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It turns out that digital rights management and its consequences extend even beyond your passing when it comes to Steam. Valve has made it clear that no, you cannot will your Steam account or games to someone else when you die. The issue of digital game inheritability gained renewed attention this week as a ResetEra poster quoted a Steam support response asking about transferring Steam account ownership via a last will and testament. Unfortunately, Steam accounts and games are non-transferable" the response reads. Steam Support can't provide someone else with access to the account or merge its contents with another account. I regret to inform you that your Steam account cannot be transferred via a will." Kyle Orland at Ars Technica My wife and I make sure we know each other's passwords and login credentials to the most important accounts and services in our lives, since an accident can happen at any time, and we'd like to be somewhat prepared - as much as you can be, under the circumstances - for if something happens. I never even considered merging Steam accounts, but at least granting access to the person named in your will or your legal heir seems like something a service like Steam should be legally obliged to do. I don't think Steam's position here - which is probably par for the course - is tenable in the long-term. Over the coming years and decades, we're going to see more and more people who grew up almost entirely online pass away, leaving behind various accounts, digital purchases, and related matters, and loved ones and heirs will want access to those. At some point over the coming decades, there's going to be a few high-profile cases in the media about something like this, and it's going to spur lawmakers into drafting up legislation to make account and digital goods transfers to heirs and loved ones not a courtesy, but a requirement. In the meantime, if you have a designated heir, like your children, a spouse, or whatever, make sure they can somehow gain access to your accounts and digital goods, by writing stuff down on paper and putting it somewhere safe or something similar. Again - you never know when you might... Expire.

These sources, as clearly stated in the repo's readme, are the 8088 assembly language sources from 10th Feb 1983, and are being open-sourced for historical reference and educational purposes. This means we will not be accepting PRs that modify the source in any way. Rich Turner I'm loving all these open source releases from Microsoft, but honestly, I'd wish the pace was a little higher and we'd get to some more recent stuff. Open sourcing early versions of MS-DOS and related software is obviously great from a software preservation standpoint, but at this rate we'll get to more influential pieces of software by the time the sun experiences its helium flash. On a related note, about a month ago Microsoft released the source code to MS-DOS 4.00. Well, we've now also got access to the code for MS-DOS 4.01, a bugfix release that came out very quickly after 4.00. Due to various bugs, DOS 4.00 was a relatively short-lived release, and it was replaced by DOS 4.01 just a couple of months later. Howard M. Harte (hharte), who already fixed various flaws in the official source code release of MS-DOS 4.00, managed to figure out the differences between DOS 4.00 and 4.01 - we now have access to the improved version as well! Lothar Serra Mari We're getting a pretty complete picture of early MS-DOS source code.

iFixit is ending its collaboration with Samsung, as iFixit claims the Korean giant is not actually interested in offering repair options at all. As we tried to build this ecosystem we consistently faced obstacles that made us doubt Samsung's commitment to making repair more accessible. We couldn't get parts to local repair shops at prices and quantities that made business sense. The part prices were so costly that many consumers opted to replace their devices rather than repair them. And the design of Samsung's Galaxy devices remained frustratingly glued together, forcing us to sell batteries and screens in pre-glued bundles that increased the cost. Scott Head Honestly, this doesn't surprise me. Unless right to repair legislation becomes more widespread and stricter, corporations will inevitably drag their feet in honouring any right to repair commitments and promises they make.

I needed a bit of a break from real work" recently, so I started a new programming project that was low-stakes and purely recreational. On April 21st, I set out to see how much of a Unix-like operating system for x86_64 targets that I could put together in about a month. The result is Bunnix. Not including days I didn't work on Bunnix for one reason or another, I spent 27 days on this project. Drew DeVault Bunnix' creator, Drew DeVault, has quite a bit of experience with writing operating systems, as they're also the creator of Helios, an experimental microkernel operating system. Bunnix is remarkably capable for a 30-day project, and comes with support for both BIOS and UEFI boot, and it'll boot on real hardware too. It doesn't have USB support though, so if you're going the real hardware route, you'll need to take that into account for mouse and keyboard input. Bunnix has a relatively solid set of drivers, taking the short development time into account: among other things, there's PCI, AHCI block devices, serial ports, framebuffers, and ext4 support. The kernel supports a virtual filesystem, a /dev filled with block devices, a terminal emulator, and more. Bunnix is single-user for now, so it doesn't enforce file permissions, but DeVault states it should be relatively easy to implement multiuser support. A unique characteristic of Bunnix is that's written mostly in Hare, complemented by some C. Hare is a relatively new programming language, which we touched on late last year when it was ported to OpenBSD. Implementing file systems proved to be one of the difficulties during development, partly due to Hare. I also learned a lot about mixing source languages into a Hare project, since the kernel links together Hare, assembly, and C sources - it works remarkably well but there are some pain points I noticed, particularly with respect to building the ABI integration riggings. It'd be nice to automate conversion of C headers into Hare forward declaration modules. Some of this work already exists in hare-c, but has a ways to go. If I were to start again, I would probably be more careful in my design of the filesystem layer. Drew DeVault DeVault's post about Bunnix gives a lot more insight into the development of Bunnix, so I'd highly suggest to head on over to read more. Do note that DeVault considers Bunnix done", in the sense that the learning experience is over, and aside from a few random developments here and there, they won't be doing any work on it anymore.

It turns out way fewer people knew search engines like DuckDuckGo are just whitelabel versions of Microsoft Bing than I thought. Today, in most of Europe and Asia, search engines like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant, other alternative search engines, ChatGPT internet search, and even Windows Copilot were all down. It turns out the culprit was Microsoft Bing; and when Microsoft Bing goes down, everyone who uses it goes down too. Alternative search engines often try to be vague about their whitelabel status, or even outright hide it altogether. Bing is a popular search engine for whitelabeling, so when Bing goes down, almost the entire house of cards of alternative search engines comes tumbling down as well. DuckDuckGo, for instance, places a lot of emphasis on using specialised search engines like TripAdvisor and direct sources like Sportradar or Wikipedia, as well as its own crawler and other indexes. However, as we saw today, as soon as Bing goes down, DuckDuckGo just stops working entirely. DDG happens to be my main search engine - a case of less shit than everyone else - so all throughout the day I was met with the error message There was an error displaying the search results. Please try again." I don't begrudge DDG or other search engines for repackaging Bing search results - building a truly new search engine and running it is incredibly hard, costly, and you'll always be lagging behind - but I was surprised by how many people didn't know just how common this practice really was. My Fediverse feeds were filled with people surprised to learn they'd been using Bing all along, just wrapped in a nicer user interface and with some additional features.

In which I build WindEmu, an emulator for the Psion Series 5mx (a PDA from 1999 running EPOC - the OS that would become Symbian), over the course of just over a week, without access to the actual hardware. Yet another cursed project. Ash Wolf I had never seen this before, even though it's from 2019. You can load the emulator in your browser and use EPOC32 as if it's running on the real thing, and I have to say it feel remarkably realistic for a project completed in a little over a week. Of course, it may have been tweaked and improved over the years since 2019, but I don't know by how much. The last GitHub commit was five years ago, so it seems there really hasn't been much public work done on it since. An emulator like this is probably the closest most of us will get to the later devices from Psion, since as with all retrocomputing platforms, the number of working devices is rapidly dwindling, and prices for working examples on sites like eBay have gone through the roof.

