OSnews

Microsoft has opened a GitHub repository for a set of tools to create Windows drivers in Rust. This repo is a collection of Rust crates that enable developers to develop Windows Drivers in Rust. It is the intention to support both WDM and WDF driver development models. Note: This project is still in early stages of development and is not yet recommended for commercial use. We encourage community experimentation, suggestions and discussions! So both Linux and Windows are now experimenting with using Rust to write drivers.

The European Commission has fined Intel $400 million (376 million) for hindering competitors' access to the market through naked restrictions between 2002 and 2007. The fine comes after a long-running antitrust court battle dating back to 2009 when the Commission initially fined Intel a record $1.13 billion for abuse of dominance. While some of Intel's actions, like hidden rebates, were dropped on appeal due to lack of evidence of harm, the Commission upheld that Intel paid PC manufacturers to delay or limit products using AMD processors. Specifically, the Commission cited examples where Intel paid HP not to sell AMD-powered business PCs to small and medium businesses through direct channels from 2002-2005. It also paid Acer to delay the launch of an AMD-based notebook from late 2003 to early 2004. Intel also paid Lenovo to push back the launch of AMD notebooks by six months. While it's great that fines are being levied for these crimes, the problem is that the damage is already done and a fine won't actually undo said damage. Of course, there's no way to know exactly what the industry would've looked like had Intel not committed these crimes, but I feel like quite often these fines are more seen as a cost of doing business than as an actual detrimental punishment. It reminds me a lot of speeding tickets - they can be devastating to somebody of lower means, but to the upper classes they're just the cost of driving a car and barely even register. I'd be much more in favour for not just fining companies that violate antitrust, but also going after the people within those companies that enabled and advocated for such behaviour through massive personal fines and jail time. None of the people involved will feel even the slightest bit of sting from their actions, and will do it all over again next time they get the chance.

I had to do some digging into our archives to see if we ever covered GeckOS before, but apparently we haven't - and that's a shame. GeckOS is a pre-emptive multitasking operating system for the Commodore 64 and the PET, and should be easily portable to other 6502-based machines, and offers multithreading, TCP/IP networking, and more. Version 2.1 has just been released, and it adds a ton of new features and bugfixes.

In this article, we'll talk about building up a tiny (micro) Linux distribution" from scratch. This distribution really won't do much, but it will be built from scratch. We will build the Linux kernel on our own, and write some software to package our micro-distro. Lastly, we are doing this example on the RISC-V architecture, specifically QEMU's riscv64 virt machine. There's very little in this article that is specific to this architecture, so you might as well do an almost identical exercise for other architectures like x86. We recently went through the RISC-V boot process with SBI and bare metal programming for RISC-V, so this is just a continuation up the software stack. This is great content, and a very fun exercise for an Autumn weekend.

Cairo 1.18 was released today as the first major stable release to this 2D graphics library in five years. This vector-based graphics library is widely-used for a variety of purposes from GNOME's GTK toolkit to other apps making use of Cairo for targeting different back-ends from PDFs to OpenGL contexts. Mozilla Firefox, WebKit, Mono, and many other open-source projects are notable users of Cairo. Cairo is something most end users don't really have to think about or worry too much about, but it's a crucial part of the open source operating system world. The most interesting change in 1.18 is that it drops support for a variety of old back-ends, most notably Qt 4, BeOS, and OS/2.

The Wayland Color Management protocol has been years in the making and is needed for a client to specify the color space and HDR metadata of a surface. This color management protocol is ultimately needed for getting high dynamic range (HDR) support working out well within Wayland environments. This week an initial merge request was opened for implementing the draft color management protocol with the Weston reference compositor. This is an important part of getting HDR working properly on Wayland, and thus making sure the Linux desktop gets full, proper HDR suport. On a related note, the Wayland Wine driver has also seen some progress, adding basic window management capabilities.

