered the entire ROM board. Here are my findings.Amazing work.

After many years of active development, AROS finally seems to be able to 'evolve' the now 30+ years old architecture of the Amiga API. The original Amiga computers from Commodore brought to home users and professionals the first pre-emptive, window based operating system at affordable prices, although its kernel was tailored to the single Motorola 68000 CPU mounted on the machines. After Commodore's demise in 1994, a long debate started about the evolution of the Amiga platform and, although many announcements were made, current AmigaOS 4.1 is still a 32bit-based, single-core oriented operating system, and the same is true for Amiga-like alternatives MorphOS and AROS.Things, however, are changing. In his weekly survey about AROS progress on AROS-EXEC.org and Amigaworld.net, Krzysztof Smiechowicz talked about "Work on handling additional CPU cores in x86_64 AROS kernel", adding "Initial version of SMP scheduler has been introduced in AROS i386/x86_64 kernel" just a week later. In the following weeks, a screenshot from coder Nick Andrews and a video on Youtube showed a 64-bit version of AROS, runnning on multicore AMD and Intel processors, handling 4 and 8 cores correctly.SMP is being added to AROS by experienced coders Nick Andrews and Michal Schulz, and while it is not available in public nightly builds just yet, there is finally the chance to see an Amiga-like operating system handling modern CPUs properly.

One other phone I want to highlight out of MWC in Barcelona: a new BlackBerry Android phone! With a proper hardware keyboard! The BlackBerry Priv from 2015 suffered from some performance issues, so I hope they get it right this time.Now that the BlackBerry KEYone is official, that means the full run down of specs are available now as well. For the KEYone, every component of the device, including the Snapdragon 625 was specifically chosen with the goal of lengthening the battery life in mind. Mind you, the battery itself is the largest ever put in a BlackBerry, (3505 mAh) so we're already off to a great start.It looks nice, too. Very intrigued by this phone.

Nokia unveiled its new lineup of phones, and there's definitely some good stuff in here. The Nokia 3, 5, and 6 are very understated Android phones with modest specifications, but with one huge selling point: stock Android, with Google security updates. Nokia is really touting it as a feature, too, which is music to my ears. The phones are not extravagant, don't come loaded with crapware or useless features, and do exactly what it says on the tin.In addition, the company released a new Nokia 3310:Nokia has sold 126 million of its original 3310 phone since it was first introduced back in September, 2000. It was a time before the iPhone, and Nokia ruled with popular handsets that let you play simple games like Snake. Now the 3310 is making a nostalgic return in the form of a more modern variant, thanks to Nokia-branded phone maker HMD. Like its predecessor, it will still be called the Nokia 3310, but this time itâs running Nokiaâs Series 30+ software, with a 2.4-inch QVGA display, a 2-megapixel camera, and even a microSD slot.I'm a little underwhelmed by this phone - not because of its specifications or anything, because those are exactly as I expected and wanted from this phone. No, I miss one crucial thing: it doesn't have WhatsApp (or WeChat, for that matter, for our Chinese friends), and you obviously can't install it either. WhatsApp is the backbone - for better or worse, I didn't choose this to be so, don't blame me, etc. etc. - of mobile communications in The Netherlands and much of the rest of the world, and without it, I literally have no use for this phone, not even as a backup phone.Very strange omission indeed, but other than that - it looks great.