Google's new search feature, AI Overviews, seems to be going awry. The tool, which gives AI-generated summaries of search results, appeared to instruct a user to put glue on pizza when they searched cheese not sticking to pizza." Jyoti Mann at Business Insider Google's artificial intelligence" is literally just parroting a joke Reddit comment from 11 years ago by a person named fucksmith. Google is paying Reddit 60 million dollars for this privilege. AI" is going just great.

Linux auto tiling manager with hot corner support for Openbox, Fluxbox, IceWM, Xfwm, KWin, Marco, Muffin, Mutter and other EWMH compliant window managers using the X11 window system. Therefore, this project provides dynamic tiling for XFCE, LXDE, LXQt, KDE and GNOME (Mate, Deepin, Cinnamon, Budgie) based desktop environments. Simply keep your current window manager and install cortile on top of it. Once enabled, the tiling manager will handle resizing and positioning of existing and new windows. Cortile GitHub page I've always been mildly interested in trying out a proper tiling window manager - of which are millions - but installing and setting up an entirely new environment always felt a bit like overkill for something I'm just curious about instead of actually intending to use it permanently. This seems like a great solution to this issue.

About a month ago we talked about the rumours, but now the feature's officially announced: Microsoft is going to keep track of everything you do on your Windows machine by taking a constant stream of screenshots, and then making said screenshots searchable by using things like text and image recognition. As you might expect, this is a privacy nightmare, and the details and fine print accompanying this new feature do not exactly instill confidence. First, the feature is a lot dumber than you might expect, as it doesn't perform any content moderation", as Microsoft calls it. Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. That data may be in snapshots that are stored on your device, especially when sites do not follow standard internet protocols like cloaking password entry. Privacy and control over your Recall experience Well, Microsoft says Recall doesn't do any content moderation, but that's actually a flat-out lie. Recall will not show any content with DRM that happens to be on your screen, and private browsing sessions in Chromium-based browsers won't be shown either. You can also exclude specific applications and websites - filtering websites, however, is only available in Edge. In other words, managing this privacy nightmare is entirely left up to the user... Except for DRM content, of course. The mouse must be pleased, after all. It also seems Microsoft is enabling this feature by default for at least some business users, as machines managed with Microsoft Intune will have Recall enabled by default, and administrators will need to use Group Policy to disable it. There is no way in hell any company serious about data security will want Recall enabled, so I guess this can be added to the pile of headaches administrators already have to deal with. My biggest worry is the usual slippery slope this feature represents. How long before governments will legally require a feature like this on all our computers? The more Microsoft and other companies brag about how easy and low-power stuff like this is, the more governments - already on the warpath when it comes to things like encrypted messaging - will want their hands on this. This is such a bad idea.

Several Dell products use ThinOS 9, such as the OptiPlex 3000 Thin Client, the OptiPlex All-In-One, and the Latitude series laptops, such as the Latitude 3440 and 5440. ThinOS is a ready-to-deploy solution that aims to improve virtual desktops while offering a secure platform for applications and services. It provides users with a seamless and integrated experience, whether remotely or from the office. It's a software environment that optimizes virtual workspaces. The latest version, ThinOS 9, is built on FreeBSD 12 with other 3rd-party open source components and is well-known for its robust security and stability. This aligns with the requirements of modern enterprises that demand high performance and protection in their computing solutions. Dell case study While Dell and FreeBSD call this a case study' but while I see plenty of case, I see little study - it's mostly just a load of marketing speak. That being said, there's still interesting news in here about the future of ThinOS. The next release of ThinOS, version 10, will make the jump from FreeBSD 12 to the current FreeBSD 14 release, drastically improving hardware support in the process, while also bringing in the various other benefits of the latest FreeBSD release. It will also improve ThinOS' compatibility with Linux applications, a feature of FreeBSD, which is something Dell is keen to highlight. It should come as no surprise that ThinOS 10 will also improve its security features, probably also mostly coming along for the ride from FreeBSD 14. Dell also mentions that it intends to continue using FreeBSD as the base for ThinOS, which could've easily gone differently as part of Dell's acquisition of Wyze, where ThinOS originally comes from. This is good news for FreeBSD, but at the same time, when I look at thin clients on Dell's website, ThinOS is just one of the options, and every photo shows the devices running Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021. I genuinely wonder what the spread is between buyers opting for ThinOS, Windows, and Linux. Thin clients have always fascinated me, so perhaps I should go onto eBay, figure out which Dell thin clients are still supported by the latest ThinOS release, buy one, and set up a simple thin client environment in my home - using ThinOS, of course.

At the heart of developer productivity lies improving performance for developer workloads on Windows. Last year at Build, we announced Dev Drive a new storage volume tailor-made for developers and supercharged for performance and security. Since then, we have continued to invest further in Windows performance improvements for developer workloads. With the release of Windows 11 24H2, workflows will get even faster when developing on a Dev Drive. Windows copy engine now has Filesystem Block Cloning, resulting in nearly instantaneous copy actions and drastically improving performance, especially in developer scenarios that copy large files. Pavan Davuluri on the Windows blog Sounds like a near and meaningful improvement.

Last week, Google unveiled a new little feature in Google Search, called Web". Residing alongside the various other options like All", Images", Video", and so on, its goal is to effectively strip Google Search results from everything we generally don't like, and just present a list of actual links to actual websites. It turns out it's quite simple to set this as your default search engine" in your browser, so somebody made a website to make that process a little easier. On May 15th Google released a new Web" filter that removes AI Overview" and other clutter, leaving only traditional web results. Here is how you can set Google Web" as your default search engine. TenBlueLinks.org It's important to note that this is not some separate search engine, and that no data is flowing any differently than when using regular Google. All this does is append the parameter UDM=14 to the URL, which loads the option Web".

noTunes is a macOS application that will prevent iTunes or Apple Music from launching. Simply launch the noTunes app and iTunes/Music will no longer be able to launch. For example, when bluetooth headphones reconnect. You can toggle the apps functionality via the menu bar icon with a simple left click. noTunes GitHub page Apparently, this is such a common complaint that an application had to be made just to gain some semblance of control over what some people still refer to as their" computer. For both macOS and Windows, there's a giant industry - you can't really call it a cottage industry anymore at this point - of tools, applications, and fixes just to deal with or avoid all the user-hostile, anti-choice garbage Apple and Microsoft shove into their respective operating systems. As a Linux user - and recent OpenBSD convert - I find this absolutely wild. Following any Apple podcast, or reading any Windows website, makes it so clear just how many hoops these people have to jump through and how many weirdly-shaped holes they have to contort into just to be able to gain some vague semblance of ownership of their own hardware. I'm not judging - we all have areas in our lives where we do this, they just differ from person to person - but it's still confronting to see it so clearly, all the time.

Lawyers for Scarlett Johansson are demanding that OpenAI disclose how it developed an AI personal assistant voice that the actress says sounds uncannily similar to her own. Johansson's legal team has sent OpenAI two letters asking the company to detail the process by which it developed a voice the tech company dubbed Sky," Johansson's publicist told NPR in a revelation that has not been previously reported. Bobby Allyn at NPR This story highlights just how much disdain techbros have for the work of creative people. Here's the timeline: Techbros like Sam Altman deeply despise and undervalue the work of creatives, believing human creativity to be merely an equation to be solved, definable by an algorithm. To people like him, creative work has no value, and as such, is up for grabs to be taken and cut up for his algorithms to spit out as new" works. This story highlights this perfectly. The sleaze runs deep with Altman and OpenAI.