Android and iOS share a common problem: they copied desktop text editing conventions, but without a menu bar or mouse. This forced them to overload the tap gesture with a wide range of actions: placing the cursor, moving it, selecting text, and invoking a pop-up menu. This results in an overly complicated and ambiguous mess-o-taps, leading to a variety of user errors. It's less of a problem if you only do short bursts of text in social media or messaging apps. But doing anything more complicated like an email gets tedious. However, in my user study on text editing, I was surprised to find that everyone had significant problems and rather severe workaround for editing text. With the extremely talented Olivier Bau, together we created a prototype called Eloquent, which offers a much simpler solution. We presented this work at UIST 2021. This is now one of my favourite articles I've ever read. I despise text input and text editing on mobile devices, whether they be Android or iOS. I hate it with the passion of a thousand burning suns, but it seems like nobody else cares. Luckily, the author of this article, Scott Jenson, a man with an impressive career doing UI work at Apple, Google, and others, agrees with me, and together with his colleagues, during his time at Google, he came up with an entirely different, touch-first way of editing text. The end result - be sure to watch the video to see it in action - immediately clicks for me. I want this. Now. This would be a massive usability improvement, and the fact it isn't in Android yet, despite being developed at Google, is further evidence Google has no clue how to make good ideas float to the top. Jenson explains why Eloquent, as they called their new input/editing system, won't ship with Android, while he expresses a bit more optimism Apple might be more open to rethinking mobile text editing: Unfortunately, shipping something like Eloquent would be challenging. First, as too many people mistakenly see text editing as done", there is little appetite to fix it. Second, users have been trained to cope with this error-prone approach for well over a decade. Asking people to change at this point would be hard. But most importantly, fixing text editing isn't seen as important enough in the war between Android and iOS. It's not the flashy feature that shifts your Net Promoter Scores. What I find ironic is that a fundamental change, like fixing text editing, could make people feel much more at ease using their phones and could be an enormous reason to switch. But it would be a slow burn and take years of steady effort. Android just can't think this way. Apple just might. Android needs this.

At its peak in 2017, the global smartphone market saw more than 700 brands fiercely competing. Fast forward to 2023 and the number of active brands (that have recorded sell-through volumes) is down by two-thirds to almost 250, according to Counterpoint's Global Handset Model Sales Tracker, which has been tracking sales of these brands across more than 70 key countries. So many good brands and good ideas kicked to the curb by the stranglehold Apple and Google have on the market. While many of these brands were mere OEMs, it also includes companies making their own platforms.

Every six months, there is a new Java release. Ever so often (currently, every two years), Oracle labels a release as long term support", and Java users wonder whether they should upgrade. In theory, other JDK distributors could offer long term support" for other releases, but it seems everyone is following Oracle's lead. Should you upgrade? Here are the major features of Java 21. I omit preview and incubator features (which you are surely not going to use in production), JVM internals, highly specialized features such as this one, and deprecations. The answer is yes - you should definitely upgrade.

GNOME 45 may have just been released, but that doesn't mean GNOME 44 will be buried right away. GNOME 44.5 has just been released, packed with bugfixes and small tweaks - nothing groundbreaking. Reading through the changelog, it's a long list of squashed bugs, so it should be an uneventful upgrade for most GNOME users who aren't upgrading to 45 quite yet.

iOS 17 and iPadOS 17 offer several welcome improvements, tweaks, and new features. They also continue two trends that have dominated recent updates for both platforms: the expansion of widgets giving modular access to functions from a variety of apps, and on-device intelligence that improves search, recommendations, and more. This year's update pushes both platforms forward just a bit-but not enough that too many people will notice. A more complete feature set will roll out over time, though, so by the end of the cycle, we'll have seen a nice range of additions. Honestly, with how mature iOS (and Android, for that matter) have become, I don't think it's a bad thing that we're seeing more iterative releases bringing polish and nips and tucks instead of massive feature overhauls and additions nobody is asking for.

It's been a while, but Visopsys has had a new release, 0.92, with all the details in the changelog. There is a longer-term project to bring the operating system into the modern era, with things like 64-bit support, UEFI booting, and so on. In the meantime, this maintenance release features stability and usability improvements, bug fixes, and multitasker portability changes designed to further unshackle it from the x86 processor architecture. Visopsys has been in development since 1997, and one of its unique features is a focus on a partitioning tool built atop Visopsys, Partition Logic, to make partitioning changes without booting into any other operating system.

