OSnews

The European Union (EU) is set to usher in a new era of smartphones with batteries that consumers can easily replace themselves. Earlier this week, the European Parliamentapproved new rulescovering the design, production, and recycling of all rechargeable batteries sold within the EU. For portable batteries" used in devices such assmartphones,tablets, andcameras, consumers must be able to easily remove and replace them." This will require a drastic design rethink by manufacturers, as most phone and tablet makers currently seal the battery away and require specialist tools and knowledge to access and replace them safely. This should've been mandated more than a decade ago, but better late than never. Faulty batteries is one of the primary reasons people eventually upgrade, even when their device is otherwise still perfectly functional. Device owners should be able to easily open their device and replace the battery, and of course, said batteries should not be hindered by patents, trademarks, or any other artificial monopolies - anybody should be able to produce them. The battery in my 2018 Dell XPS 13 9370 bulged a few years ago, but since the laptop is easily opened, it took me about 5 minutes to replace the faulty battery with a brand new one, and it only cost me about 100 - on a laptop that originally cost about 2200, I think that's an amazing deal to keep the machine going. It's otherwise in tip-top shape, and its 8th Gen i7, 16GB of RAM and 4K display can easily last me another ten years, especially since, as a Linux user, I won't have to worry about my operating system killing off support. Smartphones should be the same.

The European Commission has made aformal antitrust complaint against Googleand its ad business. In a preliminary opinion, the regulator says Google has abused its dominant position in the digital advertising market. It says that forcing Google to sell off parts of its business may be the only remedy, if the company is found guilty of the charges. This would be a significant move targeting the main source of the search giant's revenue, and a rare example of the EU recommending divestiture at this stage in an investigation. The Commission has already fined Google over three prior antitrust cases, but has only previously imposed behavioral" remedies -changes to its business practices. Music to my ears. Companies exist to serve society, and if they no longer serve society by becoming too large, too powerful, and too wealthy, thereby massively restricting competition, they must be chopped up into smaller parts to create breathing room in the market. Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft - and that's just the tech sector - all need to be broken up to allow newcomers to fairly compete. The US has taken similar actions with railroads, oil, airplanes, and telecommunications, and the technology market should be no different.

Eight years after Google Domains launched, and a little more than a year after it graduatedout of beta, Google is winding down following a transition period," as part of efforts to sharpen our focus." That'scorporate-esefor We need to keep cost-cutting, so we're selling this business we just finished shaping up to Squarespace." I have two domains over at Google Domains. I doubt Squarespace's UI is going to be as nice and easy to understand as Google's is.

One of my favourite software projects got a brand new release - the Not so Common Desktop Environment (NsCDE) 2.3 has been released. NsCDE brings the look, feel, and behaviour of CDE to the modern Linux desktop through a combination of themes, scripts, FVWM customisations, and a lot more. This new release brings the usual bugfixes, but also new features - like Qt6 integration, CSS updates for newer releases of Firefox and Thunderbird, and more.

It's no secret that the Android Open Source Project has been languishing compared to the distributions (?) of Android that are actually being used by Google itself (on their Pixel phones) and OEMs such as Samsung, Sony, and others. Now, it seems Google has taken a pretty substantial step in further gutting AOSP - it has deprecated both the Dialer and Messaging applications in AOSP, with the following message: This app is not actively supported and the source is only available as a reference. This project will be removed from the source manifest sometime in the future. This means that soon, if you build the Android Open Source Project, you will no longer be able to send messages or make phone calls without adding your own messaging and dialer applications. In the grand scheme of things, this doesn't matter all that much since every OEM already uses their own applications, but for the open source operating system that is Android, this is another nail in the coffin. Due to the slow erosion of functionality from AOSP, as well as the transfer of functionality from AOSP to closed-source Google applications and frameworks, we're fast approaching a point where you can't really state that AOSP is a full open source mobile operating system anymore. Is a mobile operating system that can't send messages or make phone calls really complete?

Edge has a built-in image enhancement tool that, according to Microsoft, can use super-resolution to improve clarity, sharpness, lighting, and contrast in images on the web." Although the feature sounds exciting, recent Microsoft Edge Canary updates have provided more information on how image enhancement works. The browser now warns that it sends image links to Microsoft instead of performing on-device enhancements. The biggest problem with Edge's super-resolution" and other questionable services is that it is enabled by default. Therefore, unaware users automatically give the browser permission to send pictures to Microsoft for processing and enhancement. Don't use Edge.

It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2023. This is a snapshot of Debian sid" at the time of the stable Debian bookworm" release (June 2023), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release. Debian GNU/Hurd is probably the easiest, most accessible way to try out Hurd.

