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Did you know that pigs eat humans “far more often than people expect?” If not, surely you must have heard the important, breaking news that a priest “died” in 2016, went to Hell briefly and returned to inform the rest of us that demons like to play Rhianna’s Umbrella song over and over again. If you aren’t aware of these important news stories then maybe you haven’t been spending enough time using Windows’ search box and widgets section, which at least for me, are filled to the brim with tabloid trash headlines. The stories come courtesy of Microsoft’s MSN content network, which syndicates content from hundreds of web publishers: some reputable, some less so. Full disclosure: Our parent company, Future Plc, has a syndication agreement with MSN and many of its sites, including Tom’s Hardware, occasionally have articles appear on the network. What’s problematic here, though, is not that MSN syndicates content but that it often pushes the equivalent of the Weekly World News table of contents right into the Windows operating system where it can be hard to avoid. Actions have consequences. If you choose to use Windows, you choose to get fed garbage all over your operating system in the form of ads and tabloid news.

Modders can change many things inside their favorite games, but dialogue from professionally voiced characters hasn’t been one of those things—at least until recently. AI voice generation could open up new modding avenues for some games, as it has already done with one Fallout 4 mod package. They’re not just new labels on existing dialogue, either. RED, created by NexusMods user ProfMajowski (and first seen by us at PCGamesN), says it used ElevenLabs voice AI to generate its more in-character lines. The results can sometimes “sound a little ’emotionless,'” the creator writes, but “otherwise they basically sound like the real thing.” Nothing your character can newly say now will change the game’s mechanics or reactions, but it should sound a bit more in character. I’m not down on “artificial intelligence” as a matter of principle – quite the opposite. This story right here is a great example of how AI can be used in productive, interesting ways that truly make something possible that either wasn’t possible before, or was simply entirely unrealistic. Spoken dialog is hard to record for a whole slew of reasons, from cost to finding enough quality voice actors to the time it takes, and it’s usually only the biggest studios that have the ability to add it to their games. Even then it’s often a struggle, from bad voice acting overall to large role-playing games where e.g. the main quest is beautifully voiced, but side quests are either entirely unvoiced or clearly rushed by some cheap interns. Thanks to technology like this, even small indie studios or mere mod developers can add something meaningful to their work that up until recently simply wasn’t realistic. It will make games meaningfully better – especially once technology improves a bit more and developers become proficient with it – without the need for hype.

Butler’s goal is to implement a virtual operating system with a strong focus on concurrency. Butler is not a computer hardware operating system. Instead, Butler is an application environment that runs on top of an existing system. Not exactly an operating system in the classical sense, but it still seems like an interesting project.

A federal judge has ruled against the Internet Archive in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a lawsuit brought against it by four book publishers, deciding that the website does not have the right to scan books and lend them out like a library. Judge John G. Koeltl decided that the Internet Archive had done nothing more than create “derivative works,” and so would have needed authorization from the books’ copyright holders — the publishers — before lending them out through its National Emergency Library program. As much as we all want the Internet Archive to be right – and morally, they are – copyright law, as outdated, dumb, and counterproductive as it is, was pretty clear in this case. Sadly.

Today, we’re introducing a major set of upgrades to the Framework Laptop spanning two new models – the Framework Laptop 13 (13th Gen Intel® Core™) and the Framework Laptop 13 (AMD Ryzen™ 7040 Series). We’ve not only scaled up performance and enabled an AMD-powered version for the first time, but we’ve also delivered refinements to the day-to-day user experience with a higher capacity battery, matte display, louder speakers, and more ridgid hinges. And Framework kept their promise: these new mainboards can be ordered separately and fit into the existing Framework 13″ laptop. The company also showed off their next product – a 16″ laptop that not only comes with an upgradeable GPU, but also a completely configurable input deck, so you can configure the keyboard and trackpad area in any configuration you like. I’m so happy Framework is doing well, as it shows that glued shut, non-repeairable, and non-upgradeable laptops are not some sort of universal inevitable truth.