This repository is part of the GoSub browser project. Currently there is only a single component/repository (this one), but the idea will be that there are many other components that as a whole make up a full-fledged browser. Each of the components can probably function as something standalone (ie: html5 parser, css parser, etc). In the future, this component (html5 parser) will receive through an API a stream of bytes and will output a stream of events. The events will be consumed by the next component and so on, until we can display something in a window/user agent. This could very well be a text-mode browser, but the idea is to have a graphical browser. Any new browser project has a certain madman" quality to it, and I'm sure GoSub is no different.

Installing Windows strictly through the Command Line is an important tool to have. If Windows changes the installer or out of box experience, you can bypass any changes with this guide! I had no idea this was possible. I knew you could open up cmd.exe during installation and do certain things there, but I didn't know you could perform the entire Windows installation this way. I'm not entirely sure what the use cases are, but it's definitely a neat trick.

The Raspberry Pi is known for its versatility and ability to run different operating systems but it seems that the $4 Raspberry Pi Pico can also run an OS. This impressive foray into the world of Palm PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) emulation on our favorite microcontroller comes from Dmitry Grinberg. They have shared an early demo of his platform known as rePalm in which he manages to run PalmOS on a Raspberry Pi Pico. We mentioned Grinberg's work before - this person is a Palm OS wizard, and the progress he's making will prove invaluable once the remaining stock of Palm OS devices - half of which is in my office - starts breaking down.

Microsoft will release its next big Windows 11 update on September 26th. The update will include the new AI-powered Windows Copilot feature, a redesigned File Explorer, a new Ink Anywhere feature for pen users, big improvements to the Paint app, and much more. Windows Copilot is the headline feature for the Windows 11 23H2 update, bringing the same Bing Chat feature straight to the Windows 11 desktop. It appears as a sidebar in Windows 11, allowing you to control settings on a PC, launch apps, or simply answer queries. It's integrated all over the operating system, too: Microsoft executives demoed using Copilot to write text messages using data from your calendar, navigation options in Outlook, and more. Copilot feels like Clippy 3.0 - yes, 3.0, if you know your Microsoft history - and I have zero interest in any of it. I don't want to be second-guessed or receive helpful" advice from a glorified autocomplete that's hogging both bandwith and CPU cycles that I'd much rather put to use somewhere else. I'm absolutely baffled by this weird obsession Microsoft has to shove AI" into every nook and cranny of their products. Am I just out of touch? If this what Windows users want?

When you plug an Android phone into a PC, you have the option to change the USB mode between file transfer/Android Auto (MTP), USB tethering (NCM), MIDI, or PTP. In Android 14, however, a new option can appear in USB Preferences: USB webcam. Selecting this option switches the USB mode to UVC (USB Video Class), provided the device supports it, turning your Android device into a standard USB webcam that other devices will recognize, including Windows, macOS, and Linux PCs, and possibly even other Android devices. Webcam support in Android 14 is not enabled out of the box, however. In order to enable it, four things are required: a Linux kernel config needs to be enabled, the UVC device needs to be configured, the USB HAL needs to be updated, and a new system app needs to be preloaded. iOS recently introduced this feature as well, and it makes a ton of sense for Android to go down the same path.

Today we have something that has taken months to write, and we feel that the best we have done is to give a sense of what Intel's coolest CPU is capable of. The Intel Xeon MAX 9480 combines 56 cores with memory on the package. The memory is not standard DDR5. Instead, it is 64GB of HBM2e, the same kind of memory found on many GPUs and AI accelerators today. What seemed like a straightforward review at the outset became absolutely fascinating, especially when we pulled all of the DDR5 memory from a system and watched it boot. Let us get to it. Few of us will ever get to use one of these - especially since they're specifically designed for a supercomputer - but maybe we'll get lucky and they end up on eBay or AliExpress ten years from now.

Mozilla has conducted one of the first - maybe even the first - studies into the effectiveness of browser choice screens, and they conclude: This research showed that browser choice screens have the potential to be effective. Well designed browser choice screens can improve competition, giving people meaningful choice and improving people's satisfaction and feelings of control. And they can do all of this without overburdening people or taking too much of their time. What's more, people have strong preferences: it turns out they want the ability to choose their default browser (rather than being assigned one by the operating system/device manufacturer); they also want to pick from a wider range of browsers. You can download the full report from Mozilla.

