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As the lead coder of bsnes, I’ve been attempting to perfect Super Nintendo emulation for the past 15 years. We are now at a point where that goal is in sight, but there we face one last challenge: accurate cycle timing of the SNES video processors. Getting that final bit of emulation accuracy will require a community effort that I hope some of you can help with. But first, let me recap how far we’ve come. The bsnes saga is a fascinating story of how an obsession for perfection can lead to something beautiful – not just the emulator itself, but also the various technical details and stories written about it. I doubt most people really needs the insane emulation accuracy bsnes strives for, but in the future, when original, first party SNES consoles have all died out or get incredibly rare, the accuracy of bsnes will be a godsend.

Dropbox is a big user of Python. It’s our most widely used language both for backend services and the desktop client app (we are also heavy users of Go, TypeScript, and Rust). At our scale—millions of lines of Python—the dynamic typing in Python made code needlessly hard to understand and started to seriously impact productivity. To mitigate this, we have been gradually migrating our code to static type checking using mypy, likely the most popular standalone type checker for Python. (Mypy is an open source project, and the core team is employed by Dropbox.) This post tells the story of Python static checking at Dropbox, from the humble beginnings as part of my academic research project, to the present day, when type checking and type hinting is a normal thing for numerous developers across the Python community. It is supported by a wide variety of tools such as IDEs and code analyzers. I recently came across an article complaining about Python’s dynamic typing and couldn’t quite believe this was still the case. As it turns out, nowadays there is indeed a standardized way to do write type annotations and to type-check prior to runtime using mypy, all the while being driven forward by the good folks at Dropbox (which includes Python’s Benevolent Dictator for Life Guido van Rossum). This article provides a fascinating insider insight into the history of type-checking in Python and how it evolved in symbiosis with Dropbox’s codebase.

We have been working extremely hard since Android 10’s release last August to port our features to this new version of Android. Thanks to massive refactoring done in some parts of AOSP, we had to work harder than anticipated to bring some features forward, and in some cases, introduced implementations similar to some of our features into AOSP (but we’ll get to that later). Other than the Android 10 features, LineageOS 17.1 also brings back theming support (deprecated in 13.0), and the default installation solution is now Lineage Recovery (but other recoveries are still supported, and may even be advised by maintainers for specific devices). Not every Android devices is supported right away, of course, but there’s a decent number of supported devices regardless.

It’s April 1, and that means it’s both April Fools’ Day and the anniversary of the founding of Apple Inc. While this year is a sober one due to current events, I think a lot of people still appreciate what people are creating and sharing to keep spirits up, whether that be music or art or… Impractical programming projects. And while pranks on April Fools’ seem less and less fun, obvious jokes and whimsy, not at anyone’s expense, are still something I believe in… And even better if they actually work. Last year I implemented the world’s best code visualizer. This year I decided to seriously attempt something that I’d thought about in the past: getting a Swift program to run on Mac OS 9. This is not an April Fools joke, but a real project that really works. An absolutely outstanding effort and great technical write-up.

It’s no secret that we’ve been enthusiastic about Microsoft’s new, Chromium-based Edge browser for a while now. But that enthusiasm has mostly been limited to “a default Windows browser that doesn’t suck,” rather than being for any particularly compelling set of features the new Edge brings to the browser ecosystem. In a folksy announcement this week, Microsoft politely declared its determination to step up our expectations from “doesn’t suck” to somewhere on the level of “oh, wow.” Microsoft Corporate VP Liat Ben-Zur spent plenty of time enthusing about the way the new features are, apparently, already changing her life. The only thing that has me excited about the new Edge is that Windows will finally have a proper default browser that isn’t either complete garbage (Internet Explorer) or ignored by every web developer ever (the old Edge).

OpenBSD aims to be a secure operating system. In the past few months there were quite a few security errata, however. That’s not too unusual, but some of the recent ones were a bit special. One might even say bad. The OpenBSD approach to security has a few aspects, two of which might be avoiding errors and minimizing the risk of mistakes. Other people have other ideas about how to build secure systems. I think it’s worth examining whether the OpenBSD approach works, or if this is evidence that it’s doomed to failure. I picked a few errata, not all of them, that were interesting and happened to suit my narrative.

