During AMD’s CES keynote, the company unveiled some of the details of its upcoming 3rd generation Ryzen processors, which are built on top of the Zen 2 architecture. We don’t have any independent benchmarks quite yet, of course, but the power figures comparing a Ryzen 3 processor to an Intel 9900K are nothing to sneeze at (note that these figures are coming from AMD, so get out your salt). Also, in that same test, it showed the system level power. This includes the motherboard, DRAM, SSD, and so on. As the systems were supposedly identical, this makes the comparison CPU only. The Intel system, during Cinebench, ran at 180W. This result is in line with what we’ve seen on our systems, and sounds correct. The AMD system on the other hand was running at 130-132W. If we take a look at our average system idle power in our own reviews which is around 55W, this would make the Intel CPU around 125W, whereas the AMD CPU would be around 75W. Even assuming these figures are idealised, that’s still a pretty startling difference.
Microsoft is now hard at work on the next feature update for Windows 10, codenamed 19H1 and scheduled for release this April. This update is expected to include yet more changes, new features, and further UI refinements and improvements. Development of this release is almost at the halfway mark, meaning it shouldn’t be long now before 19H1 is marked as “feature complete” internally and a focus on fixing bugs before release begins. This new release is still a few weeks off, but this article is a detailed overview of what’s coming. I personally see a lot of good things in here, but Microsoft’s recent release history when it comes to Windows updates hasn’t exactly been stellar, so the company certainly has something to prove here.
Updates & improvements– Menu, Process manager, CtrlAltDel, Cmd, Faster bootup The release is available from the download page. And just in case you forgot, MenuetOS is a pre-emptive, real-time and multiprocessor operating system written entirely in assembly.
It was recently decided that FreeBSD’s ZFS file-system support would be re-based atop ZFS On Linux. That new “ZFS On BSD” implementation based on ZOL continues moving along and it’s now easier to test thanks to iX Systems and their TrueOS platform. With the ZFS On Linux code-base being more actively maintained and improved upon than the OpenZFS support within the Illumos kernel, FreeBSD developers are working on merging their “ZOB” changes with ZOL. Interesting to see that the Linux implementation sees more active development than the original one – although not entirely surprising.
This release fixes several outstanding bugs in bash-4.4 and introduces several new features. The most significant bug fixes are an overhaul of hownameref variables resolve and a number of potential out-of-bounds memory errors discovered via fuzzing. There are a number of changes to the expansion of $@ and $* in various contexts where word splitting is not performed to conform to a Posix standard interpretation, and additional changes to resolve corner cases for Posix conformance. The most notable new features are several new shell variables: BASH_ARGV0, EPOCHSECONDS, and EPOCHREALTIME. The ‘history’ builtin can remove ranges of history entries and understands negative arguments as offsets from the end of the history list. There is an option to allow local variables to inherit the value of a variable with the same name at a preceding scope. There is a new shell option that, when enabled, causes the shell to attempt to expand associative array subscripts only once (this is an issue when they are used in arithmetic expressions). The ‘globasciiranges’ shell option is now enabled by default; it can be set to off by default at configuration time.
This year at CES, we have a series of announcements from AMD before the company’s keynote presentation. Addressing the company’s mobile offerings, AMD is launching the first parts of the Ryzen 3000-series of processors, focused around the Ryzen Mobile 2nd Gen family for both the general 15W market as well as the high-performance 35W market. On top of this, AMD is also making an announcement regarding how it will address graphics drivers for these platforms, and then some icing on the cake comes from AMD’s venture into Chromebooks. AMD continues its hot streak, and now we even have several new inexpensive Chromebooks running on AMD hardware, a market segment the company wasn’t active in. The future is looking bright for AMD.
Samsung today announced that it has worked with Apple to integrate iTunes movies and TV shows, as well as AirPlay 2 support, into its latest smart TVs. The features will roll out to 2018 models via a firmware update this spring and will be included on new 2019 models. iTunes movie and TV show access will come via a new dedicated app for Samsung’s TV platform, available in over 100 countries. Apple pretty much had to do this, since it’s unreasonable to expect people to buy relatively expensive Apple TV devices to be able to watch iTunes content on their TVs. Several other platforms tend to be built right into TVs or can be added with cheap dongles like the Chromecast, and Apple couldn’t compete with that. Apple has announced that iTunes content will also become available on TVs from other brands.
FreeSync support is coming to Nvidia; at its CES event today, Nvidia announced the GSync-Compatible program, wherein it says it will test monitors that support the VESA DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync protocol to ascertain whether they deliver a “baseline experience” comparable to a GSync monitor. Coincidentally, AMD’s FreeSync utilizes the same VESA-developed implementation, meaning that several FreeSync-certified monitors will now be compatible with Nvidia’s 10- and 20-series GPUs. This is great news, since GSync support requires additional hardware and this increases prices; you’ll find that the GSync version of a display is always significantly more expensive than the FreeSync version.