If you're running Windows try holding down CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + WIN + L. Then watch in bemusement as LinkedIn opens in your default browser. Windows watcher Paul Thurrott posted this bizarre keyboard shortcut on X (Twitter), noting that it's an operating system hotkey. So why does Windows even have this? It's all part of the Office key that Microsoft introduced on some of its own keyboards a few years ago. The Office key replaced the usual right-hand Windows key, offering up the ability to hold the key in combination with another one to quickly open Office apps. Absolutely bizarre. The funniest outcome of this is a joke feature request by KDE developers in the KDE bugzilla, demanding a shortcut key combination be added to KDE to open LinkedIn to achieve feature parity" with Windows, which sparked a flurry of proposed fixes" and additional feature requests - with this one definitely being my favourite.

During the opening keynote at Intel's Innovation event in San Jose, Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger unveiled a score of details about the upcoming Meteor Lake client platform. Intel's Meteor Lake marks the beginning of a new era for the chipmaker, as they move away from the chaotic Intel 7 node and go into a rollout of their Foveros 3D packaging with EUV lithography for their upcoming client mobile platform. Meteor Lake uses a tiled, disaggregated chiplet architecture for its client-centric processors for the first time, changing the very nature of Intel's consumer chips going forward. And, according to Intel, all of these changes have allowed them to bring some significant advancements to the mobile market. Intel's first chiplet-based consumer CPU breaks up the common functions of a modern CPU into four individual tiles: compute, graphics, SoC, and an I/O tile. Within the makeup of the compute tile is a new pair of cores, a P-core named Redwood Cove and a new E-core called Crestmont. Both these cores promise IPC gains over their previous counterparts, but perhaps the most interesting inclusion is a new type of E-core embedded directly into the SoC tile, which Intel calls Low Power Island.' These new LP E-cores are designed with the idea that light workloads and processes can be taken off the more power-hungry compute tile and offloaded onto a more efficient and lower-powered tile altogether. Other major additions include a first-for-Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which sits within the SoC tile and is designed to bring on-chip AI capabilities for workloads and inferencing, paving the way for the future. With Meteor Lake, Intel is aiming to put themselves in a more competitive position within the mobile market, with notable improvements to compute core hierarchy, Intel's Xe-LPG Arc-based graphics tile looking to bolster integrated graphics capabilities, and an NPU that adds various AI advantages. Meteor Lake also sets the scene for Intel and modular disaggregation, with Foveros 3D packaging set to become a mainstay of Intel's processor roadmap for the future, with the Intel 4 process making its debut and acting as a stepping stone to what will become Intel's next mainstay node throughout its fabs, Intel 3. AnandTech takes its usual in-depth look at Intel's upcoming Meteor Lake platform, which seems like it will be a rather radical shift for the company. It's also the first generation whithout Intel's Core ix naming scheme, so things might be a bit confusing for a while post-launch.

Here's one major change coming down the road: long-term support (LTS) for Linux kernels is being reduced from six to two years. Why? Simple, Corbet explained: There's really no point to maintaining it for that long because people are not using them." I agree. While I'm sure someone out there is still running 4.14 in a production Linux system, there can't be many of them. Another reason, and a far bigger problem than simply maintaining LTS, according to Corbet, is that Linux code maintainers are burning out. It's not that developers are a problem. The last few Linux releases have involved an average of more than 2,000 programmers - including about 200 new developers coming on board - working on each release. However, the maintainers - the people who check the code to see if it fits and works properly - are another matter. The longer LTS support windows were put in place mostly for embedded devices, and as Ars Technica explains, it's Android in particular that is affected by this change.

The GNOME project is excited to present the latest GNOME release, version 45. For the new version we've focused on refining your daily interactions, enhancing performance, and making the overall experience smoother and more efficient. From subtle design tweaks to functional upgrades, GNOME 45 is all about refining the core desktop environment you rely on. GNOME 45 comes with a new Activities indicator, which replaces the Activities" button with workspaces indicator, letting you know at a glance which workspace you're on. A lot of work has gone into improving search performance, and they've added an indicator to let you know when your camera is in use. The image viewer has been replaced by an entirely new application, and there's a new camera application as well. Of course, this is just a small selection - there are countless improvements and fixes in all the core GNOME applications. GNOME 45 will find its way to a distribution near you.