Honda has done what no other car maker is doing, and returned to analogue controls for some functions on the new Honda Jazz. While most manufacturers are moving to touchscreen controls, identifying smartphone use as their inspiration – most recently seen in Audi’s latest A3 – Honda has decided to reintroduce heating and air conditioning controls via a dial rather than touchscreen, as in the previous-generation Jazz. Unlike what the introduction states, Honda joins fellow Japanese car maker Mazda in not just blindly using touchscreens for everything inside cars. This is a good move, and definitely takes some guts, since I’ve seen countless car reviewers – including my standout favourite, Doug DeMuro – kind of blindly assuming that any car without 100% touchscreen control is outdated, without questioning the safety consequences. Good on Honda.

A work-in-progress patch series was posted over the weekend for adding variable refresh rate support into Mutter for X.Org and Wayland. This includes checking for VRR support from connected monitors using the DRM properties, support for activating VRR, and the ability to toggle the VRR support via a DBus API. The VRR support isn’t advertised to Wayland clients at the moment for the lack of an upstream Wayland protocol around VRR. I can’t wait for Mutter and Kwin to adopt and integrate support for variable refresh rates, so seeing these first patches is good news.

When AMD introduced its Ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs at CES, the company made bold claims of game-changing performance. Coming off of years of underwhelming laptop chips, AMD promised it had optimized Ryzen 4000 for mobile computing. Now we’ve tested those claims in AMD’s Ryzen 9 4900HS chip, an 8-core, 7nm chip with Radeon Vega cores. We’re stunned at the CPU’s impressive tour de force that defeats just about every Intel 8th- and 9th-gen laptop CPU we’ve ever seen. Just open up your YouTube feed and you’ll see pretty much every PC hardware channel staring at disbelief in just how good AMD’s Ryzen 4000 mobile processors really are. This isn’t just a “kind of good enough” processor – the top of the line model is faster than or equal than Intel’s top of the line processor at both single core and multicore workloads, while using slightly more than half the power. It’s all well and good for AMD to roundly run circles around Intel in the server and desktop/workstation space, but the laptop space is where the real money and mindshare can be found. This new line of AMD mobile processors is simply stunning.

Earlier this evening, Linus released Linux 5.6, which contains our first release of WireGuard. This is quite exciting. It means that kernels from here on out will have WireGuard built-in by default. And for those of you who were scared away prior by the “dOnT uSe tHiS k0de!!1!” warnings everywhere, you now have something more stable to work with. The last several weeks of 5.6 development and stabilization have been exciting, with our codebase undergoing a quick security audit, and some real headway in terms of getting into distributions. WireGuard is probably the biggest new feature in 5.6, announced earlier today.

You may have seen dark rumors around the Web that Microsoft is about to kill off the classic Control Panel. Rest assured, friend, we were as horrified as you are—but on more careful inspection, this seems not to be the case. That’s one of the many downsides of being at the mercy of closed operating systems like Windows or macOS – as a user, you’re not really in control, and your platform landlords can decide to remove vital functionality or features on a whim, and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you haven’t done so yet, I’d highly suggest start looking at open source alternatives before it’s too late, because I feel the noose is only going to tighten more, not less.

Here you’ll find my complete set of posts covering the Amiga Machine Code course. The course consists of twelve letters and two disks, that can be found here. The letters are available as PDF’s in their original Danish language as well as translated to English. Some light reading for the weekend.

If you have music on a collection of MiniDisc media and want to finally copy the data off onto modern media (or the cloud!), here are simple instructions for some different solutions. Why would you stop using MiniDisc though?