After 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 12 (code namebookworm). The biggest change conceptually is that Debian now includes a non-free-firmware package area, and the Debian project from here on out will allow non-free firmware to be included on installation media. For the rest, a new Debian release is exactly as you'd expect - all the latest versions of packages, and it will serve as the base for an immense number of popular Linux distributions, either directly (such as Ubuntu) or indirectly (such as Linux Mint).

For those of you a little confused about what a postcode is, it's effectively the same as a US zip code; a way of distilling a postal address down to but a few characters. Hence why some rogue auto-translate function in Windows 11 is occasionally switching zip' to postcode' in the UK's Windows menus. As a translator myself, this is easy enough to explain. Either we're looking at a terrible machine translation that wasn't properly vetted, or a translator/reviewer not getting enough context to properly translate this string. As translators, we often get the absolute bare minimum to work with when it comes to software - usually just the strings, and if we're very, very, very lucky, we might get a screenshot, but that's a rarity. It's easy to look at this and think the translator is an idiot, but without any context, some isolated strings, often delivered in a random order, can be incredibly hard to translate in a way that makes any sense in the target context. It's just another way the software industry gets away with bottom-of-the-barrel effort, something no other industry is allowed to do. A random package of disposable paper plates has to adhere to more standards, controls, and checks than consumer software has to do. Managers in the consumer software industry face virtually no consequences for shipping the absolute bare minimum in quality, and unlike in any other industry, shipping broken garbage that never gets fixed is the norm, rather than the exception. There's no other product category in our lives where we would tolerate the amount of brokenness that's common in software. And, of course, software translations are no exception. It's an easy target for managers to outsource and automate to save money". This is what it leads to.

We’re bringing a new mid-tier compiler to Chrome. Maglev is a just-in-time compiler that can quickly generate performant machine code for all relevant functions within the first one-hundredth of a second. It reduces overall CPU time to compile code while also saving battery life. Our measurements show Maglev has provided a 7.5 percent improvement on Jetstream and a 5 percent improvement in Speedometer. Maglev will start rolling out in Chrome version 114, which begins release on June 5. Let’s hope making benchmarks run faster also makes actual websites load faster.

From CrossOver’s blog: Apple revealed their newGame Porting Toolkittoday atWWDC.This Toolkit is designed to allow Windows game developers a way to easily and quickly determine how well their game could run on macOS, with the ultimate goal of facilitating the creation of Mac game ports. We are ecstatic that Apple chose to useCrossOver’s source codeas their emulation solution for the Game Porting Toolkit. We have decades of experience creating ports with Wine, and we are very pleasedthat Apple is recognizing that Wine is a fantastic solution for running Windows games on macOS. We did not work with Apple on this tool, but we would be delighted to work with any game developers who try out the Game Porting Toolkit and see the massive potential that Wine offers. So, Apple basically repackaged Wine. Interesting they’re going the same route as Valve, just less open about it, and since it’s not core to the company’s business, it probably won’t be nearly as good and aggressive at getting new games to work as Valve’s Proton does, both through Valve itself and countless modified versions of Proton from 3rd parties.

Back in March I came home for spring break and quickly found myself motivated to do something dumb with Linux but there was an issue, all of my stuff was back in my dorm. The only thing I really had was a hard modded Xbox 360, an old monitor, and an even older keyboard. I knew what I had to do. Of course.

There’s more coming to Windows 11 at some point during this year, and three of them are of particular interest to the type of people who read OSNews. First, Windows is finally getting support for more archive file formats. Microsoft has finally added native support for more archive formats, allowing you to open tar, 7-zip, rar, gz, and other files. In addition, Windows 11 users will benefit from improved compression performance when zipping files. You’ll soon also be able to force quit applications straight from the taskbar, instead of having to open Task Manager, and as we noted not too long ago, ungrouped taskbar buttons are also making a comeback – among other things.

Ars Technica: A couple of months ago, Microsoft added generative AI features to Windows 11 in the form of a taskbar-mounted version of the Bing chatbot. Starting this summer, the company will be going even further, adding a new ChatGPT-driven Copilot feature that can be used alongside your other Windows apps. The company announced the change at its Build developer conference alongside another new batch of Windows 11 updates due later this year. Windows Copilot will be available to Windows Insiders starting in June. Like the Microsoft 365 Copilot, Windows Copilot is a separate window that opens up along the right side of your screen and assists with various tasks based on what you ask it to do. A Microsoft demo video shows Copilot changing Windows settings, rearranging windows with Snap Layouts, summarizing and rewriting documents that were dragged into it, and opening apps like Spotify, Adobe Express, and Teams. Copilot is launched with a dedicated button on the taskbar. Windows is getting an upgraded Clippy, one that shares its name with the biggest copyright infringement and open source license violation in history. In fact, some of the Windows Copilot features are built atop the Github Copilot, such as the new “AI” features coming to Windows Terminal. Now you can get other people’s code straight into your terminal, without their permission, and without respecting their licenses. Neat!