As it turned out, Microsoft is testing the idea of adding folders to the Recommended section in Windows 11's Start menu, giving users access to more recently added applications and suggested files. The release notes do not mention the change, and enabling it requires a third-party app called ViVeTool. I was forced to use Windows for a little while on a new laptop, and the current Start menu is an atrocious mess. Somehow I doubt adding folders to an already useless section of the Start menu is going to make it any less of a disaster.

Hetzner introduced its Ampere Altra powered arm64-based cloud servers earlier this year, making it possible to easily run OpenBSD/arm64 on their platform. The only caveat for now is that the viogpu(4) driver is required, which was committed by jcs@ in April 2023 and thus only available in snapshots. It will first appear in OpenBSD 7.4. Excellent news.

Four of the eight central processing units in the Mate 60 Pro's system on a chip" (SoC) rely purely on a design by Arm, the British company whose chip architecture powers 99 percent of smartphones. The other four CPUs are Arm-based but feature Huawei's own designs and adaptations, according to three people familiar with the Mate's development and Geekerwan, a Chinese technology testing company that took a closer look at the main chip. I could design my own processor cores too if had the means of a genocidal, totalitarian superpower.

Google Chrome is getting a new feature that automatically plays YouTube and other videos in picture-in-picture mode (PiP) when you switch tabs or windows. Chrome's new PiP feature is coming to desktops, including Windows 11, Windows 10, macOS and ChromeOS. If you're watching a video on Chrome and decide to hop over to another tab, the browser will automatically place your video into a handy Picture-in-Picture (PiP) mode. This new feature is similar to the Automatically turn on picture in picture for video sites" option in Microsoft Edge Canary. This seems like another one of those helpful" browser features you need to turn off because at random moments it'll obscure part of the web page you're looking at. Who is asking for features like this?

However almost every circle" you can see in printed media (and most purely digital ones) are not, in fact, circles. Why is this? Since roughly the mid 80s all high quality" print jobs have been done either in PostScript or, nowadays almost exclusively, in PDF. They use the same basic drawing model, which does not have a primitive for circles (or circle arcs). The only primitives they have are straight line segments, rectangles and Bezier curves. None of these can be used to express a circle accurately. You can only do an approximation of a circle but it is always slightly eccentric. The only way to create a proper circle is to have a raster image like the one above. Shouldn't be that big of a deal, right? I'm sure nobody is using PDF for anything that would require the kind of precision needed for a perfect circle, like CAD drawings for laser cutters and similar machinery. Right? Again one might ask whether this has any practical impact. For this case, again, probably not. But did you know that one of the cases PDF is being considered (and, based on Internet rumors, is already being used) is as an interchange format for CAD drawings? Now it suddenly starts mattering. If you have any component where getting a really accurate circle shape is vital (like pistons and their holes), suddenly all your components are slightly misshaped. Which would not be fun. This is why we can't have nice things.

Java 21 introduces the notion of sequenced collections, the Z Garbage Collector (ZGC) has been extended to maintain separate generations for young and old objects for improving Java app performance, virtual threads are now out of preview form, and the Windows 32-bit x86 port has been deprecated for removal. Java 21 also brings some new preview features including string templates, the latest iteration on the foreign function and memory API, unnamed classes and instance main methods, scoped values, and structured concurrency. You can find the GPL-licensed OpenJDK builds at the OpenJDK website, and the closed source builds from Oracle are also available.

WSL isn't exactly my cup of tea so I know relatively little about it, but I do know it's quite popular. This looks like a big update with a ton of new features to play around with.

In court documents from the FTC vs Microsoft case, Google Stadia's former product lead Dov Zimring was called to discuss the cloud gaming platform and competition in the gaming space. This led to several comments on why Stadia couldn't compete in the industry from Google's own point-of-view. Exactly what you expected: lack of players led to a lack of games, which led to an even bigger lack of players, and so on. What surprises me most is not that this happened - but the fact they were surprised by this? I mean, getting a foothold in the gaming industry is incredibly hard, and requires you to be 110% in, and for the long haul at that. You have to be in all the way for the long term - anything less and you might as well not even try. I am baffled that nobody at Google was like - if we do this, we have to commit to at least ten years of perseverance, through lean times with few subscribers and massive investments and losses, only to recoup them later once the ball starts rolling. Consoles are sold at a loss for a reason.