Last week I wrote about Intel aiming to remove Xeon Phi support in GCC 15 with the products being end-of-life and deprecated in GCC 14. While some openly wondered whether the open-source community would allow it given the Xeon Phi accelerators were available to buy just a few years ago and at some very low prices going back years so some potentially finding use still out of them especially during this AI boom (and still readily available to buy used for around ~$50 USD), today the Intel Xeon Phi support was indeed removed. Michael Larabel Xeon Phi PCIe cards are incredibly cheap on eBay, and every now and then my mouse hovers over the buy button - but I always realise just in time that the cards have become quite difficult to use, since support for them, already sparse to begin with, is only getting worse by the day. Support for them was already removed in Linux 5.10, and now GCC is pulling he plug too, so the only option is to keep using old kernels, or pass the card on to a VM running an older Linux kernel version, which is a lot of headache for what is essentially a weird toy for nerds at this point. GCC 15 will also, sadly, remove support for Itanium, which, as I've said before, is a huge disgrace and a grave mistake. Itanium is the future, and will stomp all over crappy architectures like x86 and ARM. With this deprecation, GCC relegates itself to the dustbin of history.

AntennaPod has been around for a long time - the first bit of code was published in 2011. Since then, the app has grown massively and had several main developers. The beauty of open-source is that so many people can contribute and make a great app together. But sometimes having many people work on a project can lead to different ways of thinking about how to structure the project. Because of this, AntennaPod gradually grew to have a number of weird code constructs. Our latest release, version 3.4, fixes this. ByteHamster The AntennaPod team had an incredible task ahead of itself, and while it took them a few years, they pulled it off. The code structure graphs from before and after the code restructuring illustrate better than words ever could what they achieved. Thy changed 10000 lines of source code in 62 pull requests for this restructuring alone, while still adding new major features in the meantime. Pretty incredible.

Microsoft's developer conference Build is taking place this week, so there's been some major Windows news and announcements, and for once - we're not talking about more ads in your operating system, or even AI" shoehorned into, I don't know, Phone Dialer or Windows Fax and Scan. First and foremost, Windows is going to get a new compiler, kernel, and scheduler, but despite such massive low-level changes, the marketing version number won't jump from 11 to 12. Of course, we all know the marketing version number has nothing to do with the actual Windows NT version number, which currently sits at 10. The Windows NT version number, meanwhile, is actually also meaningless, since it magically jumps around left and right too, going from 6.2 to 10 between Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, where it has stayed ever since. We really focused on modernizing this update of Windows 11," said Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Windows and Devices Pavan Davuluri at a technical briefing on Microsoft's campus in mid-April. We engineered this update of Windows 11 with a real focus on AI inference and taking advantage of the Arm64 instruction set at every layer of the operating system stack. For us, what this meant really was building a new compiler in Windows. We built a new kernel in Windows on top of that compiler. We now have new schedulers in the operating system that take advantage of these new SoC architecture." Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica The focus is clearly on ARM here, which coincides with the launch of Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite, a new SoC that finally seems to truly make ARM laptops that aren't from Apple a real, competitive thing - so much so that Qualcomm is even breaking with tradition and taking Linux support very seriously for this new chip. Microsoft also unveiled the name for its new x86 translation layer for Windows on ARM: Prism. Microsoft told Ars Technica that Prism is as fast as Apple's Rosetta 2, which is interesting because Apple's M series chips contain special silicon to speed up the translation process, making me wonder if Qualcomm has done the same, or is just brute-forcing it. Performance like this means the apps customers love work great. Microsoft has partnered closely with developers across the globe to optimize their applications for this processor. In addition, the powerful new Prism emulation engine delivers a 2x performance boost compared to Surface Pro 9 with 5G. On the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, powered by Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus processors, experiences like Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft 365 and Chrome will feel snappy, quick and responsive. Pete Kyriacou on the Windows blog The new Windows on ARM machines using the Snapdragon X Elite will be marketed under the new Copilot+ brand name, which brings with it some requirements, the biggest of which is the neural processing unit: it must be capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second. At the time of writing, the only Windows-capable processor that can boast such numbers is, of course, the new Snapdragon X Elite. AMD and Intel need not apply. They simply cannot match this. Microsoft tied a bow on all this stuff by unveiling the new Surface Pro and new Surface Laptop, both powered by the new Snapdragon SoCs. You can preorder them today, but they won't be available until 18 June.

Last year marked a significant milestone for both myself and the OpenBSD desktop community, as we successfully ported KDE Plasma 5 and all dependencies to OpenBSD. With the release of OpenBSD 7.5 on April 5, 2024, KDE Plasma in version 5.27.10 has become a part of our lovely operating system. This success is the result of years of development work and commitment to achieving this goal. KDE launched version 6 of its Plasma desktop environment on February 28, 2024, bringing numerous updates and features as well as the major switch to Qt6. I am immensely proud that the OpenBSD team has managed to prepare for this major update so swiftly. All necessary components have been committed to our CVS tree, and the packages will soon be available. Rafael Sadowski Excellent news for OpenBSD users who don't wish to be using GNOME, Xfce, or one of the smaller build-it-yourself desktop environments. My dual-Xeon workstation, which I switched over from Fedora KDE to OpenBSD, runs Xfce, because I feel a smaller desktop environment is a more natural fit for OpenBSD, but I'm very happy to know that I have KDE to fall back on in case Xfce turns out not to be a good fit for me in the long term. I'll give the OpenBSD developers an other experts in that community some more time to iron out any wrinkles, and then I'll probably give it a go to see just how well KDE will be integrated with the OpenBSD base system.

Windows Server 2025 comes equipped with dtrace as a native tool. DTrace is a command-line utility that enables users to monitor and troubleshoot their system's performance in real-time. DTrace allows users to dynamically instrument both the kernel and user-space code without any need to modify the code itself. This versatile tool supports a range of data collection and analysis techniques, such as aggregations, histograms, and tracing of user-level events. To learn more, see DTrace for command line help and DTrace on Windows for additional capabilities. What's new in Windows Server 2025 DTrace was originally developed by Sun as part of Solaris, but eventually made its way to other operating systems as Sun collapsed in on itself and Oracle gave it the final push. DTrace is available for the various surviving Solars-based operating systems, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, macOS, and QNX, and Microsoft ported DTrace from FreeBSD to Windows back in 2018. With Windows Server 2025, DTrace will be shipped out of the box.

iOS 17.5 seems to be experiencing a rather nasty bug that raises some very, very concerning questions about what Apple thinks delete" really means. After updating their iPhone, one user said they were shocked to find old NSFW photos that they deleted in 2021 suddenly showing up in photos marked as recently uploaded to iCloud. Other users have also chimed in with similar stories. Same here," said one Redditor. I have four pics from 2010 that keep reappearing as the latest pics uploaded to iCloud. I have deleted them repeatedly." Same thing happened to me," replied another user. Six photos from different times, all I have deleted. Some I had deleted in 2023." More reports have been trickling in overnight. One said: I had a random photo from a concert taken on my Canon camera reappear in my phone library, and it showed up as if it was added today." Tim Hardwick at MacRumors A report a few days later says that even on devices that have been wiped and sold, photos seem to be reappearing. This is even scarier than photos reappearing on devices you're still using today - just think of all the iOS devices you've had and sold that might still be in use today. Users all over could be looking at old photos you took that you thought weren't only deleted, but also wiped when you sold the devices in question. Apple has not said anything yet, but it further illustrates just how untrustworthy companies like Apple really are. Even taking into account it might take some time (minutes? An hour?) for a delete request to propagate through iCloud's server network, there's obviously no way photos that were supposedly deleted years ago are resurfacing now - especially when entire device wipes are involved, and any new user isn't even logged into the same iCloud account. I hope for everyone involved - the users, that is, I don't give a rat's ass about Apple - that this isn't very widespread, because the last thing any of us needs is old nude photos reappearing on random people's devices. What a mess.

