Hyperion Entertainment has released another update for AmigaOS 3.2 for classic Amigas, coming with a number of improvements and bug fixes. I’m not entirely sure what to make of all this, though, since the drama around the ownership of the Amiga operating system, the trademarks, and more, as well as continuous accusations of Hyperion not paying any of its developers, have reached a fever pitch, as documented in this elaborate piece. As much as I would want to dive into all this and properly vet every single source in that article, for the sake of my sanity, I am just not going to. The soap opera around the Amiga has been going on for so long, and has jumped the shark so many times, I just don’t know where to start. I’ll leave you all with the detailed piece and its sources, and let you decide for yourself what to make of it all. I ain’t got the patience for this.
Cobalt Networks were one of the early pioneers in network appliance hardware and produced some of the first turn-key webserver boxes you could buy, founded in 1996 as Cobalt Microserver. Cobalt boxes are immediately identifiable from their distinctive deep blue plastic bezels starting with the 1998 Cobalt Qube 2700. The Qube used a 150MHz QED RM5230; these CPUs are part of QED’s R5000 family and we’ll talk about their architecture a bit later. They came with 2.1GB hard disks with later larger options, 10Mbit Ethernet, 16MB of RAM standard with up to 256MB supported, and a “console” consisting of a backlit rear-mounted 2-line LCD and control buttons (on later machines, but not the original 2700, a serial port provided an actual console if you held down a button during startup). A fair number of typical configuration tasks such as setting its IP address could be done directly from the panel and the rest were intended to be done through its Perl-based web console. They were designed to run Linux from the ground up and shipped with Red Hat using a 2.0.x kernel. Cobalt’s network appliances were so exotic back in the day, and once they started hitting the used market, I almost pulled the trigger quite a few times. These days, they’re harder to come by, and their use is, of course, inherently limited now, but that doesn’t make them any less eye-catching.
The DSi browser uses Opera 9.50. There are no security mitigations whatsoever. Jumping to shellcode is back on the menu! Stack buffer overflows are viable. Exploiting use-after-frees, which are often common in browsers, is easier than ever. In fact, the DSi doesn’t even have an operating system, so there’s no kernel to exploit. Various system privileges are handled by the SCFG register. The browser has enough privileges to run most homebrew, but not enough to gain persistence across boots without another exploit. Browsing on the DS was a nightmare – and Nintendo charged for it. Crazy how times have changed.
Tech-makers assuming their reality accurately represents the world create many different kinds of problems. The training data for ChatGPT is believed to include most or all of Wikipedia, pages linked from Reddit, a billion words grabbed off the internet. (It can’t include, say, e-book copies of everything in the Stanford library, as books are protected by copyright law.) The humans who wrote all those words online overrepresent white people. They overrepresent men. They overrepresent wealth. What’s more, we all know what’s out there on the internet: vast swamps of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, neo-Nazism. Tech companies do put some effort into cleaning up their models, often by filtering out chunks of speech that include any of the 400 or so words on “Our List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words,” a list that was originally compiled by Shutterstock developers and uploaded to GitHub to automate the concern, “What wouldn’t we want to suggest that people look at?” OpenAI also contracted out what’s known as ghost labor: gig workers, including some in Kenya (a former British Empire state, where people speak Empire English) who make $2 an hour to read and tag the worst stuff imaginable — pedophilia, bestiality, you name it — so it can be weeded out. The filtering leads to its own issues. If you remove content with words about sex, you lose content of in-groups talking with one another about those things. These things are not AI. Repeat after me: these things are not AI. All they do is statistically predict the best next sequence of words based on a corpus of texts. That’s it. I’m not worried about these things leading to SkyNet – I’m much more worried about smart people falling for the hype.
The JH7110 isn’t amazing. But it’s not bad, either. I still wouldn’t recommend most people buy this board, unless you already know a lot about Linux and SBCs in general. That may change a year from now, but right now, this board isn’t targeted at the same market as a Raspberry Pi. At around $100, and not being quite production-ready, I’m only recommending this board to people interested in exploring RISC-V for now. This seems like an expected experience for a relatively new architecture that still has rather limited hardware and software support. When the first Raspberry Pi came out, the situation wasn’t much better either, so give it a few years and RISC-V will be in a better place in the market for sub-€100 single-board computers.
And while headlines might indicate the language had fallen into disfavor, the amount of COBOL in use continues to grow, with 800 billion lines running in production systems daily, according to a global survey conducted last year by enterprise software firm Micro Focus. COBOL is considered strategic by 92% of survey respondents, and over half said they expect their organizations to keep running their COBOL applications for at least another 10 years. I feel like COBOL is one of those things that can guarantee you a career. If you know COBOL, you will most likely find a job and have a good career future, but it’s probably not going to be anything sexy or anything that has the (albeit tiny) opportunity of making you filthy rich – but you won’t ever be without a job for long either.