The time has arrived for Windows 11 users to prepare to download the latest feature drop for the operating system. After months of testing in the Windows Insider program, Windows 11 “Moment 3” update is ready for its public release on May 24, 2023. The latest feature update for Windows 11 has no official name (so much for hating silly names, such as “Fall Creators Update“), so enthusiasts call it “Moment 3,” according to the leaked story about Microsoft changing its approach to servicing its operating system. The release is not the biggest one we have seen, but it still packs a few excellent changes and new features. There’s not a whole lot going on with this update, but it’s out now, and you can get it from Windows Update. It’s optional for now, so it won’t be pushed automatically.

The United States surgeon general, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, issued a public advisory on Tuesday warning of the risks of social media use to young people. In a 19-page report, Dr. Murthy noted that although the effects of social media on adolescent mental health were not fully understood, and that social media can be beneficial to some users, “there are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” The surgeon general called on policymakers, tech companies, researchers and parents to “urgently take action” to safeguard against the potential risks. I don’t think anyone sane really needs to be convinced of the dangers of poorly-run and terribly moderated social media like Twitter and Facebook, but I do wonder why the supposed dangers stop at the age of 18? If we look at the past 10-15 years, it seems like to me the people who most easily fall prey to misinformation and targeted troll campaigns on social media are people of older generations, who then proceeded to to incredible damage to our societies in voting booths – something that can still get a lot worse in the coming years. I have no idea how to fix any of this – social media will always exist, and so will its dark side – but we better start thinking of something, fast, because I’m afraid the damage to our society we’ve seen so far from gullible idiots falling for obvious nonsense on social media is only going to get worse from here on out.

It’s finally over. In a post last year on the Windows XP subreddit (Windows XP web activation is finally dead…), retroreviewyt shared xp_activate32.exe4, which calculates the Installation ID then generates and optionally applies the corresponding Confirmation ID to activate Windows XP, all offline. Wiping the system and reinstalling Windows XP results in the same Installation ID being assigned by Windows (assuming no change in hardware or product key), thus the same Confirmation ID obtains even in msoobe’s standard telephone activation window. Long considered out of reach, this development bodes well for salvaging old systems even after Microsoft has shut down the activation servers. Incredible team effort spanning several decades. That being said, it’s quite sad that we do not live in a world where Microsoft just releases a simple tool to allow anyone to install XP anywhere without the need for activation.

axle OS is a hobby microkernel and userspace. I started the project in early 2016, and have had stints of working on it heavily since then. axle OS’s first incarnation was a multitasking monolithic kernel, with little support for IPC, user-mode or process loading. The current incarnation is a microkernel built around variable-length IPC messaging. All applications, including the desktop environment and device drivers, are ELF executables running in userspace. We reported on axle OS for the first time well over six years ago, in 2017. A lot has changed since then, including the addition of a desktop environment, a Game Boy emulator, and a lot more.

This whitepaper details the architectural enhancements and modifications that Intel is currently investigating for a 64-bit mode-only architecture referred to as x86S (for simplification). Intel is publishing this paper to solicit feedback from the ecosystem while exploring the benefits of extending the ISA transition to a 64-bit mode-only solution. This seems like a very good idea – and it does seem like the time is ripe to remove some of the unused cruft from x86. Intel is proposing removing removing the 16 bit and 32 bit modes, and instead start in 64 bit mode right away. The company’s proposal does retain the ability to run 32 bit code on a 64 bit operating system, though. As a sidenote, the introduction to this proposal is hilarious: Since its introduction over 20 years ago, the Intel® 64 architecture became the dominant operating mode. As an example of this evolution, Microsoft stopped shipping the 32-bit version of their Windows 11 operating system. Intel firmware no longer supports non UEFI64 operating systems natively. 64-bit operating systems are the de facto standard today. They retain the ability to run 32-bit applications but have stopped supporting 16-bit applications natively. It’s 2023, and Intel is still not, in any way, capable of acknowledging AMD for coming up with AMD64. Sad.

This project’s vision is to help every college student read all the code of an operating system. With only 2000 lines of code, egos-2000 implements every component of an operating system for education. It can run on a RISC-V board and also the QEMU software emulator. Exactly what it says on the tin.

Apple today previewed software features for cognitive, vision, hearing, and mobility accessibility, along with innovative tools for individuals who are nonspeaking or at risk of losing their ability to speak. These updates draw on advances in hardware and software, include on-device machine learning to ensure user privacy, and expand on Apple’s long-standing commitment to making products for everyone. These are all good, truly helpful features. Apple’s long been the choice for people with disabilities, and their lead in this field is something others should follow.