Ars Technica reports on a story from the early 2000s 2020: When software and operating system giant Microsoft announced its support for inclusion of the exFAT filesystem directly into the Linux kernel back in August, it didn’t get a ton of press coverage. But filesystem vendor Paragon Software clearly noticed this month’s merge of the Microsoft-approved, largely Samsung-authored version of exFAT into the VFS for-next repository, which will in turn merge into Linux 5.7—and Paragon doesn’t seem happy about it. Yesterday, Paragon issued a press release about European gateway-modem vendor Sagemcom adopting its version of exFAT into an upcoming series of Linux-based routers. Unfortunately, it chose to preface the announcement with a stream of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Steve Ballmer’s letterhead in the 1990s. This is some “get the facts” level of tripe. You’d think that in 2020, we’d be spared this sort of nonsense, and I’m sad I’m even spending precious bits on this one – but at least we get the name of Paragon out so you can avoid them like the plague.

AMD has filed at least two DMCA notices against Github repos that carried “stolen” source code relating to AMD’s Navi and Arden GPUs, the latter being the processor for the upcoming Xbox Series X. The person claiming responsibility for the leak informs TorrentFreak that if they doesn’t get a buyer for the remainder of the code, they will dump the whole lot online. I’d love to hear the backstory behind this hack. For a company like AMD, such a hack must’ve been an inside job, right? While I know I shouldn’t be surprised anymore by just how lacking security can be at even the most prominent technology companies, I just can’t imagine it being very easy to get your hands on this documentation and code without some form of inside help.

For those managing to get their hands on a recently released Loongson 3A4000/3B4000 or even older Loongson 3 MIPS64 processors, improving the support is on the way with the upcoming Linux 5.7 kernel. Queued as part of the MIPS architecture work for Linux 5.7 are a number of Loongson improvements, in particular for the Loongson 3 series. The Loongson processors are pretty much impossible to come by outside of China, and gained some fame as the platform of choice for Richard Stallman.

Apple has released macOS 10.15.4, watchOS 6.2, and iOS, iPadOS and tvOS 13.4. Earlier today, Apple continued its tradition of updating all of its operating systems at once. The day brought major new feature releases to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. The iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS updates are numbered 13.4, Apple Watches got watchOS 6.2, and Macs saw the release of macOS Catalina 10.15.4. You know where to get them.

Ever wondered what’s it like to run Android without Google’s services and applications? Well, get a Huawei device. A smartphone UI isn’t much use without apps, of course, and here is where Huawei hits its first hurdle. Huawei has its own store called AppGallery, which it claims is the third largest in the world based on its more than 400 million monthly active users. The vast majority of those users will be in China, of course, where the Google Play Store has never been included alongside AppGallery. If you buy a Mate 30 Pro now anywhere in the world, though, AppGallery is what you get out of the box. To be blunt, it is not great. I wouldn’t call it barren — there is support from major US companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Snap. You can’t get Chrome, of course, but Opera is there if you want something with desktop sync. But a huge amount of its content is aimed at China, with other big Western names like Facebook, Slack, Netflix, and Twitter missing, which puts the Mate 30 Pro in a more precarious app situation than even the diciest days of Windows Phone. Huawei has announced a $1 billion plan to help stock AppGallery’s shelves, but it has its work cut out. A bigger problem is that even if you can get popular applications installed, they often won’t work properly because the device lacks the Google Mobile Services. It’s an incredibly hard situation for Huawei to be in.

Google announced its decision to drop support for the User-Agent string in its Chrome browser. Instead, Chrome will offer a new API called Client Hints that will give the user greater control over which information is shared with websites. We’ve talked about this earlier this year, but I want to highlight it again since it’s very important this initiative doesn’t devolve into Google and Chrome shoving this alternative down the web’s throat. Deprecating user agent strings is a good thing, but only if the replacement is a collective effort supported by everyone.