Cubic (Custom Ubuntu ISO Creator) is a GUI wizard to create a customized Live ISO image for Ubuntu and Debian-based distributions. Cubic permits effortless navigation through the ISO customization steps and features an integrated virtual command line environment to customize the Linux file system. You can create new customization projects or modify existing projects. Important parameters are dynamically populated with intelligent defaults to simplify the customization process. This is an incredibly neat tool, and it’s given me the urge to see if I can create my own custom ISO with my personal defaults all set out of the box.
Apple’s iPhone 15 series will officially only support USB-C accessories that have been certified by Apple’s own Made for iPhone (MFi) program, potentially limiting the functionality of accessories not approved by Apple, an established leaker has now claimed. So you’re getting USB-C, but not really. Leave it to Apple to milk even something as mundane as this.
In the last three weeks, we also launched the new AI-powered Bing into preview for more than 1 million people in 169 countries, and expanded the new Bing to the Bing and Edge mobile apps as well as introduced it into Skype. It is a new era in Search, Chat and Creation and with the new Bing and Edge you now have your own copilot for the web. Today, we take the next major step forward adding to the incredible breadth and ease of use of the Windows PC by implementing a typable Windows search box and the amazing capability of the new AI-powered Bing directly into the taskbar. Putting all your search needs for Windows in one easy to find location. I feel like adding a glorified autocomplete that tricks people into thinking it’s a real artificial intelligence to the Windows taskbar is not exactly what Windows users are looking for, but I guess that services revenue cash register has to keep dinging. I’m getting major cryptocurrency, NFT, and web3 vibes from all this, and I can’t wait for the whole thing to come crashing down once again.
One interesting aspect of a computer’s instruction set is its addressing modes, how the computer determines the address for a memory access. The Intel 8086 (1978) used the ModR/M byte, a special byte following the opcode, to select the addressing mode. The ModR/M byte has persisted into the modern x86 architecture, so it’s interesting to look at its roots and original implementation. In this post, I look at the hardware and microcode in the 8086 that implements ModR/M and how the 8086 designers fit multiple addressing modes into the 8086’s limited microcode ROM. One technique was a hybrid approach that combined generic microcode with hardware logic that filled in the details for a particular instruction. A second technique was modular microcode, with subroutines for various parts of the task. This is way above my pay grade, but I know quite a few of you love this kind of writing. Very in-depth.
The merge request for landing the first of “many” parts of the Wayland driver for Wine was opened this morning. This is part of the effort of allowing Windows games/applications running under Wine to operate natively on Wayland rather than having to go through XWayland. Excellent work.
I believe that learning MINIX is probably the best way to learn about operating systems. Until now, I have not been able to find a MINIX 3 project that allows you to compile the code that is referenced in the book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (3e) (v3.1.0). It was tricky to get a reasonable development setup to make it possible for newbies like myself to learn from the book. This is an attempt to fix that and make it easy to browse, edit, recompile, and execute the code. An easy way to get started with MINIX, the famous microkernel teaching operating system from the university I got my two degrees at – although I’m not entirely sure if that’s a ringing endorsement.
The E-Class is a bit of a sneak peek into the upcoming Mercedes-Benz Operating System (MB.OS). Mercedes CTO Markus Schaefer said, “The E-Class will be a precursor in the space of infotainment. We call it the 0.8 version of MB.OS.” While the shoutout of the E-Class is apt, the reality is the upcoming MB.OS is a huge change for Mercedes, which plans to own the entire software stack, giving it control over every aspect of the vehicle. It’s a big deal for a company that sees over-the-air updates, subscriptions, and digital purchases as an integral part of its future. The chip-to-cloud Linux and QNX-based MB.OS platform will be part of the upcoming MMA (Mercedes Modular Architecture). At a high level, QNX will handle safety and the dash cluster, and Linux will take care of the infotainment aspect. The first vehicle based on the platform will be introduced in the later part of 2024, with the vehicle reaching showrooms in 2025. I’d love to review this new upcoming operating system from Mercedes-Benz. I’m sure David, OSNews’ owner, is more than willing to buy me an E-Class in 2025, right David? In all seriousness, I would love to review the operating system and UI experience of modern cars, as I feel there’s a lot of innovation and experimentation taking place in this space – some for good, and lots for… Not so good – but for obvious reasons, this is very hard to do. I’ve contemplated contacting local dealers here, but they have very little to gain from a tech site with an audience almost exclusively outside of the north of Sweden reviewing their products. In short, I accept donations in the form of cars.
