OSnews

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.

DuckDuckGo’s premise is simple. They do not collect or share personal information. They log searches, but they promise that these logs are not linked to personally identifiable information. Their search engine results seemingly come from Bing, but they claim to have their own crawler and hundreds of other sources on top of that. They do customize the results a little: geo-searches like bars near my location give me results from my home city of New York. But search results aren’t personalized. I’ve always wondered how good the results would be. DuckDuckGo is my default, main search engine on all my computers and devices. Every now and then I do use the g command to tell DDG to do a Google search, but overall, I’m incredibly satisfied with how DDG performs.

Admittedly it’s been while since I last wrote about this (formerly MATE-based) desktop environment, but it’s still out there, shipping as default experience in Ubuntu Kylin, doing its thing. But not for much longer, it seems. Based on an updated shared on Chinese social media, the UKUI team appear to be rebuilding UKUI using Qt. The plan, they say, is to stick to to the same “easy, excellent, expert, elaborate” mantra that the original UKUI desktop was (supposedly) built to. I’m highlighting this here because there’s a ton of interesting Linux desktop work going on in China that we in the west rarely talk about, such as Deepin and its Qt-based Deepin Desktop Environment that’s also available on some other distributions. UKUI fits in that same bucket. There’s, of course, legitimate concerns over code from China, but since these projects are open source, it would seem there’s little to worry about on that front. The fact of the matter is that, totalitarian dictatorship or not, Chinese people are just regular folks, and many of them are probably excellent programmers and designers that can contribute a lot to the health, variety, and competition within the desktop Linux and wider open source community.

Want a more capable and less restrictive operating system on your iPhone? Enter Project Sandcastle. The iPhone restricts users to operate inside a sandbox. But when you buy an iPhone, you own the iPhone hardware. Android for the iPhone gives you the freedom to run a different operating system on that hardware. Android for the iPhone has many exciting practical applications, from forensics research to dual-booting ephemeral devices to combatting e-waste. Our goal has always been to push mobile research forward, and we’re excited to see what the developer community builds from this foundation. This project has some serious pedigree to it, from the original developers behind Android for the very first iPhone, to Corellium, a company Apple is suing because Corellium offers virtualised iOS devices in the cloud for developers. There’s so much going on here I barely know where to start. In any event, the current Android for iPhone beta only supports the iPhone 7 and 7+, but not every part of them, and other devices are clearly in the very early stages. The source code to Project Sandcastle is available on Github. I hope this will one day lead to Android running well on all sorts of iPhone models, if only because it is such a delightful slap in the face to Apple’s anti-consumer restrictions on its hardware and software.

In 2016, through a series of joint ventures and created companies, AMD licensed the design of its first generation Zen x86 processors to be sold into China. The goal of this was two-fold: China wanted a ‘home grown’ solution for high-performance x86 compute, and AMD at the time needed a cash injection. The outcome of this web of businesses was the Hygon Dhyana range of processors, which ranged from commercial to server use. Due to the Zen 1 design on which it was based, it has been assumed that the performance was in line with Ryzen 1000 and Naples EPYC, and no-one in the west has publicly tested the hardware. Thanks to a collaboration with our friend Wendell Wilson over at YouTube channel Level1Techs, we now have the first full review of the Hygon CPUs. This is such an intriguing story. This specific joint venture – underreported and unknown to many in the west – may prove invaluable to Chinese own tech sector for years to come.

Did you ever load up your modern Windows 10 PC, ready to install your favourite application or game, only to be greeted by a dialog telling you it won’t run, and then you realise you’re trying to run a 16 bit application on your modern 64 bit Windows 10 installation? I swear to god, this happens to me all the time. Luckily, there’s a solution to this problem. In fact, there’s multiple solutions to this problem. Of course, you can always just fire up a virtual machine with 32 bit Windows, Windows 3.1, or OS/2 for massive style points, but that’s cumbersome and uncool (except for OS/2. OS/2 is always cool). There’s a better way. Enter winevdm by otya128, which is a combination of MAME’s i386 emulation and the 16 bit part of wine. It allows you to run 16 bit applications on modern 64 bit versions of Windows. Edward Mendelson created a handy installer with some additional useful tools to make the process even easier. As a sidenote, there’s also NTVDMx64, which is a version of Microsoft’s own NTVDM (Windows NT’s virtual DOS machine) adapted for 64 bit (Mendelson made a handy installer for this one, too). By its very nature, NTVDMx64 doesn’t run Windows 16 bit applications; only DOS ones. It is also important to note that NTVDMx64 is based on leaked Windows NT source code, so please be careful in which settings you use it. There’s no real reason I’m talking about this today, other than the fact I that I ran into this stuff a few days ago when watching a YouTube video about running the IBM WorkPlace Shell for Windows 3.x on Windows 10, and thought it was fascinating. It might prove useful for some of you working at companies still running old 16 bit stuff, or if you’re digging around in your old floppy collection.