So, I won't be wasting too many words on this - partially because I'm not into cheap soap operas, and partially because there's no way to know what's going on with this nonsense without dedicating a year's worth of detailed study into the subject. So it seems that the company Hyperion, which develops and owns the rights to Amiga OS 4 and Amiga OS 3.2 has gone into bankruptcy proceedings. The main shareholder of Hyperion, someone named Ben Hermans, has apparently set up several shell companies (or something?), and they might now own the rights to the two variants of Amiga OS, or they might not? And those shell companies have also gone into bankruptcy proceedings? Hyperion has been managed by a receiver since last week (Update)Ben Hermans BV" (hereinafter: BHBV) is a private company with limited liability owned by Ben Hermans, which has held 97% of the shares in Hyperion since 2019 and acts as a director' of Hyperion on paper. In March, bankruptcy proceedings were initiated against BHBV for the second time. In the same month, Ben Hermans had already initiated the founding of a new company with the same name. As BHBV has not published any statutory annual reports since 2021, it is currently unclear whether the company still holds the majority of shares in Hyperion. Ben Hermans has not responded to an inquiry from amiga-news.de; the appointed liquidator Charlotte Piers tells us she'll get back to us in the next few days with a more detailed response". Amiga-news.de I stopped trying to keep track of this stuff years and years ago, but bits and bobs I've picked up since is that there's been countless lawsuits flying back and forth, questions of rights ownership, and all sorts of other drama you can only keep track of by following the various different Amiga websites and forums in great detail on a daily basis. As is Amiga tradition. Amiga OS 4 is an interesting operating system that I spent some fun time with for an OSNews review way back in 2009, but at this point, if you're truly hooked on the Amiga OS way of doing things, just stick to AROS. There's technically also MorphOS, which is pretty great actually, but unless they sort out their own mess of being stuck to dying PowerPC Macs and move to x86 or ARM, they're basically on borrowed time, too.

I didn't know this was a thing, but apparently Microsoft offers a Windows tune-up application in the vein of things like CCleaner and similar tools. One of the things it does is protect users from applications that try and change default settings, and it seems the application takes this matter very seriously. Microsoft may be taking a bit of liberty with that last bit. It looks like the PC Manager feels your PC is broken and needs repair if you changed your default search engine from Bing. Sayan Sen at Neowin Setting aside just how defeatist it feels that the creator of Windows needs to make an application to keep Windows from falling over, I find it almost endearing just how hard Microsoft is trying to get users to choose Bing. If you've ever seen the Swedish film Fucking Amal, it's also very likely you remember the gut-wrenching, maximally cringe-inducing birthday party for main character Agnes where nobody shows up, while her mother, oblivious to just how deeply disliked Agnes is by her classmates, tries desperately to assure her daughter that people will show up. Director Lukas Moodysson takes no prisoners and drags out the scene to really maximise just how uncomfortably sad the whole thing is. It's incredibly hard to watch. Well, Agnes is Bing, Microsoft is its mother, and nobody shows up to Bing's birthday party either.

Apple's grudging accommodation of European law - allowing third-party browser engines on its mobile devices - apparently comes with a restriction that makes it difficult to develop and support third-party browser engines for the region. The Register has learned from those involved in the browser trade that Apple has limited the development and testing of third-party browser engines to devices physically located in the EU. That requirement adds an additional barrier to anyone planning to develop and support a browser with an alternative engine in the EU. Thomas Claburn at The Register If any normal person like you and I showed the same kind of blatant disregard for the law and authorities like Apple does in the EU, we'd be ruined by fines and possibly end up in jail. My only hope is that the European Commission goes through with its threats of massive fines of up to 10 or even 20 percent of worldwide turnover.

After launching Slack AI in February, Slack appears to be digging its heels in, defending its vague policy that by default sucks up customers' data-including messages, content, and files-to train Slack's global AI models. Ashley Belanger at Ars Technica I've never used Slack and don't intend to ever start, but the outcry about this reached far beyond Slack and its own communities. It's been all over various forums and social media, and I'm glad Ars dove into it to collect all the various conflicting statements, policies, and blog posts Slack has made about their Ai" policies. However, even after reading Ars' article and the various articles about this at other outlets, I still have no idea what, exactly, Slack is or is not using to train its AI" models. I know a lot of people here think I am by definition against all forms of what companies are currently calling AI", but this is really not the case. I think there are countless areas where these technologies can make meaningful contributions, and a great example I encountered recently is the 4X strategy game Stellaris, one of my favourite games. The game recently got a big update called The Machine Age, which focuses on changing and improving the gameplay when you opt to play as cybernetically enhanced or outright robotic races. As per Steam's new rules regarding the use of AI in games, the Steam page included the following clarification about the use of AI": We employ generative AI technologies during the creation of some assets. Typically this involves the ideation of content and visual reference material. These elements represent a minor component of the overall development. AI has been used to generate voices for an AI antagonist and a player advisor. The Machine Age Steam page The game's director explained that during the very early ideation phase, when someone like him, who isn't a creative person, gets an idea, they might generate a piece of AI" art and put it up on an ideation wall with tons of other assets just to get the point across, after which several rounds of artists and developers mould and shape some of those ideas into a final product. None of the early AI" content makes it in the game. Similarly, while the game includes the voice for an AI antagonist and player advisor, the voice actors whose work was willingly used to generate the lines in the game are receiving royalties for each of those lines. I have no issues whatsoever with this, because here it's clear everyone involved is doing so in an informed manner and entirely willingly. Everything is above board, consent is freely given, and everybody knows what's going on. This is a great example of ethical AI" use; tools to help people make a product, easier - without stealing other people's work or violating various licenses in the process. What Slack is doing here - and what Copilot, OpenAI, and the various other tools do - is the exact opposite of this. Consent is only sought when the parties involved are big and powerful enough to cause problems, and even though they claim AI" is not ripping anyone off, they also claim AI" can't work without taking other people's work. Instead of being open and transparent about what they do, they hide themselves behind magical algorithms and shroud the origins of their AI" training data in mystery. If you're using Slack - and odds are you do - I would strongly consider urging your boss to opt your organisation out of Slack's AI" data theft operation. You have no idea how much private information and corporate data is being exposed by these Salesforce clowns.

It's a compelling story and on the surface makes a lot of sense. Carefully curated software patches applied to a known Linux kernel, frozen at a specific release, would obviously seem to be preferable to the random walk of an upstream open source Linux project. But is it true? Is there data to support this ? After a lot of hard work and data analysis by my CIQ kernel engineering colleagues Ronnie Sahlberg and Jonathan Maple, we finally have an answer to this question. It's no. The data shows that frozen" vendor Linux kernels, created by branching off a release point and then using a team of engineers to select specific patches to back-port to that branch, are buggier than the upstream stable" Linux kernel created by Greg Kroah-Hartman. Jeremy Allison at CIQ I mean, it kind of makes sense. The full whitepaper is available, too.