Google Bard is out—sort of. Google says you can now join the waitlist to try the company’s generative AI chatbot at the newly launched bard.google.com site. The company is going with “Bard” and not the “Google Assistant” chatbot branding it was previously using. Other than a sign-up link and an FAQ, there isn’t much there right now. Google’s blog post calls Bard “an early experiment,” and the project is covered in warning labels. The Bard site has a bright blue “Experiment” label right on the logo, and the blog post warns, “Large language models will not always get it right. Feedback from a wide range of experts and users will help Bard improve.” A disclaimer below the demo input box warns, “Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn’t represent Google’s views.” Google’s Android keyboard and spell checker still can’t get “it’s” vs. “its” right 80% of the time, so I’m not holding my breath.

This release brings a grid view in the file chooser, improved settings panels forDevice Security, Accessibility, etc, and refined quick settings in the shell. The Softwareand Files apps have seen improvements, and a whole slew of new apps has joinedthe GNOME Circle. The release notes have all the details. The grid view in the file chooser alone would be worth a major version bump, considering how long it took them to implement it.

Car companies have been increasingly using digital screens and soft-touch buttons in modern cars to save costs while looking ‘hi-tech’ – but Hyundai has committed to fight this trend for as long as possible. Speaking at the launch of the new-generation Hyundai Kona, Sang Yup Lee, Head of Hyundai Design, said the new model deliberately uses physical buttons and dials for many of the controls, specifically air-conditioning and the sound system. Lee said this is because the move to digital screens is often more dangerous, as it often requires multiple steps and means drivers have to take their eyes off the road to see where they need to press. Slowly but surely, it seems car makers are starting to see the light. A clean, button-less dashboard means nothing once it’s folded around your crushed skull because you couldn’t find the seat heating button without taking your eyes off the road and wrapped yourself around a tree in the process. Just another reason to get an Ioniq 5 if we had the funds.

In fact, the broken bar barely even exists anymore. In the days of DOS, the character used for the pipe symbol (on the DOS command line) or for logical OR (in C/C++, for example) used ASCII code 7Ch (124 decimal), which was rendered as a broken vertical bar by the fonts used at least by the IBM MDA, CGA, EGA, and VGA cards. But nowadays that is no longer the case. The same ASCII codepoint is rendered as a solid vertical bar in Windows 10 or Linux, and also shown as a solid vertical bar on contemporary keyboards. What happened? Who doesn’t love some great character and ASCII archeology?

Microsoft laid off its entire ethics and society team within the artificial intelligence organization as part of recent layoffs that affected 10,000 employees across the company, Platformer has learned. The move leaves Microsoft without a dedicated team to ensure its AI principles are closely tied to product design at a time when the company is leading the charge to make AI tools available to the mainstream, current and former employees said. Oh so that’s totally not worrying at all or anything.

We’ve created GPT-4, the latest milestone in OpenAI’s effort in scaling up deep learning. GPT-4 is a large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, emitting text outputs) that, while less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks. For example, it passes a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers; in contrast, GPT-3.5’s score was around the bottom 10%. We’ve spent 6 months iteratively aligning GPT-4 using lessons from our adversarial testing program as well as ChatGPT, resulting in our best-ever results (though far from perfect) on factuality, steerability, and refusing to go outside of guardrails. “Artificial intelligence” companies are iterating quickly now. I’m definitely looking forward to the new memes based on GPT-4.

Coming up with a title that explains the full story here was difficult, so I’m going to try to explain quickly. Yesterday, Docker sent an email to all Docker Hub users explaining that anyone who has created an “organisation” will have their account deleted including all images, if they do not upgrade to a paid team plan. The email contained a link to a tersely written PDF (since, silently edited) which was missing many important details which caused significant anxiety and additional work for open source maintainers. What a shitshow. We really have to start worrying about the future of Github, too, since I find it highly unlikely Microsoft isn’t planning similar moves in the future. If you’re hosting code at Github, I’d suggest looking at alternatives sooner rather than later, so you don’t end up like the people affected by something like this.

Apple and its manufacturing partner Foxconn were among the companies behind a landmark liberalization of labor laws in the Indian state of Karnataka last month, according to three people familiar with the matter. Their successful lobbying for new legislation means two-shift production can take place in India, akin to the two companies’ practices in China, their primary manufacturing base. The law gives the southern state one of the most flexible working regimes in India as the country aims to become an alternative manufacturing base to China. “We do the right thing, even when it’s not easy.”