Update: the WebKit blog post has been updated with a clarification: Web applications added to the home screen are not part of Safari and thus have their own counter of days of use. Their days of use will match actual use of the web application which resets the timer. We do not expect the first-party in such a web application to have its website data deleted. That’s definitely a relief, and good thing they cleared this up. Original continues below: On the face of it, WebKit’s announcement yesterday titled Full Third-Party Cookie Blocking and More sounds like something I would wholeheartedly welcome. Unfortunately, I can’t because the “and more” bit effectively kills off Offline Web Apps and, with it, the chance to have privacy-respecting apps like the prototype I was exploring earlier in the year based on DAT. Block all third-party cookies, yes, by all means. But deleting all local storage (including Indexed DB, etc.) after 7 days effectively blocks any future decentralised apps using the browser (client side) as a trusted replication node in a peer-to-peer network. And that’s a huge blow to the future of privacy. I’m sure that’s entirely a coincidence for a company that wants to force everyone to use their App Store, the open web be damned.

When Apple CarPlay and Android Auto first started rolling out, initial evidence suggested these technologies held promise to reduce distracted driving. These systems funneled the most important features from our phones onto the infotainment screen, curbing motorists’ desire to reach for their handhelds. Yet, it looks like these mirroring technologies may not be nearly as safe as initially hoped. A new study from the UK’s IAM Roadsmart, an independent road safety organization, paints a far bleaker picture. The stark findings showed that drivers using one of the smartphone mirroring systems in a car displayed reaction times slower than someone who’d used cannabis. In fact, these motorists’ reaction times were five times slower than someone driving with the legal limit of alcohol in their system. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone with more than two braincells to rub together. These systems are based on touch screen technology, and touchscreens without any tactility are simply not suited for use while operating a motor vehicle. Touchscreens are far more distracting than plain old tactile buttons in a fixed order that you learn over time and can feel, and it blows my mind that no safety regulations heavily curtailing their use to parked situations has been enacted just yet.

The Counterpoint program launcher was supplied with the Amstrad PC5086 and other Amstrad PCs from that era. It acts as a user-friendly front end, replacing the full GUIs (Windows 2.0, or GEM) supplied with previous models. The Amstrad-branded version opens with a warning that it should only be used on Amstrad computers. However it appears to run successfully in non-Amstrad environments, such as the virtual machine used to make these screenshots. I love discovering user interfaces I’ve never known about this before, and this one fits the bill just right. Wild UI experimentation was the norm during the late ’80s and early ’90s, before we all settled on what we’re all using now. Digging into the past and learning from even relatively obscure footnotes such as these is fascinating.

It came out much later in March than we expected, but yesterday Google launched the second developer preview for Android 11, the next big version of Android due out at the end of the year. Despite the coronavirus disrupting just about every part of normal life, Google posted the same schedule it did with Preview 1, indicating that the plan is still to have a preview release every month. Anyway, here are the important new things in this release. As always, an excellent look at the new features by Ars. We’re still early on in Android 11’s development cycle, though, so everything is still very much subject to change.

Usually, x86 tutorials don’t spend much time explaining the historical perspective of design and naming decisions. When learning x86 assembly, you’re usually told something along the lines: Here’s EAX. It’s a register. Use it. So, what exactly do those letters stand for? E–A–X. I’m afraid there’s no short answer! We’ll have to go back to 1972… I love digital archeology.

We have seen earlier that Microsoft’s designers are working on a new Start Menu for Windows 10 (not Windows 10X) and now Panos Panay has posted a video celebrating 1 billion Windows 10 installations which appears to confirm that the changes and more are on the way. There’s finally hopefully going to be a modern replacement for Explorer, and context menus seem to be modern and thus consistent too. The already mentioned updated Stert menu is coming, too.

From the team that has brought PC and Console gamers the latest in graphics innovation for nearly 25 years, we are beyond pleased to bring gamers DirectX 12 Ultimate, the culmination of the best graphics technology we’ve ever introduced in an unprecedented alignment between PC and Xbox Series X. When gamers purchase PC graphics hardware with the DX12 Ultimate logo or an Xbox Series X, they can do so with the confidence that their hardware is guaranteed to support ALL next generation graphics hardware features, including DirectX Raytracing, Variable Rate Shading, Mesh Shaders and Sampler Feedback. This mark of quality ensures stellar “future-proof” feature support for next generation games! That’s some Vista-era name right there.