It's only been in the last couple of years that I've begun to dig deep into the inner workings of how terminal emulators, and the applications that run inside of them, really work. I've learned that there is a lot of innovation and creative problem solving happening in this space, even though the underlying technology is over half a century old. I've also found that many people who use terminal based tools (including shells like Bash and editors like Vim) know very little about terminals themselves, or some of the modern features and capabilities they can support. In this article, we'll discuss some of the problems that terminal based applications have historically had to deal with (and what the modern solutions are) as well as some features that modern terminal emulators support that you may not be aware of. Gregory Anders I don't use the terminal much - usually just to update my systems - but on occasion I've had to really sit down and explore them more than usual, especially now that my workstation runs OpenBSD, and the depth and breadth of features, options, and clever tricks they possess is amazing. Over the past half century they've accumulated a lot of features along the way, and even though its unlikely to ever be for me, I can somewhat begin to appreciate why some people just tile a bunch of terminals on their screens and do all their computing that way. I grew up with MS-DOS and Windows 3.x and later, so I'm just too attached to my mouse and pretty icons to switch to a terminal lifestyle, but over the years I've seen some pretty amazing terminal applications, from Mastodon clients to complex mail applications and web browsers, and you can be sure none of them steal your data or show you ads. Maybe the terminal people are right after all.

Nearly 30 years after the launch of the Virtual Boy, not much is publicly known about how, exactly, Nintendo came to be interested in developing what would ultimately become its ill-fated console. Was Nintendo committed to VR as a future for video games and looking for technological solutions that made business sense? Or was the Virtual Boy primarily the result of Nintendo going off script" and seizing a unique, and possibly risky, opportunity that presented itself? The answer is probably a little bit of both. As it turns out, the Virtual Boy was not an anomaly in Nintendo's history with video game platforms. Rather, it was the result of a deliberate strategy that was consistent with Nintendo's way of doing things and informed by its lead creator Gunpei Yokoi's design philosophy. Benj Edwards and Jose Zagal at Ars Technica I've never used a Virtual Boy, and in fact, I've never even seen one in real life. It was mythical object when I was not even a teenager yet, something we read about in gaming magazines in The Netherlands. We didn't really know what it was or how it worked, and it wasn't until much later, in the early YouTube age, that I got to see what using one was actually like in the countless YouTube videos made about the device. It seems it caused quite a few headaches, was cumbersome to use, had very few games, and those that were sold ended up collecting dust pretty quickly. In that sense, it seems not a lot has changed over the past thirty years.

Winamp has announced that on 24 September 2024, the application's source code will be open to developers worldwide. Winamp will open up its code for the player used on Windows, enabling the entire community to participate in its development. This is an invitation to global collaboration, where developers worldwide can contribute their expertise, ideas, and passion to help this iconic software evolve. Winamp press release Nice, I guess, but twenty years to late to be of any relevance. At least it'll be great for software preservation. But what's up with the odd language used in the press release, and the weirdly specific date that's month from now? They really seem to want to avoid the term open source", which makes me think this is going to be one of those cases where they hope the community will work for them for free without actually using a real open source license. You know, those schemes that always - no exception - fail.

Ordinary modifiers are normally straightforward, in that they are additional keys that are held down as you type the main key. Control, Shift, and Alt all work this way (by default). However, some modifiers are sticky', where you tap their key once to turn them on and then tap their key again to turn them off. The obvious example of this is Caps Lock (unless you turn its effects off, remapping its physical key to be, say, another Ctrl key). Another example, one that many X users have historically wound up quietly cursing, is NumLock. Why people wind up cursing NumLock, and why I have a program to control its state, is because of how X programs (such as window managers) often do their key and mouse button bindings. Chris Siebenmann I always have an applet in my KDE panel that shows me if I have any sticky modifiers enabled without realising it. On some of my keyboards, this isn't always easily noticable, especially when you're focused on what's happening on your display. A little icon that only shows up when a sticky modifier is engaged solves this problem, as it immediately stands out in your peripheral vision.

With Qualcomm and Microsoft about to flood the market with devices using the new Snapdragon X Elite, those of us who don't want to use Windows felt a bit uneasy - what's Linux support going to look like for this new generation of ARM devices? Well, it seems Qualcomm's been busy, and they've published a blog post detailing their work on Linux support for the X Elite. It's been our priority not only to support Linux on our premium-tier SoCs, but to support it pronto. In fact, within one or two days of publicly announcing each generation of Snapdragon 8, we've posted the initial patchset for Linux kernel support. Snapdragon X Elite was no exception: we announced on October 23 of last year and posted the patchset the next day. That was the result of a lot of pre-announcement work to get everything up and running on Linux and Debian. Qualcomm's developer blog In the blog post, the company details exactly which X Elite features have already been merged into mainline with Linux 6.8 and 6.9, as well as which features will be merged into mainline in Linux 6.10 and 6.11, and to be quite frank - it's looking really solid, especially considering this is Qualcomm we're talking about. Over the coming six months, they're going to focus on getting end-to-end hardware video decoding working, including in Firefox and Chrome, as well as various CPU and GPU optimisations, adding the required firmware to the linux-firmware package, and providing access to easy installers. All in all, it's looking like the X Elite will be exceptionally well supported by Linux before the year's over. The blog post also details the boot path for Linux on the X Elite, and that, too, is looking good. It's using a standard UEFI boot process, and supports GRUB and systemd-boot out of the box. Linux boots up using devicetrees, though, and apparently, there's a known problem with using those that Qualcomm and the community are working on. We're working closely with upstream communities on an open problem with the UEFI-based BIOS while booting with devicetrees. The problem is that, when you have more than one devicetree blob (DTB) packed into the firmware package flashed on the device, there is no standard way of selecting a devicetree to pass on to the kernel. OEMs commonly put multiple DTBs into the firmware package so it will support devices with slightly different SKUs, so we're keen to solve this problem. Qualcomm's developer blog I am pleasantly surprised by the openness and straightforwardness Qualcomm is showing the Linux community here, and I really hope this is a sign of how the company will keep supporting its laptop and possibly desktop-oriented SoCs from here on out. It seems like next year we will finally be getting competitive ARM laptops that can run Linux in a fully supported fashion.

Google released Android 15 beta 2 today, and with it, they unveiled some more of the new features coming to Android later this year when the final release lands. Android 15 comes with something called a private space, an area with an extra layer of authentication where you can keep applications and data hidden away, such as banking applications or health data. It's effectively a separate user profile, and shows up as a separate area in the application drawer when unlocked. When locked, it disappears entirely from sight, share sheets, and so on. Another awesome new feature is Theft Detection Lock, which uses Google AI" to detect when a phone is snatched out of your hands by someone running, biking, or driving away, and instantly locks it. Theft like this is quite common in certain areas, and this seems like an excellent use of AI" (i.e., accelerometer data) to discourage thieves from trying this. There's also a bunch of smaller stuff, like custom vibration patterns per notification, giving applications partial access to only your most recent photos and videos, system-wide preferences for which gender you'd like to be addressed as in gendered languages (French gets this feature first), and a whole lot more. Developers also get a lot to play with here, from safer intents to something like ANGLE: Vulkan is Android's preferred interface to the GPU. Therefore, Android 15 includes ANGLE as an optional layer for running OpenGL ES on top of Vulkan. Moving to ANGLE will standardize the Android OpenGL implementation for improved compatibility, and, in some cases, improved performance. You can test out your OpenGL ES app stability and performance with ANGLE by enabling the developer option in Settings -> System -> Developer Options -> Experimental: Enable ANGLE on Android 15. Android developer blog You can install Android 15 beta 2 on a number f Pixel devices and devices from other OEMs starting today. I installed it on my Pixel 8 Pro, and after a few hours I haven't really noticed anything breaking, but that's really not enough time to make any meaningful observations. Google also detailed Wear OS 5. Later this year, battery life optimizations are coming to watches with Wear OS 5. For example, running an outdoor marathon will consume up to 20% less power when compared to watches with Wear OS 4. And your fitness apps will be able to help improve your performance with the option to support more data types like ground contact time, stride length and vertical oscillation. Android developer blog Wear OS 5 will also improve the Watch Face Format with more complications, which is very welcome, because the selection of complications is currently rather meager. Wear OS 5 will also ship later this year.