If you’re new to the Arm ecosystem, consider this a quick primer on terms you likely have seen before but might have questions about. Well, exactly what it says.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you might remember back in 2012 when I changed the startup sound on my Power Mac G3 (Blue and White). That was a fun introduction to the Forth programming language. I had to reverse-engineer just enough of Apple’s firmware update script to understand what was going on. Recently, Aidan Halpin, a reader of this site, asked me if I could do the same kind of startup sound customization on his iMac. This particular iMac is officially known as the “iMac (Slot Loading)” and has a model identifier of PowerMac2,1. As you can guess from the name, it has a slot-loading CD-ROM drive unlike the original iMac that had a laptop-style tray-loading drive. By the way, Aidan’s iMac is special because it has a PowerPC G4 processor soldered onto the logic board instead of the original G3. He sent me Apple’s last firmware update for this model: iMac Firmware Update 4.1.9. I went to work looking at the update contents to see if I could figure out how to modify the chime the same way I did with my Power Mac G3. I thought it would be fun to take everyone along for a ride and show exactly what was involved in changing the sound. And of course, this post wouldn’t be complete without also sharing the code for the utility I created to inject the new chime into the firmware update file. This is an insane amount of work for something that doesn’t really matter in the end. I love it.

Here’s an interesting bit of news out of Mobile World Congress: Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has been certified as the “world’s first commercially deployable iSIM (Integrated SIM)”. What the heck is an iSIM? Didn’t we just go through a SIM card transition with eSIM? We did, but iSIM is better than eSIM. We’ll explain, but the short answer is that iSIM is the next step in the continual march to reduce the size of SIM cards. eSIMs are still a chip taking up space on your motherboard, and that’s not ideal if you want to squeeze every square millimeter of space out of a phone. The next shrinking step is iSIM—an Integrated Subscriber Identity Module. Rather than a chip on the motherboard, iSIMs are integrated directly onto the SoC. SoC (system on a chip) integration is the technology that makes smartphones possible. Instead of a thousand little chips for things like the CPU, GPU, RAM, modem, and a bunch of other things, everything gets packed into one single do-everything piece of silicon. Individual chips require more space and power thanks to having to make motherboard traces to connect everything and having to deal with chip packages. I’m still using an old-fashioned traditional SIM card, and while I’m sure going with eSIM and now iSIM is great from a simplification and power usage point of view, I feel like they’re both also about taking control away from the user and shifting it towards the carrier. It was a long fight to get rid of locked phones (mostly), but with eSIM/iSIM it seems locking devices down in more fine-grained ways only becomes easier. I might be overreacting, but little red flags go up when I read about eSIM and now iSIM.

Hyperion Entertainment has released another update for AmigaOS 3.2 for classic Amigas, coming with a number of improvements and bug fixes. I’m not entirely sure what to make of all this, though, since the drama around the ownership of the Amiga operating system, the trademarks, and more, as well as continuous accusations of Hyperion not paying any of its developers, have reached a fever pitch, as documented in this elaborate piece. As much as I would want to dive into all this and properly vet every single source in that article, for the sake of my sanity, I am just not going to. The soap opera around the Amiga has been going on for so long, and has jumped the shark so many times, I just don’t know where to start. I’ll leave you all with the detailed piece and its sources, and let you decide for yourself what to make of it all. I ain’t got the patience for this.

Cobalt Networks were one of the early pioneers in network appliance hardware and produced some of the first turn-key webserver boxes you could buy, founded in 1996 as Cobalt Microserver. Cobalt boxes are immediately identifiable from their distinctive deep blue plastic bezels starting with the 1998 Cobalt Qube 2700. The Qube used a 150MHz QED RM5230; these CPUs are part of QED’s R5000 family and we’ll talk about their architecture a bit later. They came with 2.1GB hard disks with later larger options, 10Mbit Ethernet, 16MB of RAM standard with up to 256MB supported, and a “console” consisting of a backlit rear-mounted 2-line LCD and control buttons (on later machines, but not the original 2700, a serial port provided an actual console if you held down a button during startup). A fair number of typical configuration tasks such as setting its IP address could be done directly from the panel and the rest were intended to be done through its Perl-based web console. They were designed to run Linux from the ground up and shipped with Red Hat using a 2.0.x kernel. Cobalt’s network appliances were so exotic back in the day, and once they started hitting the used market, I almost pulled the trigger quite a few times. These days, they’re harder to come by, and their use is, of course, inherently limited now, but that doesn’t make them any less eye-catching.

