Google has 175,000+ capable and well-compensated employees who get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year. Like mice, they are trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, documents, meetings, bug reports, triage, OKRs, H1 plans followed by H2 plans, all-hands summits, and inevitable reorgs. The mice are regularly fed their “cheese” (promotions, bonuses, fancy food, fancier perks) and despite many wanting to experience personal satisfaction and impact from their work, the system trains them to quell these inappropriate desires and learn what it actually means to be “Googley” — just don’t rock the boat. As Deepak Malhotra put it in his excellent business fable, at some point the problem is no longer that the mouse is in a maze. The problem is that “the maze is in the mouse”. I have never worked at any company – other than the hardware store for 7-8 years when I was a teenager and during university – so I have no idea if this is uncommon, but this sounds like my personal version of hell. No wonder Google has such a massive graveyard.
KDE Plasma 5.27, a Long Term Support release and the final release in the Plasma 5 series which is based on Qt 5, has been released. Plasma 5.27 brings exciting new improvements to your desktop, and the first thing you’ll notice when firing up Plasma is our new Konqi-powered wizard which will guide you through setting up the desktop. Other big new features include a window tiling system, a more stylish app theme, cleaner and more usable tools, and widgets that give you more control over your machine.
Bing AI did a great job of creating media hype, but their product is no better than Google’s Bard. At least as far as we can tell from the limited information we have about both. I am shocked that the Bing team created this pre-recorded demo filled with inaccurate information, and confidently presented it to the world as if it were good. I am even more shocked that this trick worked, and everyone jumped on the Bing AI hype train without doing an ounce of due diligence. Bing AI is incapable of extracting accurate numbers from a document, and confidently makes up information even when it claims to have sources. It is definitely not ready for launch, and should not be used by anyone who wants an accurate model of reality. Tools like ChatGPT are fun novelties, and there’s definitely interesting technology underpinning them, but they are so clearly not very good at what they’re supposed to be good at. It is entirely irresponsible of Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google to throw these alpha versions out there where the Facebook boomers can find them. Have they learned nothing from social media and its deeply corrupting influence on the general population’s ability to separate truth from fiction? And now we have “artificial intelligences” telling these very same gullible people flat-out lies as truth, presented in a way that gives these lies even more of a veneer of reliability and trustworthiness than a tweet or Facebook post ever did? These tools are going to lead to a brand new wave of misinformation and lies, and society is going to pay the price. Again.
These two men were joined by William Joy and Scott McNealy, and on the 24th of February in 1982, they founded Sun Microsystems. All of these men are Stanford graduates (except for Joy who went to Berkley), and the name “Sun” is derived from Stanford University Network. This is well named as from the start, Sun systems included network capability. Employee 5, John Gage, went so far as to say “the network is the computer,” which became the Sun slogan. Funding for this adventure was provided by Eastman Kodak, AT&T, Olivetti, and Xerox. I have a soft spot for Sun. I don’t care much for Java, but their hardware – especially their workstations and thin clients – were unique and cool, and it’s incredibly sad the company couldn’t keep their workstation business operational. SPARC actually managed to hold on for quite a while – more so than other non-x86 architectures – but Oracle was not at all interested in the workstation market, which was probably the right financial call. I’m still looking for a Sun Ultra 45 that doesn’t cost my me firstborn.
Calmira Reborn is fourth in the line of Calmira projects. It is a fork of Calmira LFN 3.32 by Alexandre Rodrigues de Sousa, itself a fork of Calmira II 3.3 by Calmira Online!, itself a fork of Calmira 2.2SR by Li-Hsin Huang. This fork does not place much emphasis on new features and instead focuses on fixing issues I’ve discovered with Calmira LFN while using it on my old computers. Calmira should ring a bell for most Windows users of the ’90s. Calmira adds a Windows 95-like desktop environment to replace Program Manager on Windows 3.x, along with tons of other features and niceties. It makes using Windows 3.x a lot less cumbersome, and I am definitely going to set up a new Windows 3.11 install in PCem to try this new release out.
An SDK for developing DOS software for x86 machines, including IBM PC compatibles and NEC PC-98 This SDK (Software Development Kit) is modeled after the Amiga NDK (Native Development Kit). The Amiga NDK contains a set of header files and libraries for both assembly and C development, which provides all the required constants, flags, data structures and whatnot to interface directly with the hardware, and having readable code making use of human-readable symbols and type definitions. An equivalent for the IBM PC platform, or PC DOS/MS-DOS/compatible environments has never been available to my knowledge. This SDK attempts to fill that void. Think of it as Ralfs Interrupt List and Bochs ports.lst turned into .inc/.asm and .h/.c files ready for use in a programming environment. What an awesome initiative.
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.
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