As expected earlier this year, Raspberry Pi is going public on the stock exchange in London. Back then, CEO Eben Upton said he did not expect the IPO to change how Raspberry Pi did things, but history tells us that initial public offerings tend to, well, change how companies do things. In their official announcement that they intend to hold an IPO, there's an incredibly interesting and telling contradiction, as noted by @yassie_j on MastoAkkoma: Raspberry Pi, in their listing press release, says: The Enthusiast and Education market is the heart" of the Raspberry Pi movement. But also says: Industrial and Embedded market accounts over 72 per cent So the heart seems to be going neglected, it seems, because there's no way you're going to not cash in on industrial applications. Especially when you've just done a big IPO. @yassie_j on Akkoma This exactly illustrates the fears we all have about what an IPO is going to mean for Raspberry Pi. It's already become increasingly more difficult for enthusiasts to get their hands on the latest Raspberry Pi models, but once the IPO's done and there's shareholders breathing down their neck, that will most likely only get worse. If the industrial and embedded market is where you're making most of your money, where do you think Raspberry Pi devices are going to end up? Luckily the market's a lot bigger and more varied now than it was back when Raspberry Pi was new, so we have a wide variety of options to choose from. Still, I'm definitely worried about what Raspberry Pi, as a company, will look like five, ten years from now.

The NetBSD project seems to agree with me that code generated by AI" like Copilot is tainted, and cannot be used safely. The project's added a new guideline banning the use of code generated by such tools from being added to NetBSD unless explicitly permitted by core, NetBSD's equivalent, roughly, of technical management". Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as such as GitHub/Microsoft's Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta's Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core. NetBSD Commit Guidelines GitHub Copilot is copyright infringement and open source license violation at an industrial scale, and as I keep reiterating - the fact Microsoft is not training Copilot on its own closed-source code tells you all you need to know about what Microsoft thinks about the legality of Copilot.

I'm pretty sure most of you are familiar with KDE Neon, the distribution KDE maintains to provide easy access to the latest KDE technologies. However, did you know GNOME has something similar, called GNOME OS? It's been around for a while, but has a far lower profile than KDE Neon does, and it seems they want to change that and put more of a spotlight on GNOME OS. GNOME OS is an immutable distribution using OSTree, the same technology used by the various popular immutable versions from the Fedora family. It seems GNOME OS is working to leave OSTree behind, and move to systemd-sysupdate instead, which has been available since systemd 251, released in May 2022. The developers claim this will bring the following benefits: To complete the move from OSTree to systemd-sysupdate, a few things need to be completed. First, the boot process and root filesystem had to be migrated, which was done last year. Second, sysupdate needs to integrated into GNOME, as for now, you can only use it via the command line. This work is ongoing, and requires a new D-Bus service and polkit integration to allow GNOME Software to manage the update process. Of course, there's more work that needs to be done to complete this migration, but these are the main tasks. All of this work is part of the project's goal to make GNOME OS nightlies viable for daily-driving for quality assurance purposes, and I'm sure all this work will also make GNOME OS more attractive to people outside of the developer community. It's basically GNOME/systemd taken to the extreme, and while that will surely make quite a few people groan, I personally find it great that this will make GNOME OS a more capable choice for everyone. That's what open source is all about, in the end.

This is not a joke: Google will now let you perform a web" search. It's rolling out web" searches now, and in my early tests on desktop, it's looking like it could be an incredibly popular change to Google's search engine. The optional setting filters out almost all the other blocks of content that Google crams into a search results page, leaving you with links and text - and Google confirms to The Verge that it will block the company's new AI Overviews as well. Sean Hollister at The Verge I hate what the web has become.

A crucial but often entirely transparent feature of a modern package management system like Debian's APT is its solver - basically the set of rules and instruction on how to handle dependencies when installing a package. APT is currently in the process of radically changing its solver, the first bits of which can be found in APT 2.9.3, referred to as solver3. Many of the changes and improvements get a little into the weeds and will mostly be transparent to users, but there is one feature the new solver will enable that many of you will be incredibly excited about. One of the core new capabilities of solver3 is the implication graph. As part of the solving phase, we also construct an implication graph, albeit a partial one: The first package installing another package is marked as the reason (A -> B), the same thing for conflicts (not A -> not B). Julian Andres Klode Seems rather innocuous at first sight, but here's what the implication graph will make possible: The implication graph building allows us to implement an apt why command, that while not as nicely detailed as aptitude, at least tells you the exact reason why a package is installed. It will only show the strongest dependency chain at first of course, since that is what we record. Julian Andres Klode If you've ever dealt with packaging issues - probably when running -testing or similar unstable distributions that use APT, a command that tells you exactly why a package is installed is an absolute godsend. Sure, aptitude exists, but aptitude takes you out of your current CLI workflow, whereas this will be much easier to quickly run. There's more features solver3 will enable, but this one is definitely one of my favourite low-level additions to APT in a long, long time.

Google I/O, the company's developer conference, started today, but for the first time since I can remember, Android and Chrome OS have been relegated to day two of the conference. The first day was all about AI", most of which I'm not even remotely interested in, except of course where it related to Google's operating system offerings. And the company did have a few things to say about AI" on Android, and the general gist is that yeah, they're going to be stuffing it into every corner of the operating system. Google's AI" tool Gemini will be integrated deeply into Android, and you'll be able to call up an overlay wherever you are in the operating system, and do things like summarise a PDF that's on screen, summarise a YouTube video, generate images on the fly and drop them into emails and conversations, and so on. A more interesting and helpful AI" addition is using it to improve TalkBack, so that people with impaired vision can let the device describe images on the screen for them. Google claims TalkBack users come across about 90 images without description every day (!), so this is a massive improvement for people with impaired vision, and a genuinely helpful and worthwhile AI" feature. Creepier is that Google's AI" will also be able to listen along with your phone calls, and warn you if an ongoing conversation is a scamming attempt. If the person on the other end of the line claiming to be your bank asks you to move a bunch of money around to keep it safe, Gemini will pop up and warn you it's a scam, since banks don't ask you such things. Clever, sure, but also absolutely terrifying and definitely not something I'll be turning on. Google claims all of these features take place on-device, so privacy should be respected, but I'm always a bit unsure about such things staying that way in the future. Regardless, AI" is coming to Android in a big way, but I'm just here wondering how much of it I'll be able to turn off.

