Companies like Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft have versions of their web browsers on Apple’s iOS and iPadOS App Stores, but these versions come with a big caveat: The App Store rules require them to use Safari’s WebKit rendering engine rather than the engines those browsers use in other operating systems. But that could be changing. According to The Register, Google and Mozilla have recently been spotted working on versions of Chromium and Firefox that use their normal Blink and Gecko rendering engines, respectively. This only makes sense. It’s very likely the rules around browser engines is going to go away, so I’m glad the competition is getting ready for this inevitability. If for some reason I’m ever forced at gunpoint to use iOS, I’d at least have access to real Firefox.
If your main problem with the Microsoft Store is that you get too many relevant results when you search for apps, good news: Microsoft is officially launching Microsoft Store Ads, a way for developers to pay to get their apps in front of your eyes when you go to the store to look for something else. Exactly what Windows needs – more ads.
While many like how Windows 11 looks or feels, there are some who just want to cut out on what they feel is bloat as their hardware may not be good enough to run the new OS smoothly, or simply for the fun of it. Recently, a popular third-party Windows 11 tweaking and customization app called ThisIsWin11 (TIW11) evolved into Debloos or Debloat OS, which, as the name suggests, allows the de-bloating of the operating system. If one isn’t comfortable going about tweaking things themselves with it, they could also opt for Tiny11, which was released earlier today. This stripped-down Windows 11 Pro 22H2 mod requires 8GB of install space, 2GB of system memory, and perhaps the best part, it does not require TPM and Secure Boot. I always find the custom Windows versions scene fascinating. Legally, it’s a very grey area, but there’s usually some real gems in there, such as this one. As the creator emphasises – this isn’t for production use or for any machine that can run regular Windows 11, but it might be useful in certain niche applications or on older hardware.
So, Cartrivision tapes came in two formats: Black Tapes and Red Tapes. Black tapes you’d buy at the store like any other product, but for Red Tapes (which were relatively recent movies), you instead would go to the store and place an order from a catalog. The store would have it delivered by mail, then you’d come back in and get the tape. You’d take it home, watch it, and then return it back to the store. So… Video rental (like Blockbuster!), except they didn’t have any stock on hand, and only got the tapes on-demand by mail? Seems annoying. BUT OH NO: it’s far more annoying than that. See… Red Tapes aren’t mechanically like Black Tapes. You can’t rewind them. I’m a sucker for weird formats, and this one is definitely right up there as one of the weirdest.
I don’t expect to see any actual Mesa Vulkan drivers in Rust for a few years yet. My current goal is merely to explore the possibility. When the time comes that someone does choose to write a Vulkan driver in Rust, I want us to be ready. This exploration may also be useful for informing the Rust community about language features which would make the task easier. Converting existing Vulkan drivers to Rust is an explicit non-goal at this time. Rust seems everywhere.
I just finished my new project, it is called love. It allows installation of IRIX from IRIX, LINUX or WINDOWS. The reason for its existence is that IRIX installations are difficult, even for experienced users. New users almost always struggle with IRIX installations which can be demotivating and frustrating. My goal is to make this task easy, fast and accessible. This is absolutely amazing, and it works very well. This will make life for retro SGI users a lot easier.
It appears that Microsoft is getting more aggressive with Windows 11 promos. A Reddit user (the post is now removed) has published a photo of their Windows 10 computer with a full-screen Windows 11 ad offering to upgrade to the latest operating system. And in typical Microsoft fashion, available options are as head-scratching as it gets: two buttons, and both mean “I agree”. It’s garbage all the way down.
I wrote a popular post about serial ports once, and serial ports are something I think about, worry about, and dream about with some regularity. Yet I have never really devoted that much attention to the serial port’s awkward sibling, always assuming that it was a fundamentally similar design employing either 8 data pins each way or 8 bidirectional data pins. It turns out that the truth is a lot more complicated. And it all starts with printers. You see, I have written here before that parallel ports are popular with printers because they avoid the need to buffer bits to assemble bytes, allowing the printer to operate on entire characters at a time in a fashion similar to the electromechanical Baudot teleprinters that early computer printers were based on. This isn’t wrong, it’s actually more correct than I had realized—the computer parallel port as we know it today was in fact designed entirely for printers, at least if you take the most straightforward historical lineage. Let’s start back at the beginning of the modern parallel port: the dot matrix printer. The serial port still sees tons of use today, but the parallel port seems to have vanished entirely.