Recently, hinted by people on Discord, Neozeed found a Win64 compiler for AXP64 / ALPHA64, that came in as part of Platform SDK from 1999. This was to let Windows developers test compile their programs to make sure they are “64bit ready”, before the hardware was even available. However, as this was a cross-compiler from IA32 to IA64 and AXP32 to AXP64, there was no actual way of running any of the binaries. Until Itanium finally came out, after long delays. Sadly, 64-bit Alpha AXP Windows was never released outside of Redmond. And that would be the end of the story… if not for one reader, who contacted Neozeed after his previous post, and shared a disk image… containing a 64bit version of Windows 2000 for Alpha AXP! The reader got it from a lot of random lot of hard disks bought from an e-waste, years ago, and completely forgot about it until they saw the blog post! And you bet they got it up and running. This find is extraordinary.

The KDE project just finished up its 2023 developer sprint, and with Plasma 6 development being in full swing – which encompasses moving to Qt 6 – there’s some major announcements here. As a result, we advanced a number of topics that had been stuck for a while. A major area of my focus in this respect became “Better default settings”. The 5 -> 6 transition is the perfect time to make significant changes to the default settings in a way that improve the UX out of the box. The two biggest changes to KDE’s default settings will be moving from single-click to open a file, to double-clicking. Single-clicking to open has been a KDE staple for a long time, but it’s the exact opposite of literally every other major environment, so it makes sense to align this basic interaction with people’s expectations. Of course, this is KDE, so it’ll be a toggle in the same way it is now. The second major change is Wayland by default. While X.org will, of course, still work and be available to distributions and users, Wayland will be KDE’s official recommendation from here on out. With X.org development having pretty much halted completely, and quite a few major distributions now defaulting to Wayland, this is the right move to make. For all the Wayland haters – feel free to donate your time and expertise to X.org development, because no one else is. There’s a few other cool changes coming up, such as the floating panel by default, the accent colour being used in the top parts of windows, and more.

The rumour, by way of The Information, claims senior Microsoft execs hope to seal a deal with Mozilla to make Bing the default search engine as soon as this year, as the browser’s existing big-bucks deal with Google is coming up for renewal. Now, Firefox making a search engine switch isn’t new. Mozilla tested Microsoft’s Bing as Firefox’s default search engine back back in 2021; and those with longer memories may just remember a time when Yahoo! was the default search engine in select countries. It’s a tough pill to swallow: Firefox, effectively the only serious browser not controlled by Google or Apple, exists by the grace of Google. Google pays Mozilla for being the default search engine in Firefox, and said deal makes up about 85% of Mozilla’s revenue. Replacing Google with Microsoft int his equation seems like a lateral move, at best.

Wordstar was the word processor that helped sell the personal computer. At one time, it was ubiquitous, and many authors had a hard time giving it up. Some, like George R. R. Martin, apparently are still refusing to give it up. But most of us have moved on. Thanks to an open-source clone, WordTsar, you may not have to. This is a modern interpretation of our old friend. Maybe this will help The Winds of Winter.

Have you ever found yourself in this position? You see an image on a website, in your feed, or in a message from a friend — and you think, “this doesn’t feel quite right.” Is the image being shown in the right context? Has it been manipulated or faked? Where did it come from? When you’re trying to figure out if a piece of information or an image is reliable, having the full story is key. That’s why we’re expanding our ongoing work in information literacy to include more visual literacy and help people quickly and easily assess the context and credibility of images. In the coming months, we’re launching a new tool called About this image. This is a great idea, and I hope it works as intended. While I doubt it’ll be perfect, it’ll make it much easier to quickly verify where an image came from, just how genuine or fake it is, if it’s been edited, and more. It’s not giving a simple “yay” or “nay”, but instead gives the user the data it can then use to make their own informed decision. This is the kind of stuff Google should be doing.

The future of Google Search is AI. But not in the way you think. The company synonymous with web search isn’t all in on chatbots (even though it’s building one, called Bard), and it’s not redesigning its homepage to look more like a ChatGPT-style messaging system. Instead, Google is putting AI front and center in the most valuable real estate on the internet: its existing search results. A good overview of some of the “AI” stuff Google is integrating into Search. Many of these actually seem quite useful and well thought out, but time will tell if the wider web will be able to game these new tools in the same way SEO killed regular Search.

Apple Inc. failed to fully revive a long-running copyright lawsuit against cybersecurity firm Corellium Inc. over its software that simulates the iPhone’s iOS operating systems, letting security researchers identify flaws in the software. The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on Monday ruled that Corellium’s CORSEC simulator is protected by copyright law’s fair use doctrine, which allows the duplication of copyrighted work under certain circumstances. CORSEC “furthers scientific progress by allowing security research into important operating systems,” a three-judge panel for the appeals court said, adding that iOS “is functional operating software that falls outside copyright’s core.” Good.

