CP/Mish is an open source sort-of-CP/M distribution for the 8080 and Z80 architectures (although for technical reasons currently it only works on the Z80). It contains no actual Digital Research code. Instead, it’s a collection of third party modules which replicate it, all with proper open source licenses, integrated with a build system that should make it easy to work with. CP/Mish is not CP/M, but it’s enough like CP/M to run CP/M programs and do CP/M things. And, if you want the real CP/M, CP/Mish uses the standard interaces so you can just drop in a Digital Research BDOS and CCP and it’ll work. Some companies bet on CP/M, some bet on DOS. We know who won, and who lost. Still, CP/M inspired a lot of DOS, so anybody with experience with DOS should feel right at home on CP/M.

The all-new Mac Pro is an absolute powerhouse with up to 28-core Intel Xeon processors, up to 1.5TB of ECC RAM, up to 4TB of SSD storage, up to AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo graphics with 64GB of HBM2 memory, and eight PCIe expansion slots for maximum performance, expansion, and configurability. The new design includes a stainless steel frame with smooth handles and an aluminum housing that lifts off for 360-degree access to the entire system. The housing also features a unique lattice pattern, which has already been referred to as a cheese grater, to maximize airflow and quiet operation. I love this machine. Not because I need it, will buy it, or even understand the kind of professional workflows people use these for – but because I’ve always had a soft spot for high-performance, no-compromises professional workstations. Whether it be the Sun or SGI UNIX workstations of the ’90s, the PowerMac and Mac Pro machines of the early 2000s, or the less flashy but still just as stunning powerhouses HP, for instance, makes with their Z line of workstations, such as the Z8. This new Mac Pro fits that professional workstation bill more than probably any PowerMac or Mac Pro before it, and I love it for it. While not nearly as insane or crazy, it reminds me of SGI’s most powerful MIPS workstation, the crazy SGI Tezro, which had a list price of tens of thousands of dollars. In that light, I’m not even remotely surprised that this is an expensive machine – anybody who has spent even a modicum of time in the world of professional workstations knows how expensive these machines are, and why. In short, if you are appalled by the price, this machine is not for you. Apple also unveiled a new professional display, and while the specifications look impressive, the stand that’s sold separately for 999 dollars has already become a meme. I’ll leave the display talk to those of us who know more about the kinds of demands professionals place upon displays.

I wasn’t available for about a week due to emigrating from The Netherlands to Sweden, so I’ve clearly got some catching up to do when it comes to Apple’s WWDC keynote. Apple detailed iOS 13 for the iPhone, the renamed iPadOS for the iPad, macOS Catalina for the Mac, updates for watchOS and tvOS, and so much more. I’m not going into great detail on everything here, since you’ve most likely already delved deep into these new releases if you’re interested. I do wish to mention that I’m insanely happy with mouse and multiwindow support for the iPad – it turns my iPad Pro into a very useful and powerful device, and I can’t wait for the first keyboards with built-in trackpad to come onto the scene. I’ll keep the other big announcement – the new Mac Pro – for a separate item and discussion thread.

From the 22nd to 26th of March, members of the KDE Privacy team met up in Leipzig, Germany, for our Spring 2019 sprint. During the sprint, we floated a lot of different ideas that sparked plenty of discussions. The notion of privacy encompasses a wide range of topics, technologies and methods, so it is often difficult to decide what to focus on. However, all the aspects we worked on are important. We ended up tackling a variety of issues, and we are confident that our contributions will improve data protection for all users of KDE software. Quite a few ideas became reality for upcoming KDE releases. Good work.

Google is essentially saying that Chrome will still have the capability to block unwanted content, but this will be restricted to only paid, enterprise users of Chrome. This is likely to allow enterprise customers to develop in-house Chrome extensions, not for ad blocking usage. For the rest of us, Google hasn’t budged on their changes to content blockers, meaning that ad blockers will need to switch to a less effective, rules-based system, called “declarativeNetRequest.” I’m glad I switched to Firefox already, and I suggest you do the same. A browser that is not tied to a platform vendor (like Safari) or run by an ad company (like Chrome).

It’s a hardware day today, and since AnandTech is the most authoritative source on stuff like this, we’ve got more from them. Arm announced its next big micro-architecture – which will find its way to flagship smartphones soon. Overall the Cortex-A77 announcement today isn’t quite as big of a change as what we saw last year with the A76, nor is it as big a change as today’s new announcement of Arm’s new Valhall GPU architecture and G77 GPU IP. However what Arm managed to achieve with the A77 is a continued execution of their roadmap, which is extremely important in the competitive landscape. The A76 delivered on all of Arm’s promises and ended up being an extremely performant core, all while remaining astonishingly efficient as well as having a clear density lead over the competition. In this regard, Arm’s major clients are still heavily focusing on having the best PPA in their products, and Arm delivers in this regard. The one big surprise about the A77 is that its floating point performance boost of 30-35% is quite a lot higher than I had expected of the core, and in the mobile space, web-browsing is the killer-app that happens to be floating point heavy, so I’m looking forward how future SoCs with the A77 will be able to perform. As linked above, the company also announced its next-generation mobile GPU architecture.