Sony has broken its silence. PlayStation 5 specifications are now out in the open with system architect Mark Cerny delivering a deep dive presentation into the nature of the new hardware and the ways in which we should expect a true generational leap over PlayStation 4. Digital Foundry had the chance to watch the lecture a couple of days ahead of time and had the opportunity to talk to Cerny in more depth afterwards about the nature of the custom PlayStation hardware and the philosophy behind its design. And just as with the Xbox Series X, specifications are meaningless without the games to back them up.

Apple today released the golden master version of iOS and iPadOS 13.4, the latest major updates to the iOS 13 operating system that was released in September. The iOS and ‌iPadOS‌ 13.4 GMs come after a little over a month of beta testing. The biggest new feature – which is accompanied by new iPad Pro devices and a keyboard with trackpad – is mouse support in iPadOS. The cool thing here is that Apple’s iOS cursor – a dot, so not an arrow – is a thing of marvel, and it does some really neat tricks that you won’t find anywhere else. When you hover over a tappable button, the pointer disappears and instead you get a hover-state highlight around the button. Hover over an app icon in the Dock or on your homescreen, and instead of seeing the mouse pointer on top of the icon, you see a highlight around the icon, much like the way icons are popped on tvOS. When text editing, the cursor changes to an I-beam, of course, but it’s an all-new I-beam cursor, not the one you get in iOS while using the on-screen keyboard as a virtual trackpad (after a tap-and-hold on the spacebar or two-finger tap-and-drag on the key area). This new I-beam cursor is smart. It adjusts to the size of the text you’re editing — if you’re editing 16-point text you’ll get a smaller cursor; if you’re editing 48-point text you’ll get a larger cursor. (Lo these 35+ years after the original Macintosh, it suddenly strikes me as a bit silly that the I-beam cursor stays small even when editing very large text.) The new iPadOS I-beam cursor also is aware of where lines are in text fields, and “snaps” to the line. There seem to be a lot of small little niceties here that seem so obvious once you see them in action. It’s really cool stuff, and I can’t wait to try it out.

Arm server chip upstart Ampere Computing made a big splash with its 80-core “Quicksilver” Altra processor two weeks ago, and Marvell, which is the volume leader in Arm server chips with its “Vulcan” ThunderX2 processors (largely inherited from its acquisition of Broadcom’s Arm server chip assets), is hitting back with some revelations about its future “Triton” ThunderX3 chip and its roadmap out beyond that. Competition in the ARM server space is really heating up.

Due to adjusted work schedules at this time, we are pausing upcoming Chrome and Chrome OS releases. Our primary objectives are to ensure they continue to be stable, secure, and work reliably for anyone who depends on them. We’ll continue to prioritize any updates related to security, which will be included in Chrome 80. Basically, Google wants to ensure the stability of Chrome and Chrome OS now that a lot of people are working from home due to the pandemic. Good call.

NsCDE is a retro but powerful (kind of) UNIX desktop environment which resembles CDE’s look and (partially feel), but with a more powerful and flexible beneath-the-surface framework, more suited for 21st century UNIX-like and Linux systems and user requirements than original CDE. NsCDE can be considered as something between a heavyweight FVWM theme on steroids, combined with a couple of other free software components and custom FVWM applications and heavy configurations. NsCDE can be considered as lightweight hybrid desktop environment. Be still, my beating heart.

AMD’s laptop offerings haven’t been amazing these past few years, but with the unveiling of their 4000 processors, that’s finally going to change. All that seems set to change. Fast forward to 2020, and notebook users are eagerly awaiting the arrival of products based on AMD’s latest Ryzen Mobile 4000 series processors, which combine up to eight Zen 2 cores and upgraded Vega graphics into a small CPU for the notebook market. AMD has already made waves with its Zen 2 cores in the desktop and enterprise space, and the company has already announced it plans to put eight of those cores, along with a significantly upgraded graphics design, into a processor that has a thermal design point of 15 W. These 15 W parts are designed for ultraportable notebooks, and AMD has a number of design wins lined up to show just how good an AMD system can be. The same silicon will also go into 45 W-class style notebooks, with a higher base frequency. These parts are geared more towards discrete graphics options, for gaming notebooks or more powerful business designs. The gaming market (at 45 W), the commercial market (15W to 45W) and the ultraportable market (15 W) are where AMD is hoping to strike hardest with the new hardware. I can’t wait for serious competition to Intel in the laptop space. It’s sorely needed.