The DSi browser uses Opera 9.50. There are no security mitigations whatsoever. Jumping to shellcode is back on the menu! Stack buffer overflows are viable. Exploiting use-after-frees, which are often common in browsers, is easier than ever. In fact, the DSi doesn’t even have an operating system, so there’s no kernel to exploit. Various system privileges are handled by the SCFG register. The browser has enough privileges to run most homebrew, but not enough to gain persistence across boots without another exploit. Browsing on the DS was a nightmare – and Nintendo charged for it. Crazy how times have changed.

Tech-makers assuming their reality accurately represents the world create many different kinds of problems. The training data for ChatGPT is believed to include most or all of Wikipedia, pages linked from Reddit, a billion words grabbed off the internet. (It can’t include, say, e-book copies of everything in the Stanford library, as books are protected by copyright law.) The humans who wrote all those words online overrepresent white people. They overrepresent men. They overrepresent wealth. What’s more, we all know what’s out there on the internet: vast swamps of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, neo-Nazism. Tech companies do put some effort into cleaning up their models, often by filtering out chunks of speech that include any of the 400 or so words on “Our List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words,” a list that was originally compiled by Shutterstock developers and uploaded to GitHub to automate the concern, “What wouldn’t we want to suggest that people look at?” OpenAI also contracted out what’s known as ghost labor: gig workers, including some in Kenya (a former British Empire state, where people speak Empire English) who make $2 an hour to read and tag the worst stuff imaginable — pedophilia, bestiality, you name it — so it can be weeded out. The filtering leads to its own issues. If you remove content with words about sex, you lose content of in-groups talking with one another about those things. These things are not AI. Repeat after me: these things are not AI. All they do is statistically predict the best next sequence of words based on a corpus of texts. That’s it. I’m not worried about these things leading to SkyNet – I’m much more worried about smart people falling for the hype.

The JH7110 isn’t amazing. But it’s not bad, either. I still wouldn’t recommend most people buy this board, unless you already know a lot about Linux and SBCs in general. That may change a year from now, but right now, this board isn’t targeted at the same market as a Raspberry Pi. At around $100, and not being quite production-ready, I’m only recommending this board to people interested in exploring RISC-V for now. This seems like an expected experience for a relatively new architecture that still has rather limited hardware and software support. When the first Raspberry Pi came out, the situation wasn’t much better either, so give it a few years and RISC-V will be in a better place in the market for sub-€100 single-board computers.

And while headlines might indicate the language had fallen into disfavor, the amount of COBOL in use continues to grow, with 800 billion lines running in production systems daily, according to a global survey conducted last year by enterprise software firm Micro Focus. COBOL is considered strategic by 92% of survey respondents, and over half said they expect their organizations to keep running their COBOL applications for at least another 10 years. I feel like COBOL is one of those things that can guarantee you a career. If you know COBOL, you will most likely find a job and have a good career future, but it’s probably not going to be anything sexy or anything that has the (albeit tiny) opportunity of making you filthy rich – but you won’t ever be without a job for long either.

Cubic (Custom Ubuntu ISO Creator) is a GUI wizard to create a customized Live ISO image for Ubuntu and Debian-based distributions. Cubic permits effortless navigation through the ISO customization steps and features an integrated virtual command line environment to customize the Linux file system. You can create new customization projects or modify existing projects. Important parameters are dynamically populated with intelligent defaults to simplify the customization process. This is an incredibly neat tool, and it’s given me the urge to see if I can create my own custom ISO with my personal defaults all set out of the box.

Apple’s iPhone 15 series will officially only support USB-C accessories that have been certified by Apple’s own Made for iPhone (MFi) program, potentially limiting the functionality of accessories not approved by Apple, an established leaker has now claimed. So you’re getting USB-C, but not really. Leave it to Apple to milk even something as mundane as this.