As a complete and utter juxtaposition to the usual tech stuff we quibble about here on OSNews, I stumbled upon this interesting video about Samuil, a man who, for the past 20 years, has been living in the middle of the Yakutia wilderness, the coldest place on earth with temperatures that go down to -71°. This is a story of Samuil. For the past 20 years, Samuil has chosen to live far away from civilization, together with bears and wolves, in one of the harshest environments on Earth. I’m not going to make some sort of philosophical statement about how this guy’s got it all figured out, and how we, with all our tech, are truly the ones living in the wilderness, because not only would that be incredibly pretentious, it would also be deeply untrue. I’m also not going to make some sort of smug remark about how the guy’s an idiot for living this way, because not only would that be an incredibly douchy thing to say, it would also also be deeply untrue. A few years ago I moved from the stable, predictable, mild, and gentle climate of the Dutch coast to the harsh, unpredictable, cold, and frozen climate of the north of Sweden, a short distance below the arctic circle. Summers here are short, Spring and Autumn last a few weeks, at best, and for the rest of the year, it’s Winter. Every Winter, temperatures drop to -30°, and most days it’ll hover between -5° and -25°. Adapting to this climate wasn’t easy, and the amount of planning even something as simple as walking to the grocery store can take when it’s -27° can be tiring and frustrating. That one time I brought my kid to preschool when it was -28° wasn’t exactly easy-going either. At those temperatures, breathing will slowly start to hurt, your nostrils take a massive beating, your eyes are painful, and your facial hair will freeze. Putting on the countless layers of clothing takes forever, and the temperature difference between outside and inside can feel like walking into a wall of ice or fire, respectively. Taking the car requires planning, as you need to plug it in the external heating system for at least two hours before you can use it, and of course, removing the ice and snow off a car in this kind of climate is basically hard labour. And yet, I love it here. Living in this kind of cold is exhilarating, and it makes you appreciate the comforts of a warm home and modern life much more than I did back in The Netherlands. The transformation from the lush green forests and scattered fields to white, frozen wonderland – and back again – never fails to give me that feeling that somehow we won, again. We survived another Winter. In the comforts of modern civilisation and really not all that dramatic, but still. I’m definitely not going to say that because of this, I understand Samuil at some deeper level, because I really don’t. The difference between my life and his is a million times bigger than the difference between my life in The Netherlands and my life in Sweden, and I wouldn’t survive more than one or two days in his Winter, and probably end up frozen in a ditch somewhere because I got lost, or mauled by a bear because I’m an idiot and didn’t see it. For people used to mild climates, it may seem like the difference between -30° or -35° is academic, but it really isn’t – once you hit temperatures like these, every single degree starts to matter, and one degree can mean the difference between “extremely cold, but manageable” and “good thing we only wanted two kids”. The temperatures Samuil experiences blow my mind. In the microcosm that is a site like OSNews, it’s easy to forget just how varied our world really is, but thanks to the same technology we report on, we can experience a slice of life of someone living on his own in the coldest wilderness on earth, and learn that he is not that different from us.
Budgie 10.7 is a brand new release series for Budgie Desktop, featuring major re-architectures, new APIs for extensibility, and polish to the user experience. For a point release, there’s a lot of changes, improvements, and new features in here, as the release notes detail. The changes are all over the place – from a brand new application indexer to replace libgnome-menus, to dual-GPU support, notification improvements, general UX improvements, and much more.
This is the bigger, more deluxe of the two Mattel dedicated D&D games (the Intellivision of course had its own set, and we had a Tandyvision ourselves), the other being the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS™ Computer Fantasy Game. That was a handheld unit with a surprisingly compelling implementation of Hunt the Wumpus, and something we might talk about another time. This one is more like a board game, but with a computer antagonist and audio. The box says copyright 1980 but I think we got it late 1982 or early 1983. Either way, I was probably too young for this game at the time: it advertises 8 and up, and I would have been around six or so. It requires you to juggle a number of different audio signals and build up the maze and the objects in it (you, your competitor, the dragon, the treasure, your lifeless defiled corpses when you try to get the treasure, etc.). My recollection is that we barely played it at all. Well, better late than never. And hey: let’s find out what makes it tick. (Teaser: it’s four bits and we have an annotated die photo. Read on.) And read on you should – if you’re into amazingly detailed looks into children’s toys from the late ’70s/early ’80s based on 4 bit chips, that is. And you are, aren’t you?
As was revealed a handful of weeks ago, Microsoft is currently working on a significant update to File Explorer on Windows 11 that will update several core areas of the app with modern designs and new features that will better integrate the experience with OneDrive and Microsoft 365. The home page itself is being updated with more integration with Microsoft 365. Along the top will be a feed of “recommended” files, which will be presented with larger thumbnails that will make it easier to see what files are being suggested to you. That’s a lot of excuses for ads.