For those unfamiliar, PowerShell 7 is the latest major update to PowerShell, a cross-platform (Windows, Linux, and macOS) automation tool and configuration framework optimized for dealing with structured data (e.g. JSON, CSV, XML, etc.), REST APIs, and object models. PowerShell includes a command-line shell, object-oriented scripting language, and a set of tools for executing scripts/cmdlets and managing modules. Do we have any PowerShell users on OSNews? If so, why are you using it, and what for?

Firefox 75 due to be released next month should finally have its native Wayland support in good order. Merged yesterday were the Firefox Wayland patches for VA-API video acceleration support in conjunction with FFmpeg. And so the slow, almost never-ending march towards Wayland continues. I wonder if the march will ever end,

Today we have the launch of the Ampere Altra Arm CPUs. This is a completely new design built specifically for cloud providers. It has up to 80 cores and is designed to go head-to-head with AMD EPYC 7002 “Rome” series processors as well as 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Refresh parts. Ampere is launching today but we do not have a test system as we have had for all of the other major server chip launches recently. It sounds like Ampere is shipping mass production units soon, but not at the time we were briefed. Hopefully, we can get more hands-on insights in the near future. In this article, we are going to discuss the architecture based on the documents we have and our discussion with the company. We are going to check performance claims and help our readers critically analyze what they are being shown. We are then going to discuss systems disclosed with the chips before getting to our final thoughts. This seems like an impressive piece of engineering, but we’ll definitely need test systems and proper reviews to test the claims about the chip. While I’m very happy AMD is back in the game and we’ve got some real competition to Intel, we as consumers would benefit even more from proper ISA competition, something we haven’t seen in a long time.

This post will give you a quick intro to the basics of GUI programming for SerenityOS. A one-line introduction that covers the article perfectly. A rarity, indeed. We covered SerenityOS late last year.

Many older VPN offerings are “way too huge and complex, and it’s basically impossible to overview and verify if they are secure or not,” says Jan Jonsson, CEO of VPN service provider Mullvad, which powers Firefox maker Mozilla’s new VPN service. That explains some of the excitement around WireGuard, an open source VPN software and protocol that will soon be part of the Linux kernel—the heart of the open source operating system that powers everything from web servers to Android phones to cars. I’ve always been wary of the countless VPN services littering YouTube and podcast sponsor slots, since you can never be quite sure if you can trust them. Luckily I don’t need a VPN, but I’m glad Linux is getting it built-in.

Speaking about LSDJ, the premiere music software for the Game Boy, George Buckenham writes: But it also got me thinking about chorded input schemes. LSDJ is a workhorse of a program, able to do a lot of stuff. And it’s designed to let you do that stuff quickly – to let you iterate fast, put down a tune fast, adjust things while you’re standing on stage. But also… a Gameboy has 8 buttons – 4 directions, A, B, SELECT and START. So it has to make those buttons work hard. And that’s where chording comes in. Chording is a means of inputting commands to software by holding down multiple buttons at once. Ctrl-C is an example of a chorded command. Hold down Ctrl, then press C while you’re doing it. Text copied. But you can also make chording work harder than that. It requires a lot of planning and thinking to make a complex application controllable by only a few buttons, such as the mere 8 buttons on the original Game Boy. I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of developers who have to make things work with limitations such as these.