In the last three weeks, we also launched the new AI-powered Bing into preview for more than 1 million people in 169 countries, and expanded the new Bing to the Bing and Edge mobile apps as well as introduced it into Skype. It is a new era in Search, Chat and Creation and with the new Bing and Edge you now have your own copilot for the web. Today, we take the next major step forward adding to the incredible breadth and ease of use of the Windows PC by implementing a typable Windows search box and the amazing capability of the new AI-powered Bing directly into the taskbar. Putting all your search needs for Windows in one easy to find location. I feel like adding a glorified autocomplete that tricks people into thinking it’s a real artificial intelligence to the Windows taskbar is not exactly what Windows users are looking for, but I guess that services revenue cash register has to keep dinging. I’m getting major cryptocurrency, NFT, and web3 vibes from all this, and I can’t wait for the whole thing to come crashing down once again.

One interesting aspect of a computer’s instruction set is its addressing modes, how the computer determines the address for a memory access. The Intel 8086 (1978) used the ModR/M byte, a special byte following the opcode, to select the addressing mode. The ModR/M byte has persisted into the modern x86 architecture, so it’s interesting to look at its roots and original implementation. In this post, I look at the hardware and microcode in the 8086 that implements ModR/M and how the 8086 designers fit multiple addressing modes into the 8086’s limited microcode ROM. One technique was a hybrid approach that combined generic microcode with hardware logic that filled in the details for a particular instruction. A second technique was modular microcode, with subroutines for various parts of the task. This is way above my pay grade, but I know quite a few of you love this kind of writing. Very in-depth.

The merge request for landing the first of “many” parts of the Wayland driver for Wine was opened this morning. This is part of the effort of allowing Windows games/applications running under Wine to operate natively on Wayland rather than having to go through XWayland. Excellent work.

I believe that learning MINIX is probably the best way to learn about operating systems. Until now, I have not been able to find a MINIX 3 project that allows you to compile the code that is referenced in the book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (3e) (v3.1.0). It was tricky to get a reasonable development setup to make it possible for newbies like myself to learn from the book. This is an attempt to fix that and make it easy to browse, edit, recompile, and execute the code. An easy way to get started with MINIX, the famous microkernel teaching operating system from the university I got my two degrees at – although I’m not entirely sure if that’s a ringing endorsement.

The E-Class is a bit of a sneak peek into the upcoming Mercedes-Benz Operating System (MB.OS). Mercedes CTO Markus Schaefer said, “The E-Class will be a precursor in the space of infotainment. We call it the 0.8 version of MB.OS.” While the shoutout of the E-Class is apt, the reality is the upcoming MB.OS is a huge change for Mercedes, which plans to own the entire software stack, giving it control over every aspect of the vehicle. It’s a big deal for a company that sees over-the-air updates, subscriptions, and digital purchases as an integral part of its future. The chip-to-cloud Linux and QNX-based MB.OS platform will be part of the upcoming MMA (Mercedes Modular Architecture). At a high level, QNX will handle safety and the dash cluster, and Linux will take care of the infotainment aspect. The first vehicle based on the platform will be introduced in the later part of 2024, with the vehicle reaching showrooms in 2025. I’d love to review this new upcoming operating system from Mercedes-Benz. I’m sure David, OSNews’ owner, is more than willing to buy me an E-Class in 2025, right David? In all seriousness, I would love to review the operating system and UI experience of modern cars, as I feel there’s a lot of innovation and experimentation taking place in this space – some for good, and lots for… Not so good – but for obvious reasons, this is very hard to do. I’ve contemplated contacting local dealers here, but they have very little to gain from a tech site with an audience almost exclusively outside of the north of Sweden reviewing their products. In short, I accept donations in the form of cars.

Being the default out-of-the-box browser on Windows 10 and 11 makes Microsoft Edge a go-to utility for downloading Chrome or another browser. That upsets Microsoft so much that it constantly comes with more aggressive and user-hostile methods to make customers stay on Edge. An attempt to install Chrome using Edge Canary now results in the browser displaying two ads: the first (tiny one) will pop on the screen when the Chrome website loads, and the second, a humongous full-size banner, will appear once the download starts. Yikes! Yikes indeed. Probably s suggestion by their glorified autocomplete.

