The holidays are coming, there’s a chill in the air (literally for me, I live in the Arctic), so it’s time for a few new additions to the official OSNews Merch Store.

Do you live in the terminal, breathe the terminal? We’ve got new shirts just for you. The opening message of the terminals of Mac OS X, BeOS, and MS-DOS (let’s be generous and call MS-DOS a terminal), with a command to call an osnews directory on the file system, printed on the front of the shirt. They sport the correct fonts, background colours, and exact verbiage used in the operating systems themselves. For the Mac OS X one, I had to choose a last login date and a username, so I opted for the exact time and date of birth of my oldest son, and a username that’s a bit of an Easter egg.

These shirts of the organic cotton variety, and all proceeds go to supporting OSNews’ continued existence so we don’t have to resort to SEO crap, “AI”-generated garbage, and malvertising. Every item sold on the store generates around $10 for us, with the rest going to our partner Bonfire for producing the items and running the store.

You can also support OSNews through individual donations on Ko-Fi, by becoming a Patreon, and by supporting us through LiberaPay.

You may have noticed that starting today, I’ve been adding a dedicated link to the main story in every post on OSNews. Our old-fashioned 2001 method of “biggest link is main story” simply doesn’t hold up today as proper attribution, so from here on out every post will have a link marked by ↫ crediting the name and/or publication of the main linked article (or multiple where it makes sense). I’ve been unhappy with our attribution for years, and finally got my act together and settled on this solution. While I’ve had, in total, maybe no more than 2-3 complaints about this since I started in 2006 – it’s taken too long, and I apologise for that.

Credit and attribution matter.

For the curious: ↫ is part of the arrows Unicode block as U+21AB, titled “Leftwards arrow with loop”. I settled on it because the path of the loop and the arrow evoked a feeling of being yoinked back somewhere else, and that’s what a link does. Sure, I could’ve opted for a chain link or whatever, but that’s boring.

The problem is that very few people are interested in learning COBOL these days. Coding it is cumbersome, it reads like an English lesson (too much typing), the coding format is meticulous and inflexible, and it takes far longer to compile than its competitors. And since nobody’s learning it anymore, programmers who can work with and maintain all that code are a increasingly hard to find. Many of these “COBOL cowboys” are aging out of the workforce, and replacements are in short supply.

This puts us in a tricky predicament. We need to maintain and modernize the code that underpins so much of the business and finance worlds, but we don’t have enough skilled workers we need to carry out those updates.

This is precisely the kind of problem that IBM thinks it can fix with AI.

↫ JD Sartain for PCMag

It seems like learning and getting good at COBOL is a surefire way to ensure job security. I wonder if there’s a way to make modern applications or software in COBOL? I mean, there are COBOL compilers for modern platforms, of course, but are there any bindings (I think that’s the correct term?) for modern GUI toolkits like GTK, Qt, and so on?

The headline’s probably a bit hyperbolic, but the core of the issue stands.

Hewlett-Packard’s 9000 Series 300 (HP300) was a range of technical workstations based on Motorola 680×0 microprocessors. Superbly engineered in modular form, and ahead of the curve in terms of functionality, these workstations were used mainly as instrument controllers and for desktop technical computing. The HP300 series launched in 1985 with the models 310 (pictured below) and 320. It evolved through numerous variants of increasing power, concluding with the 38x models released in 1991. The series was officially obsolete as of 1997.

The definitive website dedicated to vintage Hewlett-Packard computers is the wonderful HP Computer Museum, which has excellent and wide-ranging archival resources. The present site is focused specifically on the HP 9000 series 300 and is for anyone interested in the history, conservation and restoration of these personal workstations.

↫ hp-series300.net

Everything you could possibly ever want to know about the series 300, in one place. It’s incredibly detailed, and if you have your eyes on buying one of these machines, I urge you to keep this resource in a permanently open tab so you know what you’re doing.

According to Google’s official support page listing the current firmware versions of its speakers and smart displays, version 14.20230831.4.72 is now available to those enrolled in the Preview Program (which can be accessed via the Google Home app). These updates are often released in stages, meaning it may be a few weeks before your Nest Hub gets the latest build.

On the project’s website, Google offers a more in-depth look at what has changed in Fuchsia version 14 (as well as version 13, which the Nest Hubs skipped). Most of the changes will only be relevant to Fuchsia developers, but there are a handful of user-facing improvements.

Google is providing some very detailed release notes for each version of Fuchsia, which are quite interesting to peruse. The recent layoffs at Google hit the Fuchsia team hard, likely reducing its future prospects as Google’s unified consumer-facing operating system, but that clearly doesn’t mean it’s entirely dead in the water.

Windows App, which is still in beta, will let you connect to Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Microsoft Dev Box, Remote Desktop Services, and remote PCs from, well, pretty much any computing device. Specifically, you can use it from Macs, iPhones, iPads, other Windows machines, and — pay attention! — web browsers.

That last part means you’ll be able to run Windows from Linux-powered PCs, Chromebooks, and Android phones and tablets.

So, if you’ve been stuck running Windows because your boss insists that you can’t get your job done from a Chromebook, Linux PC, or Mac, your day has come. You can still run the machine you want and use Windows for only those times you require Windows-specific software.

So remote desktop in a shinier package and some additional marketing.

A team of researchers primarily from Google’s DeepMind systematically convinced ChatGPT to reveal snippets of the data it was trained on using a new type of attack prompt which asked a production model of the chatbot to repeat specific words forever. 