Microsoft is revealing the full specs for its Xbox Series X console today, and it includes support for removable storage and much faster load times for games. The software giant will be using a custom AMD Zen 2 CPU with eight cores clocked at 3.8GHz each, a custom AMD RDNA 2 GPU with 12 teraflops and 52 compute units clocked at 1.825GHz each. This is all based on a 7nm process and includes 16GB of GDDR6 RAM with a 1TB custom NVME SSD storage drive. Microsoft is using two mainboards on this Xbox Series X compact design, and the entire unit is cooled through air being pulled in from the bottom and pushed out at the top via a 130mm fan. That’s some serious firepower, but the Xbox One series didn’t lack power either, yet lost the market share battle to the PS4 without putting up much of a fight. Firepower means nothing without the games to back it up, and that’s where the Xbox One simply failed to deliver. Show us the games, because without those, all this hardware is useless. That being said, I’ve always had a soft sport for chimney-like computer designs since the PowerMac G4 Cube, and this fits right in there. Perhaps not the most practical design, but it sure does stand out.

This blog post examines a 1980s chip used in a Soyuz space clock. The microscope photo below shows the tiny silicon die inside the package, with a nice, geometric layout. The silicon appears pinkish or purplish in this photo, while the metal wiring layer on top is white. Around the edge of the chip, the bond wires (black) connect pads on the chip to the chip’s pins. The tiny structures on the chip are resistors and transistors. That’s just cool.

Microsoft has launched a new website for the Windows UI Library (WinUI) that provides more information on the various advantages of the modern libraries for the development of Windows. WinUI allows developers to access and use Fluent controls, styles, and other UWP XAML controls via NuGet packages. While earlier versions of the WinUI focused on UWP, the Redmond giant has been expanding the framework. The preview version of WinUI 3.0 brought with it support for the full Windows 10 native UI platform. The extended scope of the platform meant that developers could use WinUI XAML with their existing WPF, Windows Forms, and Win32 applications. The website terms WinUI as the modern native UI platform of Windows. Will this be the one that sticks?

Thanks to Dutch technology website Tweakers’ Arnoud Wokke for pointing this one out before any of the major sites have – Apple has been fined for 1.1 billion euros by the French competition authority for anti-competitive practices. You can read the announcement in French, too. The short of it is that between 2005 and 2013, Apple primarily sold its products in France through two specific wholesalers, who have also been fined, and the three of them agreed not to compete, limiting competition. Apple also imposed pricing upon its independent Authorised Resellers and Premium Resellers, making it impossible for them to compete on price. In addition, Apple also limited the supply given to these resellers compared to its own stores, which further limited the their ability to function. What’s interesting here is that this is Apple’s modus operandi all over Europe and the rest of the world, so it wouldn’t surprise me if other EU countries will work off of this ruling in the near future. This kind of illegal behaviour by massive corporations has gone unpunished for long enough, and it’s high time serious punishments are doled out. Good on the French authorities for this one.

We’re once again approaching that time of the year when Microsoft releases a new feature update to Windows 10. In line with the version numbering scheme we’ve been seeing, this update is currently known as Windows 10 version 2004, or 20H1, because it’s being released in the first half of the year. While we did get a feature update in the second half of 2019, there was only a very small number of additions, and those additions were also minor in nature. It was more about refining the previous update than making significant leaps forward. Surprisingly, even though version 2004 is a more significant feature update, it’s one of the smaller ones, despite having a longer period of testing with Insiders than what we’ve seen before. With that being said, there are still a few changes and improvements to many parts of the experience, and if you want to know all about it, we’ve compiled this list for you. Let’s get started. There’s some nice additions in there, but nothing earth-shattering or game-changing. Windows 10 is five years old now, and it feels like the model of frequent feature updates (instead of monolithic Windows releases and the occasional service pack) just isn’t really moving the needle.