As part of our combined efforts, the Ubuntu flavors have made a joint decision to adjust some of the default packages on Ubuntu: Going forward, the Flatpak package as well as the packages to integrate Flatpak into the respective software center will no longer be installed by default in the next release due in April 2023, Lunar Lobster. Users who have used Flatpak will not be affected on upgrade, as flavors are including a special migration that takes this into account. Those who haven’t interacted with Flatpak will be presented with software from the Ubuntu repositories and the Snap Store. We think this will improve the out-of-the-box Ubuntu experience for new users while respecting how existing users personalize their own experiences. However, we don’t want this to come as a surprise. If you have comments specific to this change you are welcome to respond here on discourse. Canonical’s got Snap to peddle, so FlatPak is a competitor. That’s all there’s to it. I maintain they’re all bad and unnecessary – a .deb, an .rpm, and your source code is all you need to cover 99.9% of Linux users in a standard, easy-to-use, uncompromising way.

A keyboard, mouse, a NIC, VGA output, 16MB of RAM and a whole gig (you wish) of read-only optical drive space with a 200MHz Hitachi SuperH SH-4 CPU faulting its paltry 8K of I-cache and 16K of D-cache non-stop. Now freshly refurbished, its cooling fan runs louder than my Power Mac Quad G5 at idle and the drive makes more disk seeking noise than when I can’t find a lost floppy. And since the buzzword with Linux distros today is immutability, what could be more immutable than an ephemeral, desperately undersized RAM disk overlaid on a live CD? i want a DreamCast.

The way Haiku handles package management and its alternative approach to an “immutable system” is one of those ideas I find really cool. Here’s what it looks like from a desktop user’s perspective – there’s all the usual stuff like an “app store”, package updater, repositories of packages and so on. It’s all there and works well – it’s easily as smooth as any desktop Linux experience. However, it’s the implementation details behind the scenes that make it so interesting to me. Haiku takes a refreshingly new approach to package management. A deep dive into Haiku’s surprisingly robust and full-featured package management system.

Paul Weissmann, maintainer of OpenPA, the definitive source of information on HP’s PA-RISC hardware and software, has published an article about how the state of information preservation on this topic has changed substantially since OpenPA’s founding in 1999. The main challenges for OpenPA at the time were both finding all the available information, as search engines were still young in the late 1990s, as well as making sense of it all as it was just so much and new sources kept appearing. This went on until the mid to late 2000s, when solid and stable sources could be found and referenced, which OpenPA did. The Internet and information on it changed since then, slowly but surely, in a profound way. Many original sources have disappeared and so much information has been lost in only two decades – making OpenPA the authoritative source for PA-RISC in some ways. A long journey from documenting complex information of the 1990s to an historic archive on the PA-RISC era. OpenPA is an amazing resource, so if you happen to have any information worth sharing with Weissmann, please do so.

It’s been many years since Intel Itanium processors made a convincing story and faced a slow demise over the past decade. While the last of the Itanium 9700 “Kittson” processors shipped in 2021, just two years later now the Linux kernel is already looking at possibly seeing its IA-64 support removed over having no maintainers or apparent users. I have a morbid curiosity when it comes to Itanium, and I’ve been on the lookout for an Itanium workstation for two decades now. This is the first time where one of these “Linux to deprecate some old unused architecture” posts might actually affect me at some point, and I’m outraged. Outraged, I tell you!

Our mobile Internet Service Provider (ISP) has a bundle where they provide a 4G modem for internet access, and a separate TV set-top box that can be used to watch their TV content or to watch streaming services. This device was sent to us as part of the bundle, but at Zeus, we don’t really have a use for it: we don’t really watch television in our space. What we do have a need for, however, are low-power computers that can run Linux. In this blog post, we will hack this set-top box to run Linux instead of Android TV. Just some good ol’ fashioned hackery for the weekend. You’ll need a soldering iron.

Google has 175,000+ capable and well-compensated employees who get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year. Like mice, they are trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, documents, meetings, bug reports, triage, OKRs, H1 plans followed by H2 plans, all-hands summits, and inevitable reorgs. The mice are regularly fed their “cheese” (promotions, bonuses, fancy food, fancier perks) and despite many wanting to experience personal satisfaction and impact from their work, the system trains them to quell these inappropriate desires and learn what it actually means to be “Googley” — just don’t rock the boat. As Deepak Malhotra put it in his excellent business fable, at some point the problem is no longer that the mouse is in a maze. The problem is that “the maze is in the mouse”. I have never worked at any company – other than the hardware store for 7-8 years when I was a teenager and during university – so I have no idea if this is uncommon, but this sounds like my personal version of hell. No wonder Google has such a massive graveyard.