If you listen to Apple podcasts - and you really should, because ATP and Gruber's The Talkshow are a delight to listen to, even if it's sometimes infuriatingly inaccurate about Windows, Android, and Linux - you would know there's a lot of talk going on about what Apple is going to do to 'salvage' the iPad, and what Apple is going to do - if anything - to replace the Mac Pro. They sometimes take it a step further, and go into what the future of macOS and iOS is going to - will they continue to exist side-by-side? Will macOS be tightened up and made more like iOS, or will iOS be expanded to make it more like macOS?These questions arise from Apple's seeming indifference towards the iPad, and the obvious situation with the lack of updates for the Mac Pro, the Mac Mini, and to a lesser degree even the iMac. On top of that, the rumour mill is running in overdrive, and it further fuel the fires of these discussions.I've been thinking about this a lot these past few months, and I've been talking to people who know their Apple stuff, and the more I take a step back and look at all the discussions, rumours, and Apple's actions - and lack thereof - the more obvious it becomes: it seems like Apple is about to completely redefine its infamous product matrix.In case you don't remember, back in the late '90s, Steve Jobs showed the following product matrix:Before I show you what I think Apple is going to do, here are a few reasons underpinning it, in list form:The Mac Pro was introduced to much fanfare, but hasn't been updated in - as of writing - more than three years.Likewise, the Mac Mini hasn't been updated in well over two years.The MacBook Air - the number one crowd pleaser among non-techy buyers - hasn't been updated in two years.The iMac hasn't been updated in over 18 months.Apple told Nilay Patel that the company is out of the standalone display business. If true, the logical extension of this would be that Apple is out of the headless Mac business. As John Gruber noted in the latest The Talkshow episode - do you really think Apple is going to put ugly LG monitors in its brand new, meticulously designed headquarters?The rumour mill claims Apple is expected to expand its iPad lineup even further, with more Pro models.iPads - even the basic models - have an insane amount of computing power, and newer models have lots of RAM and crazy fast processors. What for? To watch Netflix? I don't think so.And last but not least: Apple debuted a number of new commercials last week, in which the company positions the iPad not as a companion device, but as your only device, touting its productivity features such as Microsoft Office support.Add all this up, and I'm getting the feeling Apple is working towards a product matrix that looks more like this:The basic gist is that I feel Apple is slowly but surely working towards positioning iOS computers as its consumer line, and macOS computers as its pro line.Since I can already hear people tapping away at their keyboards about Xcode this and consumption device that - it's important to note that what is iOS today will be very different from what will be iOS in the future. iOS surely has its limitations right now - specifically things like awkward and cumbersome file management, no proper windowing, etc. - but there's no reason to assume that what iOS looks and feels like today is what it'll look and feel like forever.A lot of people are exploring what an IDE and related software will look like on iOS (just follow Steven Troughton-Smith and Federico Viticci on Twitter - they talk a lot about production-oriented iPad applications). The problem here isn't that iOS can't do complex applications - the problem is that the application ecosystem isn't conducive to such complex applications, which is quite a big hole Apple dug itself into by letting the App Store model ravage the indie developer scene, race all prices to the bottom of the barrel, and creating the expectation that everything is either 99 cents or free.Another issue easily spotted in the product matrix is that the iPad Pro awkwardly sits in the desktop line, even though it clearly isn't a desktop device. It could very well be that we'll eventually see an iOS desktop or desktop-like device, but I honestly don't think it's worth the effort. People have overwhelmingly voted with their wallets, and portable computing has resoundingly won. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

Looking for an easy way to install AmigaOS 4? We made everything as easy as possible to emulate AmigaOS 4.1 on your Windows or Mac.Basically, Flower Pot makes the process of installing AamigaOS 4 on Windows or macOS using WinUAE as easy as possible. All you need is the AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition ISO (the version for Classic!) and required ROM files, and the rest is automated. This means that the only way to legally get this up and running is to not only buy AmigaOS 4 for Classic (which is not that expensive at â¬25), but also to somehow get the Amiga 4000 ROM. My first thought was that other than extracting said ROM yourself, the only other way to get it was to buy Amiga Forever - but I'm not sure Amiga Forever contains the required ROM, which may mean you have to sail the seven seas to get it (Update: Amiga Forever supports it!)

Turns out the processor/SoC in the latest two ChromeBooks - the Samsung models - are part of a wider program by Google.The OP1 is built by Rockchip, which has made ARM processors for a while and isn't especially well-regarded among US consumers. And, strangely enough, even discovering that Rockchip makes the OP1 took a bit of sleuthing. The company doesn't have its brand anywhere near the Chromebook Plus. Also, the chip is called the OP1, which implies that there's going to be an OP2 and OP3 and so on. What exactly is going on here? Just what is OP?Well! Turns out there's a website for answering that exact question, helpfully named whatisop.com. OP is a designation for SoCs that are optimized for Chrome OS. Naturally, I assumed it was a Rockchip brand - but that's not the case at all. And the website ostensibly designed to explain OP to us doesn't tell us who owns it (and it's even registered anonymously), so OP strangely mysterious.Mystery solved: OP is a trademark owned by Google, and bestowed on SoCs that meet a Google spec for a good Chrome OS device. Basically, if a Chromebook has an OP processor, it means that Google certifies that itâs been optimized for Chrome OS.Everybody is racing towards ARM laptops. Intel's decision to sell Xscale is probably going to be looked back upon as one of the worst decisions in technology history.