Google I/O, Google’s developer conference, started today, and there has been a deluge of news coming out of the advertising giant. I do not intend to cover every single bit of I/O news, instead choosing to focus one some of the more interesting bits and pieces. In the coming weeks, when you search for something that might benefit from the experiences of others, you may see a Perspectives filter appear at the top of search results. Tap the filter, and you’ll exclusively see long- and short-form videos, images and written posts that people have shared on discussion boards, Q&A sites and social media platforms. We’ll also show more details about the creators of this content, such as their name, profile photo or information about the popularity of their content. Basically, this is a “remove SEO garbage” button. Whenever I need to find some answer to a tech issue or see if other people are experiencing a bug, regular Google search is entirely useless, as the results are overflowing with useless SEO/AI garbage, so I do what a lot of us do: append “reddit” to our queries to get content from real people. With this new Perspectives filter, Google seems to finally acknowledge that their regular search results are useless, and that what users really want is genuine results written by normal humans. I really hope this works as advertised.

Using Lotus 1-2-3 in today’s world is a bit of a challenge. The truth is I’m cheating, it does work, but it only supports a few standard text mode resolutions. If your terminal is not exactly 80 columns wide, it just makes a big ugly mess on your screen. There’s a workaround, just type stty cols 80, and it will be confined to a portion of your terminal, looking a bit sad. There is no way to display more columns, and maximizing your terminal will do nothing. …or is there? After a lot of research, reverse-engineering, and hard work, Tavis Ormandy managed to get Lotus 1-2-3 to respect any arbitrary terminal size. Bonkers work.

Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for the ‌iPad‌ will each be available for $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year, with a one-month free trial. Final Cut Pro requires an ‌iPad‌ with an M1 chip or newer, while Logic Pro requires an A12 Bionic ‌iPad‌ or newer. The apps will be available on the App Store starting on Tuesday, May 23. It’s great seeing Apple bring professional applications to tablets. The more choices we have, the better, and between desktops, laptops, and tablets, tablets have always felt left out. Let’s hope Xcode is next.

And yet, 25 years on, Google Search faces a series of interlocking AI-related challenges that together represent an existential threat to Google itself. The first is a problem of Google’s own making: the SEO monster has eaten the user experience of search from the inside out. Searching the web for information is an increasingly user-hostile experience, an arbitrage racket run by search-optimized content sharks running an ever-changing series of monetization hustles with no regard for anything but collecting the most pennies at the biggest scale. AI-powered content farms focused on high-value search terms like heat-seeking missiles are already here; Google is only now catching up, and its response to them will change how it sends traffic around the web in momentous ways. That leads to the second problem, which is that chat-based search tools like Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s own Bard represent something that feels like the future of search, without any of the corresponding business models or revenue that Google has built up over the past 25 years. If Google Search continues to degrade in quality, people will switch to better options — a switch that venture-backed startups and well-funded competitors like Microsoft are more than happy to subsidize in search of growth, but which directly impacts Google’s bottom line. At the same time, Google’s paying tens of billions annually to device makers like Apple and Samsung to be the default search engine on phones. Those deals are up for renewal, and there will be no pity for Google’s margins in these negotiations. Search on the web is in a terrible state right now. Searching for anything on Google is a horrible experience, with results riddled with ads and an endless stream of SEO’d garbage content of low to no quality. Alternatives, such as DuckDuckGo, aren’t much better, and tend to promote garbage anti-science and fascist nonsense if you’re not careful enough. At this point I just don’t know what to use to find stuff on the web, and tend to just go straight to sites that I think have the best odds of containing a relevant result (e.g. going straight to Reddit when dealing with some obscure bug or software issue). I know there are even smaller competitors, but I don’t hold high hopes they can offer the same breadth as Google once did, or even DuckDuckGo sometimes does now. It’s not looking pretty out there.

It’s no secret that Microsoft has been looking to increase advertising for its products within Windows 11, and investigation by Twitter user Albacore into recent Insider builds has found that the Settings Home page will soon start to present adverts for Microsoft 365 products in the near future. A banner asking users who aren’t subscribed to the platform to “Try Microsoft 365” shows at the top of the Home tab in Settings in the screenshot below. How much more can Microsoft abuse its users before they break?

IBM had unknowingly created a juggernaut when they allowed Bill Gates and Microsoft to control the PC operating system standard, first with DOS and then with Windows. Having lost control of the PC hardware standard, IBM was determined to regain control of the operating system standard. Their weapon? The OS/2 operating system, a powerful and feature packed operating system that best case should have had little trouble overcoming Windows, and worst case should have at least been able to carve out a profitable and sustainable market share. This is the story of how IBM’s last attempt to keep a measure of control in the PC space…Failed. I don’t always link to videos, but when I do.. This is a great video – a long, detailed story about the downfall of what was, arguably, the best operating system of the 1990s, one that lost out due to illegal behaviour by Microsoft and IBM’s own incredible incompetence. They had a gem on their hands, but just didn’t know what to do with it.

