OSnews

After a lot of news recently about Microsoft's rumoured Andromeda device, Mary Jo Foley poured cold water on my hope by publishing a story based on her usually well-informed Microsoft sources that Andromeda's future is hanging by a thread, that the software is far, far from ready, and that Andromeda could very well be cancelled. In response, Neowin's Rich Woods published a passionate plea for Microsoft to make Andromeda a reality.

This is an article written 20 years ago by Mark Russinovich, which compares VMS and Windows NT.

Toni Wilen has released a massive new update of WinUAE. This major new release hosts a wealth of new features and bugfixes. Also check out Worthy's release trailer, a new commercial game by Pixelglass for the Amiga 500, which is also available as digital download for use in UAE.

Rust 1.27.0 has been released! As regular readers will know, I'm not a programmer and know very little about the two main new features in this release. The biggest new feature is SIMD.

Sculpt for The Curious (TC) is the second incarnation of the general-purpose operating system pursued by the developers of the Genode OS Framework. It comes in the form of a ready-to-use system image that can be booted directly from a USB thumb drive. In contrast to earlier versions, Sculpt TC features a graphical user interface for the interactive management of storage devices and networking. The main administrative interface remains text-based. It allows the user to "sculpt" the system live into shape, and introspect the system's state at any time.The technological foundation of Sculpt is a combination of Genode's microkernel architecture with capability-based security and virtualization. It does not resemble a POSIX system, rather it supports hosting POSIX and Unix software as an option. This way, security-critical components are not exposed to the complexities of POSIX while the system retains compatibility to existing applications. Sculpt TC features several examples of such applications, ranging from Qt-based software over a custom Unix runtime to VirtualBox.The downloadable system image with the accompanied documentation is available at the Sculpt download page of the Genode project.

Is anybody interested in a long list of obscure NTFS tricks? Yes? Good, because this long list provides just that. As an example, ever wanted to create folders with just periods, but you realized you couldn't because every NTFS folder has the special "." and ".." folders to refer to itself and its parent folder, respectively? Well, here's your chance to learn how.Probably not the most useful tricks, but fun nonetheless.

Microsoft's device roadmap has been leaked, and it contains a lot of information about upcoming devices. The most interesting one is the mythical pocketable dual-screen Andromeda.

For days now, I've been pondering whether or not to post a link to this story, but after a talk with my closest friends about how much we despise anti-vaxxers - they just had their first baby - I feel like the story in question highlights a very uncomfortable truth we have to face.