Not just one, but seven Earth-size planets that could potentially harbor life have been identified orbiting a tiny star not too far away, offering the first realistic opportunity to search for biological signs of alien life outside of the solar system.The planets orbit a dwarf star named Trappist-1, about 40 light years, or about 235 trillion miles, from Earth. That is quite close, and by happy accident, the orientation of the orbits of the seven planets allows them to be studied in great detail.One or more of the exoplanets - planets around stars other than the sun - in this new system could be at the right temperature to be awash in oceans of water, astronomers said, based on the distance of the planets from the dwarf star.Science is awesome.

AMD's benchmarks showed that the top Ryzen 7 1800X, compared to the 8-core Intel Core i7-6900K, both at out-of-the-box frequencies, gives an identical score on the single threaded test and a +9% in the multi-threaded test. AMD put this down to the way their multi-threading works over the Intel design. Also, the fact that the 1800X is half of the price of the i7-6900K.If these promises and benchmarks hold up, Intel will be facing some incredibly tough competition on the desktop/laptop side for the first time in a long, long time.

European Union data protection watchdogs said on Monday they were still concerned about the privacy settings of Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system despite the U.S. company announcing changes to the installation process.The watchdogs, a group made up of the EU's 28 authorities responsible for enforcing data protection law, wrote to Microsoft last year expressing concerns about the default installation settings of Windows 10 and users' apparent lack of control over the company's processing of their data.Remember Scroogled? Good times.

When Max Karlsson found out that he was going to be in charge of Sweden's official Twitter account this week, he was looking forward to sharing some of his photography, or riffing about music and technology - nothing too different from how hundreds of others have used the handle since Sweden opened it up to ordinary users in 2011."My thought was to speak about the interests and values that I have," Karlsson, 22, said in a phone interview Monday evening. "And then Trump hit."I find it fascinating that the official Twitter account for Sweden changes hands every week between Swedish citizens. In this particular case, it gives an ordinary Swede the opportunity to use facts to dispel a bunch of nonsense from the most powerful man in the world, who is apparently incapable of separating fact from Fox News-infused fiction.

In September 1885, a bunch of librarians spent four days holed up in scenic Lake George, just over 200 miles north of New York City. In the presence of such library-world luminaries as Melvil Dewey - the well-organized chap whose Dewey Decimal System keeps shelves orderly to this day - they discussed a range of issues, from the significance of the term "bookworm" to the question of whether libraries ought to have a separate reference-room for ladies.They then turned their attention to another crucial issue: handwriting. As libraries acquired more books, card catalogs needed to expand fast in order to keep track of them. Though the newly invented typewriter was beginning to take hold, it took time and effort to teach the art of "machine writing." Librarians still had to handwrite their catalog cards. And this was causing problems.Fascinating story - and funny how I was taught something very close to Library Hand cursive script (the one from A Library Primer listed in the article) when I was a kid.

Linux 4.10 has been released. This release adds support for virtualized GPUs, a new 'perf c2c' tool for cacheline contention analysis in NUMA systems, a new 'perf sched timehist' command for a detailed history of task scheduling, improved writeback management that should make the system more responsive under heavy writing load, a new hybrid block polling method that uses less CPU than pure polling, support for ARM devices such as the Nexus 5 & 6 or Allwinner A64, a feature that allows to attach eBPF programs to cgroups, an experimental MD RAID5 writeback cache, support for Intel Cache Allocation Technology, and many other improvements and new drivers. Here is the full list of changes.

I'm pretty sure all of you are aware of Advanced Interactive Executive, or AIX, IBM's high-end, professional UNIX operating system. It has been in development since 1986, and is currently at version 7.2, released in 2015. It's one of those operating systems you hear relatively little about here on OSNews, if only because it sits in a part of the market where few of us ever encounter it.Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to learn that AIX hasn't been confined to (relatively) exotic non-x86 hardware such as IBM Power and PowerPC-based systems. During my research into the IBM PS/2, I discovered that IBM released versions of AIX for PS/2 systems. The first release was AIX 1.1 1989, followed by 1.2 in 1990, and the last release, 1.3, in 1992.From the AIX 1.3 PS/2 announcement letter:Performance tuning in AIX PS/2 Operating System Version 1.3 offers increased throughput for Input/Output (I/O) in both raw and block mode, in addition to kernel performance enhancements and smaller size requirements available through the availability of serviceable shared libraries usage in applications written to utilize them. Enhancements have also been made to the pager and swapper areas of memory management that have resulted in performance increases.Improvements in the windowing and Graphical User Interface (GUI) areas are highlighted with the introduction of the X Windowing System V11 R5 from MIT available in AIX PS/2 X-Windows Version 1.3 and AIXwindows Environment for PS/2 Version 1.3 and OSF's Motif 1.1.3 available in AIXwindows Environment for PS/2 Version 1.3 along with AIXwindows Desktop. Support for the IBM Xstation 120 and Xstation 130 is provided in the AIX PS/2 Xstation Manager Version 1.3 Support for XGA-2 provides non-interlaced, high resolution graphics on those displays that support it.The internet is a great thing, and IBM AIX 1.3 for PS/2 can be found on abandonware sites, and there are some repositories with more information. The full AIX 1.3 PS/2, with all the additional packages you had to buy separately, comes in at a whopping 94 1.44 MB floppies. The installation procedure is complex, and I haven't yet been able to get it installed in VirtualBox. I want to give this some visibility, because maybe someone with more experience with AIX can get AIX PS/2 to run inside VirtualBox or some other virtualisation tool.