There's a certain community in tech that's very vocal about their preference toward native apps. I share that sentiment, yet sometimes people take this idea too religiously. Unfortunately, the actual choice is about having an app or not, and I'd rather take something over nothing. I mean, sure, but that doesn't negate the fact that web applications - or, more specifically, Electron and Electron-like applications - are just bad. Any time I see an Electron application offered, I instantly know the developers behind the project do not respect me as a user. They choose their own convenience over my experience as a user, and while that's a perfectly valid choice they can make, it does mean I'm not going to use your service.

Today we are beginning to roll out an update for the Paint app to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels (version 11.2308.18.0 or higher). With this update, we are introducing support for layers and transparency! Paint.NET is still better.

The Verge: Panos Panay has always been the force behind Microsoft's Surface line. He helped bring Surface to life as a secret project more than 10 years ago. He's presented the new devices onstage at events, showed up at malls to promote Surface hardware, and has steered Microsoft's Surface tablets to success in the years since. Now, he's leaving in a surprise departure announced just days before Microsoft's next big Surface event. Panay will no longer be presenting at Microsoft's showcase on Thursday but will remain at the company for another couple of weeks as part of a transition process. He's reportedly joining Amazon to replace Dave Limp and lead Amazon's Echo and Alexa push. Amazon is also holding its own hardware event on Wednesday. This sure is an odd and rather abrupt departure - only a few days before Panay was supposed to be present Microsoft's Surface event - and I wonder what the full story is, and if we'll ever get to hear it. I have mixed feelings about Panay's tenure at Microsoft. As far as hardware goes, Surface devices are quite nice and pleasant, albeit often a tad bit out of date for the prices Microsoft is asking. Worse yet, Microsoft and Panay, despite halfhearted attempts, completely missed the boat on ARM, and Windows is still floundering there due to both poor ARM hardware (compared to Apple's offerings) and Windows on ARM being an afterthought. As far as software goes - well, Windows is in a worse state than it's ever been in. It's the clown car of operating systems, and two decades of layering one user interface and API above another has turned the operating system into a layer cake that makes Hisarlik seem like a thin sheet of single-ply toilet paper. The ways in which Microsoft has jerked Windows from left to right are numerous, and Panay was at the head of it all for a long time. Maybe Microsoft's relentless push for shoving AI down Windows' users' throats as the straw that broke Panay's back?

iOS 17 expands on last year's Lock Screen updates with the addition of interactive widgets and StandBy, a new feature that turns the iPhone into a mini home hub when it is charging. You can now see voicemail transcriptions in real time, and leave video messages in FaceTime. FaceTime also now works on the Apple TV with tvOS 17. Apple also released watchOS 10, tvOS 17, and HomePod 17 Software. Take a guess which one is the unwanted child.

KDE's Nate Graham talks about Wayland, and sums up both its history, current status, and the future. Wayland. It comes up a lot: Bug X fixed in the Plasma Wayland session." The Plasma Wayland session has now gained support for feature Y." And it's in the news quite a bit lately with the announcement that Fedora KDE is proposing to drop the Plasma X11 session for version 40 and only ship the Plasma Wayland session. I've read a lot of nervousness and fear about it lately. So today, let's talk about it! Wayland is a needlessly divisive topic, mostly because the people who want to stick to X.org are not the same people with the skills required to actually maintain, let alone improve, X.org. Wayland should not be a divisive topic because there's really nowhere else to go - it's the current and future of the Linux desktop, and as time goes on, the cracks in X.org will start to grow wider and longer. In essence, Xorg became too large, too complicated, and too fragile to touch without risking breaking the entire Linux ecosystem. It's stable today because it's been essentially frozen for years. But that stability has come hand-in-hand with stagnation. As we all know in the tech world, projects that can't adapt die. Projects that depend on them then die as well. My biggest - and basically only - issue with Wayland is that it's very Linux-focused for now, leaving especially the various BSDs in a bit of a rough situation. There's work being done on Wayland for BSD, but I fear it's going to take them quite a bit of time to catch up, and in the meantime, they might suffer from a lack of development and big fixing in their graphics stack.