Being the default out-of-the-box browser on Windows 10 and 11 makes Microsoft Edge a go-to utility for downloading Chrome or another browser. That upsets Microsoft so much that it constantly comes with more aggressive and user-hostile methods to make customers stay on Edge. An attempt to install Chrome using Edge Canary now results in the browser displaying two ads: the first (tiny one) will pop on the screen when the Chrome website loads, and the second, a humongous full-size banner, will appear once the download starts. Yikes! Yikes indeed. Probably s suggestion by their glorified autocomplete.
As part of our combined efforts, the Ubuntu flavors have made a joint decision to adjust some of the default packages on Ubuntu: Going forward, the Flatpak package as well as the packages to integrate Flatpak into the respective software center will no longer be installed by default in the next release due in April 2023, Lunar Lobster. Users who have used Flatpak will not be affected on upgrade, as flavors are including a special migration that takes this into account. Those who haven’t interacted with Flatpak will be presented with software from the Ubuntu repositories and the Snap Store. We think this will improve the out-of-the-box Ubuntu experience for new users while respecting how existing users personalize their own experiences. However, we don’t want this to come as a surprise. If you have comments specific to this change you are welcome to respond here on discourse. Canonical’s got Snap to peddle, so FlatPak is a competitor. That’s all there’s to it. I maintain they’re all bad and unnecessary – a .deb, an .rpm, and your source code is all you need to cover 99.9% of Linux users in a standard, easy-to-use, uncompromising way.
A keyboard, mouse, a NIC, VGA output, 16MB of RAM and a whole gig (you wish) of read-only optical drive space with a 200MHz Hitachi SuperH SH-4 CPU faulting its paltry 8K of I-cache and 16K of D-cache non-stop. Now freshly refurbished, its cooling fan runs louder than my Power Mac Quad G5 at idle and the drive makes more disk seeking noise than when I can’t find a lost floppy. And since the buzzword with Linux distros today is immutability, what could be more immutable than an ephemeral, desperately undersized RAM disk overlaid on a live CD? i want a DreamCast.
The way Haiku handles package management and its alternative approach to an “immutable system” is one of those ideas I find really cool. Here’s what it looks like from a desktop user’s perspective – there’s all the usual stuff like an “app store”, package updater, repositories of packages and so on. It’s all there and works well – it’s easily as smooth as any desktop Linux experience. However, it’s the implementation details behind the scenes that make it so interesting to me. Haiku takes a refreshingly new approach to package management. A deep dive into Haiku’s surprisingly robust and full-featured package management system.
Paul Weissmann, maintainer of OpenPA, the definitive source of information on HP’s PA-RISC hardware and software, has published an article about how the state of information preservation on this topic has changed substantially since OpenPA’s founding in 1999. The main challenges for OpenPA at the time were both finding all the available information, as search engines were still young in the late 1990s, as well as making sense of it all as it was just so much and new sources kept appearing. This went on until the mid to late 2000s, when solid and stable sources could be found and referenced, which OpenPA did. The Internet and information on it changed since then, slowly but surely, in a profound way. Many original sources have disappeared and so much information has been lost in only two decades – making OpenPA the authoritative source for PA-RISC in some ways. A long journey from documenting complex information of the 1990s to an historic archive on the PA-RISC era. OpenPA is an amazing resource, so if you happen to have any information worth sharing with Weissmann, please do so.
It’s been many years since Intel Itanium processors made a convincing story and faced a slow demise over the past decade. While the last of the Itanium 9700 “Kittson” processors shipped in 2021, just two years later now the Linux kernel is already looking at possibly seeing its IA-64 support removed over having no maintainers or apparent users. I have a morbid curiosity when it comes to Itanium, and I’ve been on the lookout for an Itanium workstation for two decades now. This is the first time where one of these “Linux to deprecate some old unused architecture” posts might actually affect me at some point, and I’m outraged. Outraged, I tell you!
Our mobile Internet Service Provider (ISP) has a bundle where they provide a 4G modem for internet access, and a separate TV set-top box that can be used to watch their TV content or to watch streaming services. This device was sent to us as part of the bundle, but at Zeus, we don’t really have a use for it: we don’t really watch television in our space. What we do have a need for, however, are low-power computers that can run Linux. In this blog post, we will hack this set-top box to run Linux instead of Android TV. Just some good ol’ fashioned hackery for the weekend. You’ll need a soldering iron.
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