Today marks the fifth release of the ReactOS 0.4.x series, as well as the fifth following the 4 month release cycle started by 0.4.0 itself. Progress has continued steadily, with a great deal of work going on in the background to improve ReactOS' general usability and stability. Many of these improvements were on display at the FOSDEM convention in Brussels that took place on the 4th and 5th of this month. Certainly one of the more notable albeit less visible additions was the incorporation of basic printing support by Colin Finck. At present ReactOS is only capable of sending print commands to a parallel port printer, but this is the first step towards universal support and Colin should be applauded for his effort.It seems ReactOS can run Office 2007 now. That's actually quite neat.

ToaruOS 1.0 was released 18 days ago, and since then, several bugfix releases have been released. The latest release - the one you want to test - is 1.0.3. ToaruOS is a complete hobby operating system, including a kernel and userspace with many graphical applications. This is the first release considered to be "user-ready", but please keep in mind that ToaruOS is a hobby project and it may not be stable or suitable for any purpose you might have for an operating system. This release represents the culmination of many years of development, research, and learning.IT's a remarkably fun operating system, and runs without any problems in VirtualBox. I've played with it a bit during the day, messing around with the basic but elegantly simple UI, browsing the file system, installing a few packages through the graphical package manager, and playing some Quake. It's rare for hobby operating systems to achieve this level of functionality in a 1.0 release, so colour me pleasantly surprised.ToaruOS's kernel in its current form is 32-bit, non-SMP, monolithic (but modular), and Unix-like. It supports processes, threads, shared memory, files, pipes, TTYs, packet-based IPC, and basic IPv4 networking. Driver modules allow for access to EXT2 and ISO9660 filesystems, PATA and ATAPI disk access for hard drives and CDs, framebuffer support on most virtual machines (as well as bootloader-assisted generic framebuffer support), networking on AMD PCnet FAST, Realtek RTL8139, and Intel PRO/1000-series NICs, PS/2 mice and keyboards, audio on Intel AC'97 chipsets, as well as special support for VirtualBox's guest additions.The userspace includes a dynamic linker, a full-featured compositing windowing system, many Unix-like utilities, a port of Python 3.6 (including many binding libraries for the ToaruOS windowing environment), and several graphical applications (including a package manager).The code's on github.

Apple is planning to fight proposed electronics "Right to Repair" legislation being considered by the Nebraska state legislature, according to a source within the legislature who is familiar with the bill's path through the statehouse.The legislation would require Apple and other electronics manufacturers to sell repair parts to consumers and independent repair shops, and would require manufacturers to make diagnostic and service manuals available to the public.This is completely normal in the automotive sector, and I see no reason why the tech sector should be any different.