Before the ubiquity of the Internet, before WiFi, even before Ethernet was affordable, there was the LocalTalk physical layer and cabling system and its companion suite of protocols called AppleTalk. A network ahead of its time in terms of plug-and-play, but not quite as fast as 10mbit/s Ethernet at 230.4 kbit/s. This article goes into great detail about setting up an AppleTalk network today.

The spread of Mastodon clients to alternative platforms is continuing, and today, it's OS/2's - the one that got away - time in the spotlight. Robert Roland is working on a Mastodon client targeting OS/2, eComStation, and ArcaOS, but it's all still early in development. The first bits of code were only uploaded yesterday, so there's a long way yet to go - but if you want to follow along, you can go to Roland's Mastodon account, and of course, if you want to help out, I'm sure he'd be delighted. I love OS/2 - in the form of the modern ArcaOS - and a working Mastodon client is something that's quite high on my wish list. Who knows - maybe one of you nerds can help out with this project.

If you reach this page, you may be interested into this new category of Linux distributions labeled immutable". In this category, one can find by age (oldest youngest) NixOS, Guix, Endless OS, Fedora Silverblue, OpenSUSE MicroOS, Vanilla OS and many new to come. I will give examples of immutability implementation, then detail my thoughts about immutability, and why I think this naming can be misleading. I spent a few months running all of those distributions on my main computers (NAS, Gaming, laptop, workstation) to be able to write this text. I haven't given any of these a try just yet, but I feel like this is where the Linux desktop is going. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing - I need both more experience as well as read more informed opinions about it - but I do like the concept.

But little was said at the time about connectivity and networking. It could IR-beam (consuming the battery) and sync, but other than muted complaints about missing Bluetooth (which would have consumed even more battery), no one said anything one way or the other about getting it on the Internet. And I'm all about Palm devices on the Internet. It turns out there's a reason for that, and we're going to patch the operating system so we can make the Fossil Wrist PDA into what may be the smallest (and first wrist-mounted) Gopher client. That also required an update to the Overbite Palm Gopher client (which you'll want for your 68K Palm anyway), and then there's the matter of the battery refusing to charge as well. And finally, we want to make all of this portable! This makes my heart flutter and my tummy somersault.

Phoenix is the latest addition to AMD's long line of APUs (chips with integrated graphics). Ever since Picasso launched with Zen cores and Vega graphics, AMD's APUs saw massive improvements from generation to generations. That's largely because AMD started from so far behind. But Zen 2 and Zen 3 APUs were already very solid products, so Phoenix's improvements make it a very dangerous competitor. AMD has put a lot of focus into reducing power consumption across every area of the chip. Zen 4 cores do an excellent job on the CPU side, while RDNA 3 provides strong graphics performance. Hardware offload helps power efficiency on specialized AI and audio processing workloads. To support all this, Infinity Fabric gets lower power states and very flexible clock behavior. Phoenix ends up being able to perform well across a wide range of form factors and power targets. These are the kinds of chips powering the current slew of mobile gaming devices like the Steam Deck and its various competitors. It's great to see this market segment take off, mostly thanks to AMD and Valve, but I'm going to hold off just one or two generations more before jumping in. If AMD's pace of improvement continues, these handheld devices are going to become even thinner and lighter. That being said, I'd still love to review a Steam Deck for OSNews, specifically because of its Linux base. Maybe I'll run into an acceptable deal at some point soon.

Macs have brought a great deal to us over the years: desktop publishing, design, image editing and processing, multimedia, and more. One of the few fields where they have failed is programming, despite many attempts. Here I look back at some of those opportunities we missed. It's a bit of an only mildly related aside, but even though I personally would love to get into programming in some form, it's actually a lot harder to get into than a lot of programmers tend to think. Learning how to program has big the rest of the fucking owl" energy in that the most basic of basic concepts are relatively easy to grasp, but the leap from those very basic concepts to actually using them for something useful is absolutely massive and fraught with endless pitfalls. Many, many have tried to bridge this massive canyon, and Apple sure has tried numerous times as this article illustrates, but other than just starting at a young age and never losing interest and never standing still for too long, it seems like nobody has found an actually good, reliable way of teaching latecomers how to program.