Using this tactic, the researchers showed that there are large amounts of privately identifiable information (PII) in OpenAI’s large language models. They also showed that, on a public version of ChatGPT, the chatbot spit out large passages of text scraped verbatim from other places on the internet.

So not only are these things cases of mass copyright infringement, they also violate countless privacy laws.

Cool.

As 2023 draws to a close—and as we start to finalize our Game of the Year contenders—I really should be catching up on the embarrassingly long list of great recent releases that I haven’t put enough time into this year. Instead, over the last few days, I’ve found myself once again hooked on a simple, addictive, and utterly unique Japanese Windows freeware game from the late ’90s that, until recently, I thought I had lost forever.

Pendulumania is a cult classic in the truest sense of the word: Few people have heard of it, even in hardcore gaming circles, but those who have experienced it tend to have very fond memories of it. And while I shared those memories, it wasn’t until this week that I’ve been able to share my effusive praise for a game whose name and playable executable had eluded me for well over a decade.

What a great story.

Cinnamon, the desktop environment mostly associated with Linux Mint, has released its sixth version.

It also adds support for AVIF images, a new option for notification screen selection, a new gesture for desktop zoom, a new menu details option, color picker support in the screenshot service, and an xdg-portal configuration file.

Various improvements are present as well to fix missing thumbnails for windows that are created while the Menu applet is open, enable window resizing in the Cinnamon Menu Editor, fix a bug causing the Menu applet to be partly behind the panel, fix the Power applet’s battery status, fix reloading of desklets after an update when multiple instances are running, and ensure the Settings window fits the toolbar when expanded.

Cinnamon 6.0’s biggest new feature is an experimental Wayland session, marking the first steps towards fully supporting Wayland in the near future.

This ambition to escape dependence on foreign technology rests on the shoulders of Huawei and SMIC. The successful launch of the Kirin 9000S injected new vigor into the semiconductor industry, with executives reporting that chip start-ups are seeing a surge in funding.

But Huawei’s long-term ambitions are not limited to the markets in China’s orbit. The original nickname for the Kirin 9000S—Charlotte—is a symbol of these hopes. It was named not for an individual, but for the city in North Carolina. Other mobile semiconductors in development are also named internally for US cities, insiders say.

Using American names, says one Huawei employee, reflects “our desire to one day reclaim our place in the global supply chain.”

It’s amazing how without any official support and using cobbled-together outdated lithography machines, Huawei and SMIC have managed to make a reasonably competitive smartphone SoC. As I keep saying – Chinese chip makers have the full financial might of the Chinese state behind them, and they’ll stop at nothing to reduce their dependence on ASML, TSMC, Intel, AMD, and so on.

And they’re making progress.

Evaluating the performance of CPUs with identical cores is relatively straightforward, and they’re easy to compare using single- and multi-core benchmarks. When there are two different types of core, one designed primarily for energy efficiency (E), the other for maximum performance (P), traditional benchmarks can readily mislead. Multi-core results are dominated by the ratio of P to E cores, and variable frequency confounds further. In this series of articles, I set out to disentangle these when comparing core performance between Apple’s original M1 Pro and its third-generation M3 Pro chips.

This first article explains why and how I am investigating this, and shows overall results for performance and power use under a range of loads.

Articles like these will help you make an informed decision about whether or not your workloads can benefit from moving from an M1/M2 to an M3.

Reading the story of how Windows NT came to be was entertaining, as it is a story of the system itself and the dynamics between Dave Cutler, the original designer and lead for NT, and the other people involved in the project. I was shy of being 10 years old when Windows NT launched and I didn’t comprehend what was going on in the operating systems world and why this release was such a big deal. Reading the book made me learn various new things about the development process, the role of Microsoft in that era, and allowed me to settle some questions I’ve had over the years.

This article is a mixture of a book review and a collection of thoughts and reflections that the book evoked. Let’s begin because we have a lot of ground to cover.

Dave Cutler’s impact on the word of computing really can’t be understated. I often wonder how he truly feels about what his and his team’s creation turned into today – does he like what Windows NT has become? Does he consider Windows 11 worthy of carrying on the torch of NT? As Cutler still works at Microsoft, we won’t get an answer any time soon, but I sure do hope he intends to write down his memoirs in a tell-all book about his life and career, because I’d be down for reading that.

Chinese chip designer Loongson has finally launched its loong teased “next-generation” 3A6000-series processors based on the LoongArch microarchitecture. IPC tests showed the 3A6000 matching Intel’s Raptor Lake i5-14600K in IPC (instructions per clock), with both chips clocked at 2.5GHz.

As well as the headlining x86 compatible processor came the announcement of numerous partner desktop, laptop, and all-in-one machines — plus a consumer-grade motherboard from Asus. It was also entertaining to see a recorded overclocking session, which took an LN2-cooled 3A6000 chip to the current maximum 3 GHz.

Many of us are being dismissive now, but give it a few more generations and Chinese PC users won’t be depending on Intel or AMD anymore – and that’s pretty impressive.

I got my hands on a Monoprice Blackbird 4K Pro HDCP 2.2 to 1.4 Converter. According to the marketing copy it “is the definitive solution for playback of new 4K HDCP 2.2 encoded content on 4K displays with the old HDCP 1.4 standard.”

Stuffed after a delicious Thanksgiving meal, I decided to take it apart after the guests had left. It’s a simple single-function device, so I didn’t expect much, but maybe there’s some things to be learned?

Turns out there’s a lot to learn, and it’s also incredibly interesting. The note at the end about the legality of this device is also interesting.