The sudo and su utilities mediate a critical privilege boundary on just about every open source operating system that powers the Internet. Unfortunately, these utilities have a long history of memory safety issues. By rewriting sudo and su in Rust we can make sure they don’t suffer from any more memory safety vulnerabilities. We’re going to get it done. Like I said – Rust is everywhere. Of course, these specific rewrites are not necessarily going to be picked up by the various Linux distributions, but the fact people are starting projects like this means it won’t be long before we’re going to see core UNIX utilities rewritten in Rust making their way to our machines.

MacDock is like the Dock in modern macOS. To use it, simply launch the program. MacDock will be visible at the bottom of your screen. You will see your running applications on the list (limited to 7 applications). Clicking on any of them switches you to the app. I love little projects like these. Even today, they make using older systems just a little bit less alien.

A vintage keyboard, a mysterious battery, and some questionable 1990s engineering choices… The subtitle I quoted above should be enough to get you hooked.

Microsoft is gearing up to improve the security features of Windows 11 and upgrade the default file system with a more robust and efficient solution. Developers at the tech giant are independently working on two new features – booting with Rust inside the kernel and using ReFS instead of NTSF as the default file system. Rust is officially everywhere.

In the mid-1980’s, Microsoft produced an expansion card for the IBM PC and PC XT, known as the Mach 10. In addition to occupying an expansion slot, it also replaced your CPU: You unplugged your old and busted 4.77 MHz 8088 CPU and plugged into the now-empty socket a special adapter that led via a ribbon cable back to the Mach 10 card. On the Mach 10 card was the new hotness: A 9.54 MHz 8086 CPU. This gave you a 2× performance upgrade for a lot less money than an IBM PC AT. The Mach 10 also came with a mouse port, so you could add a mouse without having to burn an additional expansion slot. The Mach 20 took the same basic idea as the Mach 10, but to the next level: As before, you unplugged your old 4.77 MHz 8088 CPU and replaced it with an adapter that led via ribbon cable to the Mach 20 card, which you plugged into an expansion slot. This time, the Mach 20 had an 8 MHz 80286 CPU, so you were really cooking with gas now. And, like the Mach 10, it had a mouse port built in. According to a review in Info World, it retailed for $495. Microsoft also produced a customized version of OS/2 for the Mach 20. Despite being tailor-made for the Mach 20, it still had terrible performance problems. One of my former colleagues spoke with the person who took over from him as the support specialist for OS/2 for Mach 20. According to that person’s memory (which given the amount time that has elapsed, means that we should basically be saying “according to legend” at this point), a total of eleven copies of “OS/2 for Mach 20” were ever sold, and eight of them were returned. That leaves three customers who purchased a copy and didn’t return it. And the support specialist had personally spoken with two of them. If these numbers are accurate, I believe this makes OS/2 for Mach 20 a strong candidate for being the worst-selling actually-shipped Microsoft software product of all time. We have to find this. Someone must have a copy of OS/2 for Mach 20 in a box in the attic somewhere. This is the final boss of software preservation.

In Sun’s ideal world, a user would run programs on a central server (a Sun, of course), having their session follow their smart card seamlessly from terminal to terminal along with any other shared resources they might require. While Sun produced the JavaOS-based JavaStation in 1996 — ironically based on Oracle’s Network Computer concept — it used relatively expensive hardware, being essentially a miniaturized SPARCstation 4. Instead, the new proof of concept for a cheaper, more connected world was the 1997 NetWorkTerminal “NeWT” — one wonders if that abbreviation was a coincidence — based on Sun’s MicroSPARC IIep CPU, and that prototype in turn evolved into the first Sun Ray thin client in 1999, codenamed Corona. Setting up a number of Sun thin clients – both fixed and laptop models – running off a Sun Ultra 45 workstation, with smartcards and all, is basically my retro computing end game. I have always been deeply fascinated by “the network is the computer”, and while there’s quite a few other thin client platforms, it’s the Sun one that feels like the real, original concept. I can’t find a reasonably priced Ultra 45 anywhere – feel free to contact me if you have one on offer – but Sun thin clients are a dime a dozen on eBay. In any event, it will come as no surprise that I love the linked article.

JanOS is an alternative operating system for mobile phones, designed to run on devices without their screen attached. It was demonstrated as a proof of concept during JSConf.EU 2014. Shortly after it was chosen as the OS that powers Gonzo, a cellular connected and low-power camera. The project is maintained and funded by Telenor Digital. It’s heavily based on Firefox OS, and currently only supports a relatively small number of devices. It’s open source, and the project’s goal is to make the ‘motherboards’ inside phones more useful and extend their useful lifespan.