Today, after sitting in storage for over 20 years, my brother and I dusted off his old IBM PS/2 Model 50 (8550-021), with the goal of cleaning it up and making sure it still works. It was still working when he stored it, so it should still be okay today (barring any unavoidable degradation caused by the slow march of time). As far as he remembers, it's got DOS installed on its 20MB hard drive (and a bunch of games).I've taken it apart completely so that I can set to cleaning it thoroughly tomorrow. Everything seems to be in relatively pristine condition (save for the case, which is battered in a grungy, industrial kind of way). A visual inspection didn't reveal anything blown or out of the ordinary on the motherboard or HDD/FDD riser cards, and from what I can tell without opening it up, the PSU seems to not feature any blown caps either.Originally, I was planning on just getting some cheap PS/2 keyboard and mouse somewhere (turns out none of us owns any of those any more), but the more I was awestruck by the industrial beauty and elegance of the PS/2 and its modular internals, I felt overcome by a strong urge to do this machine justice - assuming it still works, I'm buying the original PS/2 mouse and IBM Model M keyboard. It's the least I can do.I've also been looking at other ways to expand and upgrade the device (which I'll do only after having confirmed it still works, of course). I've found an AST Advantage/2 RAM expansion/SCSI controller 16-bit MCA card (with 4MB of RAM installed) in an online store, which would be a neat way to add some additional memory to the machine. It's a multifunction MCA card that adds 8 RAM slots and a SCSI interface to the PS/2. I'm not entirely sure how these additional RAM slots work (i.e., does any RAM get added to extended memory?), but for its relatively low price, it seems like an interesting exotic piece of hardware to own either way.There are other, far more substantial upgrades and peripherals I'd like to add to it, such as the IBM 486SLC2-50/25 processor upgrade kit (incredibly rare and prohibitively expensive if you do find one) or a math co-processor (haven't been able to find one, and would be rather useless for running a few DOS games anyway). Additionally, there are rare things like an MCA Sound Blaster or SGI IrisVision (

Gabe Newell sits perfectly still, leans forward. His hands are laid on his lap. Only his eyes are moving. They shift rapidly from left to right and back again. He's physically here, he's sort of listening, but I'd say he's also somewhere else, mentally untangling the knots of the future.The way he talks bears this out. He's unscripted, exploratory. He ranges far from corporate dogma and empty visionary horseshit. He admits when heâs been wrong in the past, or that he might be wrong right now about one of the biggest gambles of his career.I like this about him: the act of engaging with journalists without a script, enjoying an actual conversation, prodding ideas that might be important outside the confines of a media event.While I wouldn't go as far as putting Gabe Newell on the same pedestal as tech personalities like Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds, I do feel Gabe is a similar sort of person. He worked on the first few releases of Windows at Microsoft, and then, as we all know, founded Valve, one of the most influential gaming - and therefore, technology - companies in the world, responsible for some of the best games of all time, and one of the most successful - if not the most successful - game platforms of all time.While Valve is far from perfect - Half-Life 3, customer service, etc. etc. - I do feel the company has managed to create a great platform with Steam, which, even though it uses DRM, seems to be unobtrusive in its implementation and truly made PC gaming better, if not outright saved it in the face of ever-better consoles.

I decided to dig through open source to examine the state of Google's upcoming Andromeda OS. For anyone unfamiliar, Andromeda seems to be the replacement for both Android and Chrome OS (cue endless debates over the semantics of that, and what it all entails). Fuchsia is the actual name of the operating system, while Magenta is the name of the kernel, or more correctly, the microkernel. Many of the architectural design decisions appear to have unsurprisingly been focused on creating a highly scalable platform.It goes without saying that Google isn't trying to hide Fuchsia. People have clearly discovered that Google is replacing Android's Linux kernel. Still, I thought it would be interesting for people to get a better sense of what the OS actually is. This article is only intended to be an overview of the basics, as far as I can comment reasonably competently. (I certainly never took an operating systems class!)What excites me the most about Fuchsia and related projects are the people involved. The pedigree here is astonishing - there are quite a few former Be, Palm, and Apple engineers involved. The linked article contains a good higher-level overview, and I do truly believe it's one of the most exciting projects in the operating systems world right now.What remains to be seen, however, is this: just how serious is this project? The breadth of the project and the people involved seem to suggest this is indeed something quite serious, and all signs point towards it being a future unification and replacement for both Chrome OS and Android, which is quite exciting indeed.

But perhaps the most interesting of these devices, at least from the perspective of mobile enthusiasts, is not a smartphone at all, but a modern version of a classic workhorse of a feature phone, the Nokia 3310. Known primarily for its plentiful battery life and nearly indestructible build, the 3310 was released at the turn of the millennium as a replacement to the also-popular 3210.At just â¬59, this new incarnation seems priced competitively enough to win over nostalgic former owners for use as a second phone.This is amazing. The 3310 is one of the most iconic pieces of technology ever created.

Probably you asked yourself at least once, how an Operating System (OS) was written from the ground up? You probably have spent years programming, but still understand operating system as a collection of abstract concepts, not how to implement an operating system in actual code. In your mind, somehow the operating system can magically control the underlying hardware and do what you want through the higher level API of your favorite programming language. You wish to understand the details, but for some reason, it seems too difï¬cult because regardless how much you learn, it is never enough. You may feel that you are missing an important piece of the puzzle, and get stuck. However, deep inside you still want to write an operating system without a crystal clear understanding. After all, you are a software engineer, and an operating system is a software. You should know your software better than anyone else!If that is the case, this book is for you. By going through this book, you will be able to ï¬nd the missing piece that is essential and enable you to implement your operating system, from scratch!A free detailed book about writing your first operating system.