After Broadcom acquired VMware, there's been a steady stream of worrying or outright bad news for people using VMware products at home, for personal use, as enthusiasts. The biggest blow to the enthusiast market was the end of perpetual licensing, forcing people into subscriptions instead. Finally, though it seems we're getting some good news. The most exciting part is that Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro will now have two license models. We now provide a Free Personal Use or a Paid Commercial Use subscription for our Pro apps. Users will decide based on their use case whether a commercial subscription is required. This means that everyday users who want a virtual lab on their Mac, Windows or Linux computer can do so for free simply by registering and downloading the bits from the new download portal located at support.broadcom.com. Michael Roy on the VMware blog This is definitely good news for us enthusiasts, and it means I won't have to buy a cheap VMware license off eBay every few years anymore, so I'm quite satisfied here. However, with VMware under Broadcom focusing more and more on the enterprise and squeezing every last penny out of those customers, one has to wonder if this free for personal use' is just a prelude to winding down the development of enthusiasts' tools altogether. It wouldn't be the first time that a product going free for personal use was a harbinger of worse things yet to come.

Now that Android - since version 13 - ships with the Android Virtualisation Framework, Google can start doing interesting things with it. It turns out the first interesting thing Google wants do with it is run Chrome OS inside of it. Even though AVF was initially designed around running small workloads in a highly stripped-down build of Android loaded in an isolated virtual machine, there's technically no reason it can't be used to run other operating systems. As a matter of fact, this was demonstrated already when developer Danny Lin got Windows 11 running on an Android phone back in 2022. Google itself never officially provided support for running anything other than its custom build of Android called microdroid" in AVF, but that's no longer the case. The company has started to offer official support for running Chromium OS, the open-source version of Chrome OS, on Android phones through AVF, and it has even been privately demoing this to other companies. At a privately held event, Google recently demonstrated a special build of Chromium OS - code-named ferrochrome" - running in a virtual machine on a Pixel 8. However, Chromium OS wasn't shown running on the phone's screen itself. Rather, it was projected to an external display, which is possible because Google recently enabled display output on its Pixel 8 series. Time will tell if Google is thinking of positioning Chrome OS as a platform for its desktop mode ambitions and Samsung DeX rival. Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority It seems that Google is in the phase of exploring if there are any OEMs interested in allowing users to plug their Android phone into an external display and input devices and run Chrome OS on it. This sounds like an interesting approach to the longstanding dream of convergence - one device for all your computing needs - but at the same time, it feels quite convoluted to have your Android device emulate an entire Chrome OS installation. What a damning condemnation of Android as a platform that despite years of trying, Google just can't seem to make Android and its applications work in a desktop form factor. I've tried to shoehorn Android into a desktop workflow, and it's quite hard, despite third parties having made some interesting tools to help you along. It really seems Android just does not want to be anywhere else but on a mobile touch display.

As Nintendo Switch unlocks and homebrew software develops, people are inclined to explore the possibilities and whether or not they actually provide a good experience. Our new prime example seems to be a full install of Windows 11 Arm on the Switch. As noted by @PatRyk on Twitter, who actually set this up, the experience is pretty grueling! The initial installation took three hours, and even basic system tasks were unresponsive. Christopher Harper at Tom's Hardware Silly, sure, but efforts like these all contribute to emulation efforts, which will eventually be important once Nintendo drops support for this machine and they become increasingly harder to get. Give it a decade or so and we'll need the Switch emulators to keep playing Switch games.

Electronic Arts has a long, storied history of trying to wring more money out of gamers after they've purchased a game - now, it appears, the company's hard at work on its next generation of in-game ads. EA CEO Andrew Wilson admitted as much on the company's Q4 earnings call: when an analyst asked about the market opportunity for more dynamic ad insertion across more traditional AAA games," he said the company's already working on it. We have teams internally in the company right now looking at how do we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences," said Wilson. Sean Hollister at The Verge Ads in games are definitely not new - we've seen countless games built entirely around brands, like Tapper for Budweiser, Pepsiman, or Cool Spot for 7-Up - and banner ads and product placement in various games has been a thing for decades, too. It seems like EA wants to take this several steps further and use things like dynamic ad insertion in games, so that when you're playing some racing game, you'll get an ad for your local Hyundai dealer, or an ad for a gun store when you're playing GTA in the US. Either way, it's going to make games worse, which is perfectly in line with EA's mission.

Snikket is a FOSS project for creating private chat spaces for small groups, such as families, friends, or clubs. It doesn't depend on a phone number, doesn't upload address books anywhere, and doesn't sell data to advertisers. It supports all the features you expect, including media and voice messages, audio and video calls, end-to-end encryption, group messaging, and more. Use it from multiple devices at once with the official apps, or even with unofficial, third-party apps. Snikket is easy to self-host, and professional managed hosting is also available. Our previous sponsor, JMP, opted to donate a free week's sponsorship to Snikket, which any paying OSNews sponsor can opt to do. This is our very small way of giving something back to the countless open source and/or smaller projects out there. Thank you Snikket for sponsoring OSNews!

Each S1012 node has a single Power10 processor, which can have 1, 4, or 8 cores activated, which suggests that it is the same single chip module (SCM) implementation of the Power10 processor that was used in the Power S1022s entry machine. The Power S1012 node has four ISDIMM memory slots (using the differential signaling created by Big Blue for its Power10 memory) with a maximum capacity of 256 GB. The node has four half-height, half-length PCI-Express 5.0 slots and room for four NVM-Express U.2 drive bays that come in a maximum 1.6 TB capacity each for a total of 6.4 TB of storage. The eight-core version of the Power10 SCM is only available in the rack configuration, while the one-core and four-core versions are available in rack or tower configurations. The four-core and eight-core versions can run IBM i, AIX, or Linux, but the one-core version can only run IBM i and it has its main memory capped at the same 64 GB that other single-core Power Systems machines have been subjected to. We have suggested that 128 GB or even 256 GB is more appropriate given modern workloads, but Big Blue is standing its ground here. If you need more memory than 64 GB, then this machine is not for you. Timothy Prickett Morgan at IT Jungle I understand full well that these machines are by no means meant for people like you and I, sitting at home playing with our toys. That being said, I still wish there was some way for IBM to offer unique hardware like this - perhaps in a more standard, paired-down configuration - so more people than just enterprises could explore and use them. It wouldn't make any economic sense for IBM to do so, and even in a more standard, paired-down configuration they'd probably still be ungodly expensive, but when I look at this unique tower, with its POWER10 hardware and the ability to run AIX, desires are stirred within me that are banned in at least 46 countries. Such a machine would surely be wasted on someone like me, who would just be shoehorning whatever desktop tasks he could into it, but what a grand ol' time we would have. There is absolutely, positively, unequivocally zero percent chance IBM would ever send one of these over for review to someone like me, but I wonder if I should try anyway. I've got nothing to lose. Does anyone here work at IBM? Perhaps IBM wants to sponsor OSNews? How about like 12 weeks of free sponsorships in exchange for a tower model of the Power S1012? I also have two POWER9 machines to compare it to! It's the only way you'll ever get a Power S1012 screenfetch screenshot go viral on nerd social media, and we all know that deep down, that's all you IBM folks really want.

Apple has released the latest updates for virtually all of its actively supported devices today. Most include a couple handfuls of security updates, some new features for Apple News+ subscribers, and something called Cross-Platform Tracking Protection for Bluetooth devices. The iOS 17.5, iPadOS 17.5, macOS 4.5, watchOS 10.5, tvOS 17.5, and HomePod Software 17.5 updates are all available to download now. Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica You know where to get them.