I had no idea that Vim started on the Amiga, and I doubt many people do.

At WWDC earlier this year, Apple announced that upcoming versions of iOS and macOS would ship with a new feature powered by a Transformer language model" that will give users predictive text recommendations inline as they type." Upon hearing this announcement, I was pretty curious about how this feature works. Apple hasn't deployed many language models of their own, despite most of their competitors going all-in on large language models over the last couple years. I see this as a result of Apple generally priding themselves on polish and perfection, while language models are fairly unpolished and imperfect. As a result, this may be one of the first Transformer-based models that Apple will ship in one of its operating systems, or at least one of the first that they've acknowledged publicly. This left me with some questions about the feature. Jack Cook did some digging into this new feature and the language model it uses, and came up with some very interesting findings. He also details his process, and of course, the code he wrote to do all of this is available on Github.

Java 21 will be released on September 19, 2023, supporting record patterns in switch blocks and expressions. Such syntax is monumental (At least, in Java land). It marks the point where Java could be considered to properly support functional programming patterns in ways similar to Kotlin, Rust, or C#. And it marks the first point where I can say, as a Kotlin developer, that I feel jealous. I've got nothing to say about matters such as these, so I'll just quietly back away and let you all handle it.

Pineapple ONE is a functioning (macro) processor, that is based on an open-source architecture RISC-V. This architecture is becoming very popular these days, and it is well, open-source, so we chose to build a cpu only out of discrete, off-the-shelf components. You heard it right, there is no FPGA nor any microcontroller, there are just logic gates and memories. Our goal is to prove that designing a modern" CPU isn't that hard, so we have released our schematics and made it open source as well. You can check out our GitHub repository for more information. If there would be enough interest, maybe we could make a DIY kit, so anybody interested with soldering skills would be able to make their own Pineapple ONE! Don't think you can run Crysis on this though - it runs at 500 kHz, has a 512 kB program memory and 512 kB of RAM, and a black and white graphics card with 200*150 pixels. It's no speed demon, but who cares - this is quite the feat.

In short, no, I'm not making it up, I did make a virus back in 1990. I don't have the source code, unfortunately, for two reasons. It was over thirty years ago. I'm a chronic hoarder, but seemingly not that chronic. The floppy discs containing the code were confiscated. No, my mum wasn't proud, indeed she didn't even know about this episode at the time, and still doesn't. Not that she'd understand what a computer virus is, even if I attempted to explain it to her. What a great story.

Last week, Microsoft started rolling out the modern Photos app on Windows. While the modern Photos app has several new editing tools, it removes the built-in Video Editor" and replaces it with a web-based Clipchamp. If you've lost track of how many different photos applications Microsoft has shipped for Windows and what features they don't and do have - the linked article has a good, if Microsoftian convoluted overview.

Servo, the Rust browser engine originally developed by Mozilla, has posted an update about the project's progress over the past month, and there's a lot of good stuff in there. While our WebGPU support is still very much experimental (--pref dom.webgpu.enabled), it now passes over 5000 more tests in the Conformance Test Suite, after an upgrade from wgpu 0.6 (2020) to 0.16 (2023) and the addition of GPUSupportedFeatures. A few WebGPU demos now run too, notably those that don't require changing the width or height on the fly, such as the Conway's Game of Life built in Your first WebGPU app. On the CSS front, floats and white-space: nowrap' were previously only supported in our legacy layout engine (--legacy-layout), but now they are supported again, and better than ever before! Floats in particular are one of the trickiest parts of CSS2, and our legacy version had many bugs that were essentially unfixable due to the legacy layout architecture. On top of this and other improvements, Servo's reference browser now also comes with a new user interface, and it comes with a location bar! Keep in mind this is not supposed to be a full-fledged user interface comparable with Chrome or Firefox, so don't expect the world as a user.

Earlier this month, we linked to a story about how Android 14 would make it impossible for users - even root users - to modify system certificates on Android. We're ten days along now, and it seems two new methods have already been found to work around this issue, making it once again possible to edit system certificates. The original author, Tim Perry, found a way with the help of a few other people over on Mastodon, while g1a55er found a different way independently. I'm not smart enough to indicate if these methods are hacks or solid, durable, intended methods, but at least for now, this functionality remains available.