We already covered earlier articles in this series, but I want to highlight this one too, because it covers one of the most unique consoles ever developed – the Atari Jaguar. The designers of the Jaguar departed from the traditional architecture where one CPU drives fixed-pipeline audio and graphics chips as we saw earlier in the series with the SNES and Genesis. If we find a Motorola 68000 like in the Atari, Amiga, and Genesis (albeit running at 13.295 Mhz) and a sprites engine (called Object), there is also two 32-bit RISC processors running at 26.59 MHz called TOM and JERRY. The Jaguar is wild.

Microsoft said this week that it will support Visual Basic on .NET 5.0 but will no longer add new features or evolve the language. “Starting with .NET 5, Visual Basic will support Class Library, Console, Windows Forms, WPF, Worker Service, ASP.NET Core Web API … to provide a good path forward for the existing VB customer who want to migrate their applications to .NET Core,” the .NET team wrote in a post to the Microsoft DevBlogs. “Going forward, we do not plan to evolve Visual Basic as a language … The future of Visual Basic … will focus on stability, the application types listed above, and compatibility between the .NET Core and .NET Framework versions of Visual Basic.” Alright then.

Microsoft today announced that Co-Founder and Technology Advisor Bill Gates stepped down from the company’s Board of Directors to dedicate more time to his philanthropic priorities including global health, development, education, and his increasing engagement in tackling climate change. He will continue to serve as Technology Advisor to CEO Satya Nadella and other leaders in the company. Microsoft is in a pretty good spot, so Gates’ company seems to be in good hands.

Google is not working with the US government in building a nationwide website to help people determine whether and how to get a novel coronavirus test, despite what President Donald Trump said in the course of issuing an emergency declaration for the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, a much smaller trial website made by another division of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is going up. It will only be able to direct people to testing facilities in the Bay Area. People are dying, and the administration of the most powerful and important country in the world is lying to its citizens left, right, and centre. What a joke.

seL4 has been our team’s greatest achievement, but it didn’t fall out of the sky: it was the result of 15 years of research, and has evolved further for the past 10 years. From the beginning, the design of seL4 has been driven by a number of principles. But a recent internal discussion about some fine points of the spec (as well as some discussions with externals) reminded me that some of these principles are in the minds of the designers but not really documented. This can lead to people (internal as well as external to Trustworthy Systems) arguing for APIs that are not in the spirit of seL4. Hence I’ll try to write up these principles. Articles like these are rare.

In the previous installment of this three-part series, we took a look at the reasons why having truly open source-friendly Linux-based phones are not only a good thing to have but are also necessary to shake up things in the mobile space. The idea, of course, isn’t new and goes as far back as the OpenMoko community-driven project and even the mostly-but-not-totally open source Nokia N900 and N9. Those days are long gone, however, and the smartphone industry has changed drastically over the last decade and so have the attempts at making Linux phones. In this part, we take stock of the options that are currently available not just to Linux enthusiasts but to privacy and freedom-loving people as well. I’d love to have a mobile operating system based on Linux that isn’t Android, but it seems like all the options still have a long, long way to go.

Today KaiOS Technologies, maker of KaiOS, the leading mobile operating system for smart feature phones, and Mozilla, developer of one of the world’s leading web browsers, announced a partnership to enhance the Gecko engine for KaiOS, enabling a more diverse and open mobile internet for users around the world. Kai’s engineering expertise and Mozilla’s software support together will ensure future versions of Gecko are compatible with KaiOS-enabled devices and their web-based resources. I really want a KaiOS device to give the platform a proper test. It seems like such an elegant midway point between the cell phone of yore and modern smartphones.