MacRelix is a Unix-like environment that runs in classic Mac OS. MacRelix natively supports classic 68K and PPC Mac OS, as well as Mac OS X on PPC via Carbon. MacRelix website The creator of MacRelix, Josh Juran, published an article in 2019 detailing the origins of the project. As a Mac OS developer, he was so unhappy with both CodeWarrior and Apple's Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW), that he set out to create what would become MacRelix in 1999. Reading through the limitations and roadblocks he experienced with CodeWarrior and MPW, it's not hard to see why he got frustrated - CodeWarrior's targets were apparently a mess and a half to deal with. Then came target multiplication. Whereas the initial CodeWarrior developer releases shipped with each combination of language (C and Pascal) and architecture (68K and PPC) supported in a separate application, a later version of the IDE unified these, allowing the developer to have a single project file per project. To allow the same project to be built for both 68K and PPC architectures, the project data model included targets: One target would compile for 68K and link against 68K libraries, another would do the same for PPC. Targets could also be used to select an optimized build versus one for debugging. Combining both dichotomies yields four targets: 68K debug, 68K optimized, PPC debug, and PPC optimized. Then if your project involves multiple executables, like a code resource or shared library in addition to an application, you now have eight targets. Or, if you support one of, say, 68020 optimization, profiling, or a third executable, make that twelve. Or, for all of them, twenty-seven. Josh Juran Changing an option in your application required you to change it in every single target, too, which I can easily see is incredibly frustrating. MPW, for its part, was a massive improvement, he argues, but while it was clearly inspired by UNIX, it didn't seem to actually implement any of the features and characteristics of UNIX. However, very much unlike Unix, the MPW Shell had only a single thread of execution - only one program could be running at once. Not only that, but there was no way for MPW's compiled plugins (called tools) to invoke other tools or scripts - not even via system() (which blocks the calling program until the called program exits). Therefore, Make couldn't actually do anything, but only printed out the commands for the user to run manually. You could code in Perl instead of the built-in language, but then your scripts couldn't run other programs - only MPW shell scripts could do that. Josh Juran The limitations Juran was experiencing with these two tools pushed him to create his own solution, which went well beyond what MPW offered, even in 2019 when this article was published. Nowadays, MacRelix has pipes, signals, system calls, TCP sockets, and more. It works on both 68K and PowerPC Mac systems and builds as Carbon to run natively in OS X. It can be used on any Mac OS version from System 7 to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard" (after which Apple removed the Rosetta PowerPC emulator). I haven't implemented fork() yet, but I know how to do it. In addition to a Unix-like file system interface (which even handles long names by storing them in Desktop database comment fields)), MacRelix has a /proc filesystem (with human readable stack crawls) and also maps various parts of Mac OS (e.g. the ROM image in /sys/mac/rom). Josh Juran I had never heard of MacRelix, but it seems like an amazing tool Juran put a lot of thought, effort, and love into. Sadly, with the number of PowerPC Mac OS X users being vanishingly small, and the number of classic Mac OS users even smaller so, the future of MacRelix seems uncertain. I wonder what parts of it can be salvaged and upgraded to work on ARM macOS or even Intel macOS, because I think the ideas and concepts are incredibly cool. A related project by Juran is something called FORGE, a portable windowing API that used a virtual file system, meaning that instead of using functions as objects, it uses files. Juran mentions the example of a window title - which is a file, and if you want to change the title of that window you just change the file, which will be instantly reflected in the GUI. Here's a Hello World example: Even though I'm not a programmer, this little tidbit of code makes perfect sense to me, and I understood it instantly. Of course, anything more complex will quickly leave my wheelhouse, but intuitively, I really like this. FORGE exists as a prototype inside MacRelix, so you can play with this concept while using MacRelix.

This article is a partial-rebuttal/partial-confirmation to KGOnTech's Apple Vision Pro's Optics Blurrier & Lower Contrast than Meta Quest 3, prompted by RoadToVR's Quest 3 Has Higher Effective Resolution, So Why Does Everyone Think Vision Pro Looks Best? which cites KGOnTech. I suppose it's a bit late, but it's taken me a while to really get a good intuition for how visionOS renders frames, because there is a metric shitton of nuance and it's unfortunately very, very easy to make mistakes when trying to quantify things. This post is divided into two parts: Variable Rasterization Rate (VRR) and how visionOS renders frames (including hard numbers for internal render resolutions and such), and a testbench demonstrating why photographing the visual clarity of Vision Pro (and probably future eye tracked headsets) may be more difficult than a DSLR pointed into the lenses (and how to detect the pitfalls if you try!). Shiny Quagsire I did it. I think I managed to find an article that isn't just over my head, but also over most of your heads. How's that feel?

Window management in Emacs gets a bad rap. Some of this is deserved, but mostly this is a consequence of combining a very flexible and granular layout system with rather coarse controls. This leaves the door open to creating and using tools for handling windows that employ and provide better metaphors and affordances. As someone who's spent an unnecessary amount of time trying different approaches to window management in Emacs over the decades, I decided to summarize them here. Almanac might be overstating it a bit - this is a primer to and a collection of window management resources and tips. Karthik Chikmagalur I honestly had no idea Emacs was this... Advanced, complex, and feature-laden. I mean, I thought Emacs' complexity was just a meme, but reading this article it seems the memes don't do it justice.

Disassembly and enhancements for Apple II DeskTop (a.k.a. Mouse Desk), a Finder"-like GUI application for 8-bit Apples and clones with 128k of memory, utilizing double hi-res monochrome graphics (560*192), an optional mouse, and the ProDOS 8 operating system. Apple II DeskTop GitHub page The goal of this project is to reverse-engineer Apple II DeskTop, and fix bugs and enhance it in the process. I didn't actually know that the Apple IIgs initially shipped with this instead of the 16 bit GS/OS, which is the operating system I personally associate with the IIgs. Apple II DeskTop was largely 8 bit, and built on top of ProDOS 16, and didn't really take full advantage of the IIgs hardware. It wasn't until version 4.0 of the system software that the IIgs switched over to GS/OS. The latest release is v1.4-alpha9, released a few days ago. Apple II DeskTop is still entirely compatible with Apple II machines and clones from before the IIgs, as well, and it runs in emulators, too. We actually already covered this project a few years ago, but a reminder that this exists never hurt anyone.

If you remember a time when using floppy disks didn't seem weird, you're probably at least 30 years old. Floppy disks or diskettes emerged around 1970 and, for a good three decades or so, they were the main way many people stored and backed up their computer data. All the software and programmes they bought came loaded onto clusters of these disks. They are a technology from a different era of computing, but for various reasons floppy disks have an enduring appeal for some which mean they are from dead. Chris Baraniuk at the BBC Articles such as these in more mainstream media are always incredibly odd to me. Nobody bats an eye at someone lovingly maintaining a classic car, or restoring an old house, or a group of people petitioning a local government to not demolish a beloved old building or whatever, but as soon as computer technology is involved, so many people find it incredibly weird that classic computer technology, too, can be worth saving. It highlights how society views technology - disposable, replaceable, worthless, to be dumped and forgotten about as soon as something newer comes along. Even after at least two decades of articles like this, they keep being essentially republished with the same words, the same storylines about these weird people who keep using - get this! Look at these idiots! - older technology when faster, newer, shinier stuff is readily available. I'm glad the retrocomputing community seems to be growing by the day, and there's now definitely a large enough internationally connected group of people and organisations to maintain our old computers and related hardware and software.

Starting in the release 560 series, it will be recommended to use the open flavor of NVIDIA Linux Kernel Modules 119 wherever possible (Turing or later GPUs, or Ada or later when using GPU virtualization). NVIDIA developer forums Slowly but surely, NVIDIA is taking a more favourable position towards open source. It still feels surreal.