The news is that after 15 years the IMDb is closing down its message boards, but the story is their creation in the first place: a tale of Apache, mod_perl, PostgreSQL, C, and XEMacs, all served up on a BeOS bun in a Bristol-area cafeteria; of missed deadlines, missed opportunities and misplaced innocence given the scale of comments, comment spam and trolling up to that point. Brought to you by Colin M. Strickland, a developer whose CV has long read "you can blame me for the message boards" (and yes, he does go by the initials cms).

The POSIX standard for APIs was developed over 25 years ago. We explored how applications in Android, OS X, and Ubuntu Linux use these interfaces today and found that weaknesses or deficiencies in POSIX have led to divergence in how modern applications use the POSIX APIs. In this article, we present our analysis of over a million applications and show how developers have created workarounds to shortcut POSIX and implement functionality missing from POSIX.

A neat piece of computing history - a combination of a hardware dongle and software that lets you run up to System 7 on a NeXT machine (and with some hacking, Mac OS 8).The latest addition to my NeXT/Mac collection, a Daydream ROM box made in about 1993 by Quix Computerware AG. This unit plugged into the host NeXT's DSP port and contained genuine licensed Macintosh LC ROMs. This allowed the NeXT to boot off the ROMs and thus become a Mac. It was the first time Apple licensed Mac ROMs to a 3rd party and also offered the same performance as a Quadra 950 at a much lower price point and that was including the purchase of the NeXT system. It ran up to system 7.5 officially though with a few hacks 8.1 can be made to run. It is not a Mac virtual machine; it actually boots as a Mac.The manual contains more information, and it explains that Daydream installs a secondary kernel that in turn boots the Mac ROM.This in and of itself is quite cool, but as it turns out, that's not where the story ends. People - including some of the original Daydream developers - have hacked this tool to remove the need for the hardware ROM dongle by inserting the ROM directly into the secondary kernel. This means that if you have a 68k NeXT machine, you can boot directly into System 7 or Mac OS 8. Or, more likely, if you have a NeXT emulator such as Previous, you can boot your NeXT emulated machine directly into System 7 or Mac OS 8 (video).Incredibly cool, and I had no idea this existed. While NeXT and Apple people were doing these awesome things, I was still using MS-DOS. Strange realisation.

When we consider any new features or changes for Steam, our primary goal is to make customers happy. We measure that happiness by how well we are able to connect customers with great content. We've come to realize that in order to serve this goal we needed to move away from a small group of people here at Valve trying to predict which games would appeal to vastly different groups of customers.Thus, over Steam's 13-year history, we have gradually moved from a tightly curated store to a more direct distribution model. In the coming months, we are planning to take the next step in this process by removing the largest remaining obstacle to having a direct path, Greenlight. Our goal is to provide developers and publishers with a more direct publishing path and ultimately connect gamers with even more great content.This is a big step for Steam, and will make it incredibly trivial for developers and publishers alike to publish games on Steam.

This update, 2.1.0 alias Iijoki brings major architectural changes to Sailfish OS by introducing Qt 5.6 UI framework, Bluez5 Bluetooth protocol (ready to be deployed for development purposes), basics for the 64-bit architecture and text selection in browser. Included is also a beta level implementation for Virtual Private Networks (VPN) (please read release notes) and the first version of QML live coding support. In addition, 2.1.0 adds bigger fonts to the UI, improves the use of camera and fixes a number of errors, many of which were reported by our developer community.Maybe I'll get around to updating my Jolla phone and tablet at some point, but I really don't see a reason why. Since I reviewed Sailfish OS and the Jolla phone more than three years ago, nothing has been done to address the elephant in the room. The operating system itself was quite stable, good-looking and full-featured from the beginning, and that has only improved with the constant stream of updates and refinements. However, the application situation is still incredibly dire, and we're all still using the same few applications - updated only very infrequently - that we were using three years ago. Several have even died out.Instead of investing in attracting developers to write Sailfish applications (the three year old promises of support for paid applications still hasn't been fulfilled, for instance), the company got distracted with crazy projects like the tablet, and investing heavily in making Android applications 'run' on Sailfish. While Android applications do 'run', it's still a slow, frustrating, and utterly jarring experience that's a complete and utter waste of resources. Had they spent even half the effort spent on Android application compatibility on attracting native developers, the platform would be in a far better state.Jolla proclaimed they wanted to take over the world, but in doing so, lost touch with the very people they should've continued to focus on: open source/Linux-oriented enthusiasts, former Maemo/N900 users. Not a large group of people, of course, but definitely a big enough - and, more importantly, loyal enough! - group of people to sustain a small, community-focused company.Whatever.Jolla's CEO Sami Pienimäki penned a letter to the community about upcoming developments for the company. There's some stuff in there about Russia and tablet refunds.