The Chinese government has facilitated the mass transfer of Uyghur and other ethnic minority citizens from the far west region of Xinjiang to factories across the country. Under conditions that strongly suggest forced labour, Uyghurs are working in factories that are in the supply chains of at least 83 well-known global brands in the technology, clothing and automotive sectors, including Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen. The current coronavirus outbreak is showing us once again just how dependent the world is on Chinese manufacturing. The companies implicated in this report – technology companies in particular, since this is OSNews – need all these Chinese workers to function, to exist, and to grow their revenue and Cayman Islands money piles even more, more, more. Do you really think Tim Cook loses one night of sleep over a few thousand Muslims ground to minced meat between the cogs of his manufacturing empire?

While open source software is taking over the world, a push for open source hardware has been quietly building. The RISC-V Foundation has been pushing its open sourced instruction set architecture for chips based on the long-established paradigms for reduced instruction set computing. And one of its most vocal advocates is Calista Redmond, the chief executive of the RISC-V Foundation, which is working to promote its adoption. This is a slow burn. RISC-V won’t change the world overnight, but will slowly but surely seep into every corner of the computing industry – and looking at the incompatible, closed-source mess that is the ARM world, we really need RISC-V on all those millions of embedded devices we use every day.

The other day I set out to solve a seemingly simple problem: With a DOS extended application, lock down memory buffers using DPMI and use them for bus-mastering (BusLogic SCSI HBA, though the exact device model isn’t really relevant to the problem). Now, DPMI does not allow querying the physical address of a memory region, although it does have provisions for mapping a given physical memory area. But that doesn’t help here–mapping physical memory is useful for framebuffers where a device memory needs to be mapped so that an application can access it. In my case, I needed the opposite, allowing a bus-mastering device to use already-allocated system memory. I think I may have understood some of these words.

In software development, and especially Google’s development cycles, there’s usually a point where the developers “eat their own dogfood” or use their own work, before letting normal users try it. It seems that Google’s long-in-development Fuchsia OS may finally be reaching this “dogfood” stage. And yet, we’re still no closer to what, exactly, Fuchsia is going to be for.

The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to develop the SeaMonkey Internet Application Suite (see below). Such a software suite was previously made popular by Netscape and Mozilla, and the SeaMonkey project continues to develop and deliver high-quality updates to this concept. Containing an Internet browser, email & newsgroup client with an included web feed reader, HTML editor, IRC chat and web development tools, SeaMonkey is sure to appeal to advanced users, web developers and corporate users. SeaMonkey has been around for a while, and I’m sure many of you are familiar with it. It’s effectively a modern continuation of the more classic Mozilla browser, the Mozilla Application Suite, which also included a news reader, email client, and so on. Not exactly the kind of thing most people want to use today, but there must still be a place for it in today’s era. That being said, the project just released its latest new version, 2.53.1, so I figured I’d highlight it here.

While it doesn’t get the same attention as their high-profile mobile, desktop, or server CPU offerings, AMD’s embedded division is an important fourth platform for the chipmaker. To that end, this week the company is revealing its lowest-power Ryzen processors ever, with a new series of embedded chips that are designed for use in ultra-compact commercial and industrial systems. The chips in question are the AMD Ryzen Embedded R1102G and the AMD Ryzen Embedded R1305G SoCs. These parts feature a 6 W or a configurable 8 W – 10 W TDP, respectively. Both SoCs feature two Zen cores with or without simultaneous multithreading, AMD Radeon Vega 3 graphics, 1 MB L2 cache, 4 MB L3 cache, a single channel or a dual-channel memory controller, and two 10 GbE ports. Two quite capable chips. I’ve always liked these low-power chips and have, on numerous occasions, pondered buying the devices these kinds of chips tend to end up in – small industrial machines, thin clients, that sort of stuff – since they’re cheap and abundant on eBay. Sadly, I can never quite find a use for them.

Are you constantly annoyed that your smartphone battery dies before the rest of the phone? Angry about the wastage that creates? Well, leaked EU proposals could force smartphone manufacturers to to make all batteries removable. That would mean that all brands wanting to sell in the EU would have to make sure each phone has a battery that can be removed by the user – and that even would include Apple, the company most resistant to legislation around its iPhone designs, if attempts to make it change ports in the past is anything to go by. This makes perfect sense. People are keeping their phones for longer and longer, so the ability to easily and quickly replace the battery is a big boon.