Today at Computex, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su is announcing the raft of processors it will be launching on its new Zen 2 chiplet-based microarchitecture. Among other things, AMD is unveiling its new Ryzen 9 product tier, which it is using for its 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X processor, and which runs at 4.6 GHz boost. All of the five processors will be PCIe 4.0 enabled, and while they are being accompanied by the new X570 chipset launch, they still use the same AM4 socket, meaning some AMD 300 and 400-series motherboards can still be used. We have all the details inside. If the first few waves of Zen-based processors put AMD back on the map, this is the wave that will propel the company beyond Intel on all fronts – single-core performance, multicore performance, price, and on all fronts, from workstations to gaming. Intel will probably be trailing AMD on all these fronts until at least 2022. AMD’s turnaround over the past few years is nothing short of stunning, and I’m quite sure my next machine will be rocking team red once again.

We are developers and designers making apps for the GNOME platform. We take pride in our craft and work hard to make sure our applications are a great experience for people. Unfortunately, all our efforts designing, developing, and testing our apps are made futile by theming in many cases. This is insanity – even if they claim it only applies to distribution makers. Their argument basically comes down to certain themes making certain applications look bad, and that theming removes branding from applications. First, theming making applications look bad is either an issue with the theme that needs to be fixed or an issue with Gtk+/GNOME being bad at theming, and second, your branding is irrelevant on my computer, or on my distribution. I use KDE, and one of the main reasons I do so is to ensure I can make my desktop and its applications look exactly the way I want them to look.

More or less anyone using modern PCs has to wonder: why does Windows use backslash as a path separator when the rest of the world uses forward slash? The clear intermediate answer is “because DOS and OS/2 used backslash”. Both Windows 9x and NT were directly or indirectly derived from DOS and OS/2, and certainly inherited much of the DOS cultural landscape. That, of course, is not much of an answer. The obvious next question is, why did DOS use backslash as a path separator? When DOS 2.0 added support for hierarchical directory structure, it was more than a little influenced by UNIX (or perhaps more specifically XENIX), and using the forward slash as a path separator would have been the logical choice. That’s what everyone can agree on. Beyond that, things get a bit muddled. A fascinating bit of sleuthing, and the author comes to an interesting theory. What’s fascinating to me is that I don’t even consciously realise the MS-DOS is the odd one out here – I just adapt to it without even thinking about it.

For Ubuntu 19.10 the developers are adding the NVIDIA driver packages onto the ISO. The NVIDIA binary drivers won’t be activated by default, but will be present on the install media to make it easier to enable post-install. The open source Nouveau driver will remain the default, but this will make it easier to opt for NVIDIA’s proprietary driver. NVIDIA has given permission for this inclusion.

As of hrev53136, we’ve finally replaced the aging hoard2 with a shiny new mmap-based allocator – mjansson’s rpmalloc. Thanks to @pulkomandy and @mmlr for helping out with that work! The main benefit here will be on 64-bit Haiku, as applications will now (finally) be able to use more than 1.5GB of RAM each, a limitation of the old allocator. But there are some pretty nice (10-15%) performance benefits over the old allocator, too. More of the technical details can be found in the commit message 5, but essentially the only thing to be concerned about is if things start suddenly crashing more often. It’s already known to exacerbate a few pre-existing WebKit crashes (mostly around Google Maps or the like, which were already so unstable as to be unusable anyway).

In an interesting video interview, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth shares his thoughts on desktop Linux. Some of his most prominent statements include: “I think the bigger challenge has been that we haven’t invented anything in the Linux that was like deeply, powerfully ahead of its time” and, “if in the free software community we only allow ourselves to talk about things that look like something that already exists, then we’re sort of defining ourselves as a series of forks and fragmentations.”

VSI is porting OpenVMS to x86-64. The company has done a lot of work, and it is beginning to bear fruit. Recently they’ve managed to boot the kernel and perform a DIR command. Grand steps indeed. Truly amazing work!

When John Bumstead looked at listings for his products on Amazon.com in early January, he was waiting for the guillotine to fall. A small online business owner from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Bumstead specializes in refurbishing and selling old MacBooks, models he typically buys from recyclers and fixes up himself. But on January 4th, Bumstead’s entire business dwindled into nonexistence as his listings were removed from the platform due to a new policy limiting all but the largest companies and specially authorized providers from selling Apple products. Apple made a special deal with Amazon to basically exterminate all third party repair services and used Apple product sellers that aren’t specifically approved by Apple. The result is a sharp increase in pricing on used Apple products sold on Amazon – exactly what Apple wants, of course – and smaller, non-Apple approved resellers are dying off. Charming. And people actually claim Apple has morals and values.