Android Wear 2.0 is also buggier than it should be, especially given the fact that it had an extended public beta period and its launch was delayed by months. Beyond them taking a long time to launch, it can be hard to tell when an app is actually launching, because the screen will flicker back to the list of apps before it will launch the one you just tapped. The Google Assistant also crashed often, forcing me to repeat my inquiry multiple times (or more likely, I just get frustrated with it and pull out my phone).The changes and improvements look decent, but if you don't first get the above things right, they're all for naught. When will software makers learn that performance - especially UI responsiveness - is the single most important part of a consumer-oriented device?Not that it matters to me - for some mysterious reason, these new watches won't be coming to The Netherlands. They're coming to the rest of Europe - just not The Netherlands. The Google Pixel is also still pretty much sold out in the two or three countries where it's supposedly available, with no indication they're ever going to be available elsewhere.Here's a tip, Google: if you want to be a successful hardware maker, maybe make sure interested consumers can actually, you know, buy your stuff?

Just as Windows' development had become complex and fragmented, so too did the company's internal systems for things like source control, issue tracking, testing, building, code analysis, and all the other tasks that fall under the application lifecycle management umbrella. And just as Windows' development was unified as OneCore, the company has embarked on an effort to unify its ALM and develop what it calls One Engineering System (1ES).The cornerstone of 1ES is TFS, but for 1ES, the company wanted to do more than just standardize on TFS; it wanted to switch to a single version control system. TFVC, Source Depot, and Git were the obvious contenders, though other options such as Mercurial were also considered. In the end, the company standardized on Git.Why reinvent the wheel all the time, when you can just use a tool everybody else is already using anyway?

Due to an SSD failure last year, I lost a bunch of my virtual machines, including my Windows 3.11 virtual machine. I don't actually use these for anything, but I like having these old operating systems at my fingertips, in case, I don't know, the world is about to end and the only way to prevent it is to run a very specific Windows 3.11-only application. So, yesterday, I recreated the virtual machine.This seems like an excellent opportunity to link to the original Windows for Workgroups (Windows 3.11) launch event, from October 1992. I'm not even going to try to characterise or summarise this event, because it's so incredibly Microsoftian and '90s, the English language simply doesn't contain enough words to paint an accurate picture.I grew up with MS-DOS and later Windows 3.x, so this is a strange, somewhat... Twisted throwback to... Let's call it 'simpler' times.

Augustin Cavalier (also known as Waddlesplash) was a guest on The Lunduke Hour, where he explains a lot about what's been going on with the Haiku project for the last couple of years, and why it's been so long from Alpha 4 to the upcoming Beta 1.Cavalier goes into Haiku's rather unique package management system, progress on the application front, and tons of other things. Definitely worth a listen.

Business owners in the town of Buea, the capital of the Southwest Region of Cameroon say they are struggling to operate following an internet shutdown that began on January 17.

What did Vizio know about what was going on in the privacy of consumers' homes? On a second-by-second basis, Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen that it matched to a database of TV, movie, and commercial content. What's more, Vizio identified viewing data from cable or broadband service providers, set-top boxes, streaming devices, DVD players, and over-the-air broadcasts. Add it all up and Vizio captured as many as 100 billion data points each day from millions of TVs.Vizio then turned that mountain of data into cash by selling consumers' viewing histories to advertisers and others. And letâs be clear: We're not talking about summary information about national viewing trends. According to the complaint, Vizio got personal. The company provided consumers' IP addresses to data aggregators, who then matched the address with an individual consumer or household. Vizio's contracts with third parties prohibited the re-identification of consumers and households by name, but allowed a host of other personal details - for example, sex, age, income, marital status, household size, education, and home ownership. And Vizio permitted these companies to track and target its consumers across devices.That's... That's a lot of very creepy spying.