We’ve known that Intel’s P-State Linux CPU frequency scaling driver in general can be a bit quirky and especially so when dealing with Intel integrated graphics where the iGPU and CPU share the same power envelope. This has been shown with examples like using the “powersave” governor to boost iGPU performance while discrete graphics owners are generally best off switching over to the “performance” governor. As the latest though on helping the iGPU front with P-State, there is a new patch series talking up big gains in performance and power efficiency. Francisco Jerez of Intel’s open-source driver team sent out a set of ten patches today working on GPU-bound efficiency improvements for the Intel P-State driver. This is a very welcome patchset, since the interplay between Intel processor and Intel integrated GPU isn’t exactly optimal, as we’ve talked about before.

The European Commission has announced plans for new “right to repair” rules that it hopes will cover phones, tablets, and laptops by 2021. If successful, these rules will mean these devices should remain useful for longer before needing to be recycled or ending up in landfills. The plans were introduced as part of a wide-ranging set of product initiatives that also cover textiles, plastics, packaging, and food with the aim of helping the trading bloc become climate neutral by 2050. As well as introducing new “right to repair” rules, the EU also wants products to be more sustainably designed in the first place. Under the new plan, products should be more durable, reusable, upgradeable, and constructed out of more recycled materials. The EU’s hope is to reward manufacturers that achieve these goals. Finally, the EU is also considering introducing a new scheme to let consumers more easily sell or return old phones, tablets, and chargers. Good. One of the most important aspects of these rules is that the EU wants to force companies to provide spare parts to third party repair shops, which is something that’s entirely normal in, for instance, the car industry, but so far hasn’t been implemented in the technology sector yet because tech companies are special because reasons. EU-wide right-to-repair legislation will force companies like Apple and Samsung to take device longevity and repairability seriously, and these benefits will spill over to other parts of the world, such as the US, Canada, and maybe even the UK.

We are pleased to announce the official release of GNOME 3.36: “Gresik”. Version 3.36 contains six months of work by the GNOME community and includes many improvements, performance enhancements, and new features. Highlights from this release include visual refreshes for a number of applications and interfaces, particularly noteworthy being the login and unlock interfaces. The release notes provide a more detailed overview of the changes.

As reported on CNET today: A huge proportion of internet-connected imaging devices at hospitals run outdated operating systems, according to research released Tuesday by Palo Alto Networks, a cybersecurity firm. The company found that 83% of these devices run on outdated software that can’t be updated even when it contains known vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit. This is such a serious issue, but most people are oblivious to the problem of critical legacy systems that cannot be upgraded. Most critics just make uniformed statements like “upgrade” to a modern OS, but it’s usually a cocktail of ageing hardware and legacy software requirements that will stop upgrades from happening.

We don’t often talk about power supplies, but Intel’s new ATX12VO spec—that’s an ‘O’ for ‘Oscar,’ not a zero—will start appearing soon in pre-built PCs from OEMs and system integrators, and it represents a major change in PSU design. The ATX12VO spec removes voltage rails from the power supply, all in a bid to improve efficiency standards on the PC and meet stringent government regulations. But while the spec essentially removes +3.3-volt, +5-volt and -12-volt and +5-volt standby power from the PSU, they aren’t going away—they’re just moving to the motherboard. That’s the other big change, so keep reading to find out more. Power supplies are definitely one of the more cumbersome parts of a modern PC build, so any changes there can potentially have a big impact. The new Mac Pro has really shown how a modern PC can be designed to not use ugly and annoying cabling, opting instead for various pogo pins and properly aligned connectors. Sure, that would be much harder to accomplish in the open ecosystem of PCs, but for an easier building experience and thus potential access to a larger segment of the market, players in the PC industry would do well to come together and take a long, hard look at the Mac Pro and how to replicate some of its innovations into the wider PC industry.

I have been curious about data compression and the Zip file format in particular for a long time. At some point I decided to address that by learning how it works and writing my own Zip program. The implementation turned into an exciting programming exercise; there is great pleasure to be had from creating a well oiled machine that takes data apart, jumbles its bits into a more efficient representation, and puts it all back together again. Hopefully it is interesting to read about too. This article explains how the Zip file format and its compression scheme work in great detail: LZ77 compression, Huffman coding, Deflate and all. It tells some of the history, and provides a reasonably efficient example implementation written from scratch in C. One for the ages. Articles like this don’t get written every day.