DiscoBSD is a 2.11BSD-based UNIX-like operating system for microcontrollers, with a focus on high portability to memory constrained devices without a memory management unit. This microcontroller-focused operating system is the continuation of RetroBSD, a 2.11BSD-based OS targeting only the MIPS-based PIC32MX7. DiscoBSD is multi-platform, as it also supports Arm Cortex-M4 STM32F4 devices. We mentioned RetroBSD before, way back in 2014 and 2018. Good to see the project is still alive, albeit under a new name.
While developing mirrord, which heavily relies on injecting itself into other people’s binaries, we ran into some challenges posed by macOS’s SIP (System Integrity Protection). This post details how we ultimately overcame these challenges, and we hope it can be of help to other people hoping to learn about SIP, as we’ve learned the hard way that there’s very little written about this subject on the internet. Potentially useful information for macOS developers.
The Justice Department and a group of eight states sued Google on Tuesday, accusing it of illegally abusing a monopoly over the technology that powers online advertising, in the agency’s first antitrust lawsuit against a tech giant under President Biden and an escalation in legal pressure on one of the world’s biggest internet companies. The lawsuit said Google had “corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers and brokers to facilitate digital advertising.” More of this, please.
Welcome to Magic Cap, the oddest yet somehow most endearing interface a PDA — and, briefly, Windows 95 — ever had. Unlike the Palm OS where I bought my first device brand new, I was a late convert to Magic Cap, picking up this wacky device called a DataRover in 2004 just to play with. It wasn’t exactly pocket-sized, but it was still quite portable, and the whimsical audio feedback and immediately accessible interface drew me in. I found some games and an Ethernet driver and the browser and enjoyed using it as a handheld in my old apartment. Despite my love for PDAs and my pretty large collection of devices covering most PDA platforms, I’ve never actually owned or used a Magic Cap device. I wonder if it’s time to address that shortcoming.
But as you might think, nobody at AMD envisioned it that way in the planning or design stages. No engineer would ever start working with the idea to “build a shit product”; a recent chat with an engineer who was at AMD during Bulldozer’s development gave us additional insight on what the original goals for the architecture were. AMD originally wanted Bulldozer to be like K10, but with a shared frontend and FPU. In one architecture, AMD would improve single threaded performance while massively increasing multithreaded performance, and move to a new 32 nm node at the same time. But those goals were too ambitious, and AMD struggled to keep clock frequency up on the 32 nm process. This resulted in cuts to the architecture, which started to stack up. The last AMD processor I used pre-Zen was a Phenom II, which was a fine processor for the price. However, after that, it quickly became clear that Intel had taken the lead. As such, I never experienced this era of AMD, and I think many of you will have had the same experience. This makes articles like these incredibly interesting.
While working on my Windows 3.x display driver, I ran into a vexing problem. In Windows 3.1 running in Enhanced 386 mode, I could start a DOS session and switch it to a window. But an attempt to set a mode in the DOS window (e.g. MODE CO80) would destroy the Windows desktop, preventing further drawing from happening properly. It was possible to recover by using Alt+Enter to switch the DOS window to full screen again and then returning to the desktop, but obviously that wasn’t going to cut it. Oddly enough, this problem did not exist in Windows 3.0. And in fact it also didn’t exist in Windows 3.1 if I used the Windows 3.0 compatible VDDVGA30.386 VxD shipped with Windows 3.1 (plus the corresponding VGA30.3GR grabber). A classic retro computing bug hunt! These stories are always a good read.
Recent Windows 11 Insider builds include support for ReFS, the Resilient File System. The file system is currently only available in Windows server operating systems, but not in client systems. Resilient File System is designed to “maximize data availability, scale efficiently to large data sets across diverse workloads, and provide data integrity with resiliency to corruption” according to Microsoft. I doubt ReFS will replace NTFS any time soon, but with Windows’ lacklustre support for file systems, it’s always interesting to see something new come up.
Ahead of these layoffs, Fuchsia appeared to be on an upward trajectory within Google. After years of being a skunkworks project, the company’s from-scratch operating system has grown to be used in the Nest Hub series and is poised to be used in an upcoming device. There are even indications of Google ramping up Fuchsia development internally in recent months. Considering Google’s overall workforce is set to be reduced by around 6%, the Fuchsia team appears to have been targeted more directly by the layoffs than other divisions. It’s not yet clear what this may mean for the project going forward. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to heavily cut the workforce of a team building a brand new operating system from scratch that you’ve only just started putting in consumers’ hands, but what do I know?