Per Arca Noae's revised release schedule, and as announced at Warpstock 2016, Blue Lion (ArcaOS 5.0) moved into beta testing stage today. The first beta release has been made available to the test team, and we anticipate a rigorous round of installation, modifications, formatting, deletion, disk wiping, and all that other fun stuff which accompanies a healthy beta test.We do not anticipate a public beta cycle nor are we planning a gamma release or an untold number of release candidates. Instead, we fully expect ArcaOS 5.0 to emerge from beta testing at the end of March and to become generally available at that time.As mentioned during earlier coverage, ArcaOS is a sort-of continuation of eComStation, since it's founded by several eCS developers who felt eCS had ground to a halt.

The VA2000 is a FPGA based graphics card for Amiga 2000/3000/4000 computers featuring high resolutions and color depth over DVI-D/HDMI. It has a hacker-friendly expansion header for upgrades and custom mods and features a slot for MicroSD cards that can be mounted in AmigaOS.The YouTube video provides additional insight into the open source graphics card. Interestingly enough, I've been looking into getting my hands on a classic Amiga, but the one I would want - an A3000 or A4000 - are quite hard to come by here in The Netherlands.

This is interesting: it turns out there was a NextStep release for IBM AIX workstations. From the initial, archived press release (via Steven Troughton-Smith):AIX PS/2 NextStep Environment Version 1.1 is a state-of-the-art graphical user interface and programming environment for AIX workstations, designed to be compatible with the same application programming interface (API) as the NextStep product, Software Release 1.0, provided by NeXT, Incorporated.AIX PS/2 NextStep Environment Version 1.1 provides icons and menus to facilitate access to system utilities and applications. The AIX NextStep Interface Builder is designed to provide a rich set of well-defined objects and graphical cut-and-paste capabilities for designing and implementing application user interfaces. The Objective-C (3) Compiler provides the benefits of object-oriented programming for developers who choose to design additional objects for the application development environment. AIX PS/2 NextStep Environment can help increase the productivity of programmers and end users.Steven Troughton-Smith, who has a thing for collecting NEXT/early OS X builds and versions, is now looking for this piece of software history, but not a whole lot can be found about this online. I did ran into a thread in comp.sys.next.advocacy from 1995 in which a Robin D. Wilson sheds some more light onto the fate of this product:And we ran it on an RS/6000 model 540 (with 63MB of RAM no less) -- it was pretty fast. The thing that killed it is Steve Jobs wanted IBM pay more money for 2.0. They had only _just_ finished porting 1.0 to AIX (it did run on top of AIX -- and there were several hacks made to accomodate it -- but it did run fine). When NeXT was shipping 2.0, IBM felt they wouldn't be able to sell 1.0 (there we some rather dramatic improvements between 1.0 and 2.0). They also didn't want to spend more money on it (as SJ was demanding for 2.0), and they didn't feel like porting 2.0 would take any less time (meaning they wouldn't get done until NeXT released a newer version). All that considered -- IBM abandoned NS.This wasn't a "bad decision" by SJ (per se), but I can see IBM's view on this easier than I can see NeXT's...Steven also stumbled upon a very, very long FAQ about NextStep/AIX, which contains tons of information. This will probably be very hard to find, but for the sake of digital archaeology and preservation, we really need to find it somewhere and preserve it. Absolutely fascinating.

But today's breakthroughs would be nowhere and would not have been possible without what came before them - a fact we sometimes forget. Mainframes led to personal computers, which gave way to laptops, then tablets and smartphones, and now the Internet of Things. Today much of the interoperability we enjoy between our devices and systems - whether at home, the office or across the globe - owes itself to efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to make an interoperable operating system (OS) that could be used across diverse computing environments - the UNIX operating system.[...]As part of the standardization efforts undertaken by IEEE, it developed a small set of application programming interfaces (APIs). This effort was known as POSIX, or Portable Operation System Interface. Published in 1988, the POSIX.1 standard was the first attempt outside the work at AT&T and BSD (the UNIX derivative developed at the University of California at Berkeley) to create common APIs for UNIX systems. In parallel, X/Open (an industry consortium consisting at that time of over twenty UNIX suppliers) began developing a set of standards aligned with POSIX that consisted of a superset of the POSIX APIs. The X/Open standard was known as the X/Open Portability Guide and had an emphasis on usability. ISO also got involved in the efforts, by taking the POSIX standard and internationalizing it.A short look at the history of UNIX standardisation and POSIX.