Behavioral health interventions are notoriously difficult. They require a grasp of psychology, sure, but they also require a certain amount of flexibility because people’s lives are complicated. Apple’s ham-handed approach to physical health has been bad enough — the idea it is now going to approach mental health does not fill me with confidence. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who won’t mind letting Apple toy with their emotions. But we’ve got a lot of evidence now that too much screen time is linked to bad health — and for Apple, its entire business is getting you to spend more time with its software and gadgets, not less. This is a great article, and highlights the problems that stem from tech bros trying to be doctors, or in this case, even psychologists and therapists. Health interventions require a personalised approach, and blanket one-size-fits-all attempts are generally suboptimal. A person with weight issues who happens to perform a physically intensive job will require a different approach than someone with similar weight issues who has a desk job. A generic “move!” on your Apple Watch a few times a day won’t really help either of those people. This gets even more problematic with mental health issues. A great example of just how counterintuitive health information can be comes from myself – I have a severe anxiety disorder and related mental ailments, and I’ve been trying to learn to live with it since I was a child (there’s probably a genetic element, since similar disorders run in my family). Through a combination of extensive behavioural, cognitive, and physical therapy, a lot of scientific studying with my doctor and other specialists into what, exactly, is wrong inside my brain and body to gain a crystal clear insight into how anxiety fluctuates in my body during the day and what internal and external stimuli affect it, and to cap it off a very small dose of daily anxiety medication (it took me almost two decades to come around to taking medication), I now have my mental health issues well under control. That being said, I will always have these problems. I manage them every day, and they’re never gone, like someone with chronic back problems, even if I seem completely “normal”. Passively and actively, throughout every day, I manage my anxiety, make sure I keep it in check, and recognise the earliest possible warning signs, all made just a little bit easier by my medication. When I emigrated to Sweden four years ago to live together with my now wife, we went to IKEA, about a 90 minute drive away on the border with Finland. Since trips like that generally increase my anxiety considerably, I had a few rough days leading up to it, but during the car ride, I finally managed to overcome it and settle down. As we parked, everything was back to my normal levels – a change in venue from e.g. car to destination often works as a “reset button” of sorts – and we were ready to shop and eat meatballs. And then my smartwatch pinged me in the IKEA lobby. Despite me feeling entirely normal with for me acceptable levels of anxiety, it started telling me I was experiencing the highest level of “stress”. Even though I did not feel any stress whatsoever, such a small thing can be enough to send me into a downward spiral of a panic attack – which I actually do not have very often, maybe once a year or so. Due to having just emigrated thousands of kilometers away to the Arctic, leaving family and friends behind, I was obviously already susceptible, and this stupid digital piece of crap on my wrist telling me I was “stressed” was all it took to trigger a massive panic attack. I’m used to always having a heightened level of anxiety and associated vitals compared to others, but this watch didn’t know that. It just had some basic data programmed in about what is “normal” for someone of my stature, gender, and age, and didn’t take my personal situation into account at all – because it couldn’t. There are countless little indicators, both internal and external, that come into play in a situation like this, and a smartwatch has no way of learning or disseminating such information. It takes a dumb, standardised, generalised shotgun approach in determining if its wearer is “stressed”, actual, real-world stress levels in the moment be damned. This is why I am incredibly weary of Apple”s rumoured plans to enter the realm of mental health with its Apple Watch. As the linked article details, it’s already not doing a great job at managing people’s physical health, and I am genuinely afraid of what effects such a crude approach will have on people’s mental health. Shotgun mental health notifications are going to make people obsessive, they’re going to give people anxiety, they’re going to give people panic attacks, they’re going to give people depressive episodes, they’re going to disturb people’s sleep, they’re going to worsen or even cause eating disorders, and much more. Mental health is not something you should leave to Silicon Valley tech bros – you should leave it to your doctor, trained medical personnel, licensed psychologists and therapists, other specialists, and science, not to a glorified wrist calculator.

Speaking of Windows, here’s something I’m pretty sure many of you will be very happy about: In March, we exclusively confirmed the tech giant’s plan to restore classic taskbar features in the fall as part of the Windows 11 version 23H2 update. One of the features set to return is “never combine” for the taskbar. As the name suggests, this new toggle would let you ungroup icons/apps on the taskbar. Microsoft has finally added the early bits of the functionality to the taskbar with Windows 11 Build 23440, which is available in the Dev Channel. In the update, Microsoft has reintroduced the taskbar show labels feature and the ability to ungroup app icons on the taskbar in Windows 11, addressing user demands for these popular legacy features. I prefer the more dock-style approach to managing and opening applications, but I know a considerable number of you prefer the more traditional taskbar-based approach.