KDE Plasma 5.27, a Long Term Support release and the final release in the Plasma 5 series which is based on Qt 5, has been released. Plasma 5.27 brings exciting new improvements to your desktop, and the first thing you’ll notice when firing up Plasma is our new Konqi-powered wizard which will guide you through setting up the desktop. Other big new features include a window tiling system, a more stylish app theme, cleaner and more usable tools, and widgets that give you more control over your machine.

Bing AI did a great job of creating media hype, but their product is no better than Google’s Bard. At least as far as we can tell from the limited information we have about both. I am shocked that the Bing team created this pre-recorded demo filled with inaccurate information, and confidently presented it to the world as if it were good. I am even more shocked that this trick worked, and everyone jumped on the Bing AI hype train without doing an ounce of due diligence. Bing AI is incapable of extracting accurate numbers from a document, and confidently makes up information even when it claims to have sources. It is definitely not ready for launch, and should not be used by anyone who wants an accurate model of reality. Tools like ChatGPT are fun novelties, and there’s definitely interesting technology underpinning them, but they are so clearly not very good at what they’re supposed to be good at. It is entirely irresponsible of Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google to throw these alpha versions out there where the Facebook boomers can find them. Have they learned nothing from social media and its deeply corrupting influence on the general population’s ability to separate truth from fiction? And now we have “artificial intelligences” telling these very same gullible people flat-out lies as truth, presented in a way that gives these lies even more of a veneer of reliability and trustworthiness than a tweet or Facebook post ever did? These tools are going to lead to a brand new wave of misinformation and lies, and society is going to pay the price. Again.

These two men were joined by William Joy and Scott McNealy, and on the 24th of February in 1982, they founded Sun Microsystems. All of these men are Stanford graduates (except for Joy who went to Berkley), and the name “Sun” is derived from Stanford University Network. This is well named as from the start, Sun systems included network capability. Employee 5, John Gage, went so far as to say “the network is the computer,” which became the Sun slogan. Funding for this adventure was provided by Eastman Kodak, AT&T, Olivetti, and Xerox. I have a soft spot for Sun. I don’t care much for Java, but their hardware – especially their workstations and thin clients – were unique and cool, and it’s incredibly sad the company couldn’t keep their workstation business operational. SPARC actually managed to hold on for quite a while – more so than other non-x86 architectures – but Oracle was not at all interested in the workstation market, which was probably the right financial call. I’m still looking for a Sun Ultra 45 that doesn’t cost my me firstborn.

Calmira Reborn is fourth in the line of Calmira projects. It is a fork of Calmira LFN 3.32 by Alexandre Rodrigues de Sousa, itself a fork of Calmira II 3.3 by Calmira Online!, itself a fork of Calmira 2.2SR by Li-Hsin Huang. This fork does not place much emphasis on new features and instead focuses on fixing issues I’ve discovered with Calmira LFN while using it on my old computers. Calmira should ring a bell for most Windows users of the ’90s. Calmira adds a Windows 95-like desktop environment to replace Program Manager on Windows 3.x, along with tons of other features and niceties. It makes using Windows 3.x a lot less cumbersome, and I am definitely going to set up a new Windows 3.11 install in PCem to try this new release out.

An SDK for developing DOS software for x86 machines, including IBM PC compatibles and NEC PC-98 This SDK (Software Development Kit) is modeled after the Amiga NDK (Native Development Kit). The Amiga NDK contains a set of header files and libraries for both assembly and C development, which provides all the required constants, flags, data structures and whatnot to interface directly with the hardware, and having readable code making use of human-readable symbols and type definitions. An equivalent for the IBM PC platform, or PC DOS/MS-DOS/compatible environments has never been available to my knowledge. This SDK attempts to fill that void. Think of it as Ralfs Interrupt List and Bochs ports.lst turned into .inc/.asm and .h/.c files ready for use in a programming environment. What an awesome initiative.