As documented on the Windows 10 Enterprise and Education and Windows 10 Home and Pro lifecycle pages, Windows 10 will reach end of support on October 14, 2025. The current version, 22H2, will be the final version of Windows 10, and all editions will remain in support with monthly security update releases through that date. Existing LTSC releases will continue to receive updates beyond that date based on their specific lifecycles. It’s important for organizations to have adequate time to plan for adopting Windows 11. Today we’re announcing that the next Windows LTSC releases will be available in the second half of 2024. You will move to Windows 11, whether you like it or not.

You don’t see a lot of good news about road safety in the United States. Unlike in most peer countries, American roadway deaths surged during the pandemic and have barely receded since. Pedestrian and cyclist fatalities recently hit their highest levels in 40 years, but U.S. transportation officials continue to ignore key contributing factors. In a February interview with Fast Company, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that “further research” is needed before addressing the obvious risks that oversized SUVs and trucks pose to those not inside of them. Happily, there is one area where we are making at least marginal progress: A growing number of automakers are backpedaling away from the huge, complex touchscreens that have infested dashboard design over the past 15 years. Buttons and knobs are coming back. Good. Now all we need is for all these popular YouTube car reviewers to stop drooling over these dangerous touch screens and we can get back a sense of normalcy in our cars.

The other day I was asked an interesting question: What was the first BIOS with support for ROM shadowing? In the 1990s, ROM shadowing was common, at first as a pure performance enhancement and later as a functional requirement; newer firmware is stored compressed in ROM and must be decompressed into RAM first, and firmware may also rely on writing to itself before being locked down and write protected. Old PCs did not use ROM shadowing because it made no sense. ROMs were only marginally slower than RAM, if at all, and RAM was too precious to waste on mirroring the contents of existing ROMs. Over the years, RAM speeds shot up while ROM remained slow. By about 1990, executing BIOS code from ROM incurred a noticeable performance penalty, and at the same time devoting 64 or 128 KB to ROM shadowing was no longer prohibitively expensive. But who did it first? The OS/2 Mussum’s content never fails to be deeply interesting. And the answer to the question is the same answer it always is when it comes to who did something first in the early years of the PC platform. It’s always the same.

If you’ve kept a close eye on the technology space of late, you probably know that this is perhaps one of the most interesting times for processors in many years. After a number of stagnant generations, Intel has started competing again; AMD’s Ryzen chips are still pretty solid; ARM is where a lot of the innovation is happening; and RISC-V looks like it’s going to be the coolest thing in the world in about a decade. But none of these chips, honestly, can hold a candle to the interestingness of the chip I’m going to tell you about today. It didn’t set the world ablaze; in fact, it was designed not to. In the end, it was used in relatively minor systems, like internet appliances and palmtops. But technologically, it bridged the gap between two camps—RISC and CISC. And that’s what makes it interesting. Today’s Tedium looks back at the Transmeta Crusoe, perhaps the most interesting processor to ever exist. The Crusoe was absolutely fascinating, and the most bonkers what if?-scenario with the Crusoe is that in theory, there was nothing preventing the Crusoe’s software translation layer from emulating something other than x86. If this technology had evolved and received far more funding and success, we could’ve had a vastly different processor and ISA landscape today.

I just want to emphasize that if you install and run Windows, your friendly provider is Microsoft. You need to contact Microsoft for support and help with Windows related issues. The curl.exe you have in System32 is only provided indirectly by the curl project and we cannot fix this problem for you. We in fact fixed the problem in the source code already back in December 2022. If you have removed curl.exe or otherwise tampered with your Windows installation, the curl project cannot help you. Both Windows and macOS have along history of shipping horribly outdated, insecure, and unsupported versions of open source software, and it seems that hasn’t changed.

A few months after my contract with Haiku, Inc. began, I rewrote the implementation of the Haiku kernel’s condition variables (as opposed to our userspace condition variables, which are from POSIX.) As this new implementation has run in Haiku for over a year and shipped in the latest release with no sign of any remaining issues, I figured it is high time for a deep-dive on the API, its implementation history, and the design of the new implementation I wrote. I expect this article will be of broader interest than just to Haiku’s community, because Haiku’s condition variables API has some notable (and powerful) features not found in those of other operating systems, and its implementation is thus likewise unique (at least, as far as I have been able to figure out.) I’m currently working on a “state of Haiku” sort of article, and I’m incredibly impressed with just how stable, fast, full-featured, and usable Haiku has become on real hardware. I’ve always kept an eye on Haiku in virtual machines, but now I’m running it on real hard hardware – where it belongs – and it’s been an absolute joy. The fact that waddlesplash managed to pull off this switch basically without any issues and with few people noticing, is further illustration the project’s in a good place.

British chip designer ARM is working on its own advanced semiconductor to showcase the power and capabilities of its design, Financial Times reports. According to people briefed on the move, ARM will work with manufacturing partners to bring the new chip to fruition. They’re not intending to get into the chip game, as this will only be a prototype chip to demonstrate what they can do.