Companies like Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft have versions of their web browsers on Apple’s iOS and iPadOS App Stores, but these versions come with a big caveat: The App Store rules require them to use Safari’s WebKit rendering engine rather than the engines those browsers use in other operating systems. But that could be changing. According to The Register, Google and Mozilla have recently been spotted working on versions of Chromium and Firefox that use their normal Blink and Gecko rendering engines, respectively. This only makes sense. It’s very likely the rules around browser engines is going to go away, so I’m glad the competition is getting ready for this inevitability. If for some reason I’m ever forced at gunpoint to use iOS, I’d at least have access to real Firefox.

If your main problem with the Microsoft Store is that you get too many relevant results when you search for apps, good news: Microsoft is officially launching Microsoft Store Ads, a way for developers to pay to get their apps in front of your eyes when you go to the store to look for something else. Exactly what Windows needs – more ads.

While many like how Windows 11 looks or feels, there are some who just want to cut out on what they feel is bloat as their hardware may not be good enough to run the new OS smoothly, or simply for the fun of it. Recently, a popular third-party Windows 11 tweaking and customization app called ThisIsWin11 (TIW11) evolved into Debloos or Debloat OS, which, as the name suggests, allows the de-bloating of the operating system. If one isn’t comfortable going about tweaking things themselves with it, they could also opt for Tiny11, which was released earlier today. This stripped-down Windows 11 Pro 22H2 mod requires 8GB of install space, 2GB of system memory, and perhaps the best part, it does not require TPM and Secure Boot. I always find the custom Windows versions scene fascinating. Legally, it’s a very grey area, but there’s usually some real gems in there, such as this one. As the creator emphasises – this isn’t for production use or for any machine that can run regular Windows 11, but it might be useful in certain niche applications or on older hardware.

So, Cartrivision tapes came in two formats: Black Tapes and Red Tapes. Black tapes you’d buy at the store like any other product, but for Red Tapes (which were relatively recent movies), you instead would go to the store and place an order from a catalog. The store would have it delivered by mail, then you’d come back in and get the tape. You’d take it home, watch it, and then return it back to the store. So… Video rental (like Blockbuster!), except they didn’t have any stock on hand, and only got the tapes on-demand by mail? Seems annoying. BUT OH NO: it’s far more annoying than that. See… Red Tapes aren’t mechanically like Black Tapes. You can’t rewind them. I’m a sucker for weird formats, and this one is definitely right up there as one of the weirdest.

I don’t expect to see any actual Mesa Vulkan drivers in Rust for a few years yet. My current goal is merely to explore the possibility. When the time comes that someone does choose to write a Vulkan driver in Rust, I want us to be ready. This exploration may also be useful for informing the Rust community about language features which would make the task easier. Converting existing Vulkan drivers to Rust is an explicit non-goal at this time. Rust seems everywhere.

I just finished my new project, it is called love. It allows installation of IRIX from IRIX, LINUX or WINDOWS. The reason for its existence is that IRIX installations are difficult, even for experienced users. New users almost always struggle with IRIX installations which can be demotivating and frustrating. My goal is to make this task easy, fast and accessible. This is absolutely amazing, and it works very well. This will make life for retro SGI users a lot easier.

It appears that Microsoft is getting more aggressive with Windows 11 promos. A Reddit user (the post is now removed) has published a photo of their Windows 10 computer with a full-screen Windows 11 ad offering to upgrade to the latest operating system. And in typical Microsoft fashion, available options are as head-scratching as it gets: two buttons, and both mean “I agree”. It’s garbage all the way down.

I wrote a popular post about serial ports once, and serial ports are something I think about, worry about, and dream about with some regularity. Yet I have never really devoted that much attention to the serial port’s awkward sibling, always assuming that it was a fundamentally similar design employing either 8 data pins each way or 8 bidirectional data pins. It turns out that the truth is a lot more complicated. And it all starts with printers. You see, I have written here before that parallel ports are popular with printers because they avoid the need to buffer bits to assemble bytes, allowing the printer to operate on entire characters at a time in a fashion similar to the electromechanical Baudot teleprinters that early computer printers were based on. This isn’t wrong, it’s actually more correct than I had realized—the computer parallel port as we know it today was in fact designed entirely for printers, at least if you take the most straightforward historical lineage. Let’s start back at the beginning of the modern parallel port: the dot matrix printer. The serial port still sees tons of use today, but the parallel port seems to have vanished entirely.