Happy New Year everyone! I’ve got big plans for my Amiga projects in 2019, but thought I’d start off the New Year with a blog post on a not-particularly “exciting” topic, but an important one nonetheless: backups. As I am experimenting more with my X5000 and Amiga OS 4.1, I’ve been getting particularly “twitchy” that I didn’t have a solid backup/restore plan in place, particularly as some of my experiments will invariably go wrong and I’ll need a way to roll back my changes to a known-good state. I spent a few days researching and implementing a backup strategy that’s ideal for my needs and hopefully there will be something of use to other Amiga owners too. Developing and implementing a solid back-up strategy is not just something that’s important for computers running popular platforms like Windows, Linux, or macOS – there’s countless people who do all kinds of more or less important work on smaller platforms like Amiga OS to whom proper back-ups are just as important. This article is a great resource on how to get started with back-ups for Amiga OS 4.
But sometimes life using DOS was not so great, sometimes you would be using DOS and all of a sudden things like this would happen. This sample also plays a small tune on the PC speaker while it’s printing, so this could be really embarrassing in a office environment. Those bootsector viruses were incredibly resilient – your computer would be just fine, until you put in an older floppy that apparently still had a virus on it. Good times.
HelenOS 0.8.0 has been released. HelenOS is a portable microkernel-based multiserver operating system designed and implemented from scratch. It decomposes key operating system functionality such as file systems, networking, device drivers and graphical user interface into a collection of fine-grained user space components that interact with each other via message passing. A failure or crash of one component does not directly harm others. HelenOS is therefore flexible, modular, extensible, fault tolerant and easy to understand. You can read the release notes to figure out what’s new and improved, and download this new release.
K2 is an academic project OS developed out of the Rice University Efficient Computing Group. Its stated purpose is: “Modern mobile System-on-chip(SoC) often embraces heterogeneous cores that are hosted in separate coherence domains, i.e. no hardware coherence among them. This architecture promises high energy efficiency, however complicates software development, thus preventing the energy efficiency from being harvested by software.” Learn more here.
EmuTOS is designed to run on traditional Atari hardware (ST, TT, Falcon, based on Motorola 68000 or ColdFire microprocessors) and their emulators. It features functionality similar to TOS, which powered the Atari ST and its successors between 1985 and 1994. EmuTOS can run on real hardware, either as ROM replacement or from floppy, or on any Atari emulator such as ARAnyM, Hatari, or Steem SSE. EmuTOS is Free Software, and can run legacy third-party software on emulators without requiring copyrighted Atari ROMs, thereby avoiding legal issues.
Windows 7, released in July of 2009, was a gigantic leap forward in the evolution of the desktop OS. Good enough, it turns out, that a huge number of people and organizations are still using it, despite it being nearly ten years since its release. Back in February, Statscounter proclaimed that according to its analytics, Windows 10 had finally overtaken 7 in marketshare. But these kinds of measurements are never exact. They’re based on counting users that connect to various constellations of sites and services, so there’s going to be some variation depending on who’s counting.
We’ve long suspected that Google’s upcoming operating system, Fuchsia, would join the ranks of Chrome OS (and Android) in its support for Android apps. Today, that suspicion has been confirmed by a new change found in the Android Open Source Project, and we can say with confidence that Fuchsia will be capable of running Android apps using the Android Runtime. This just adds more fuel to the fire for Fuchsia’s future.
Regular readers will have noticed that we’ve been offline for several days. As you can see, during that time, we’ve made some major changes to the site, and though the design has changed substantially, we’ve made even more dramatic changes in the back-end. We are now running our 6th major iteration of OSNews. It all was precipitated by messages from readers we’ve received over the past few weeks alerting us that they’ve been getting spam, phishing attempts, and some weak-sauce cyber-extortion emails at addresses that were unique to their OSNews accounts. Read on for more.
A former Microsoft intern has revealed details of a YouTube incident that has convinced some Edge browser engineers that Google added code to purposely break compatibility. In a post on Hacker News, Joshua Bakita, a former software engineering intern at Microsoft, lays out details and claims about an incident earlier this year. Microsoft has since announced the company is moving from the EdgeHTML rendering engine to the open source Chromium project for its Edge browser.
Google disputes Bakita's claims, and says the YouTube blank div was merely a bug that was fixed after it was reported. "YouTube does not add code designed to defeat optimizations in other browsers, and works quickly to fix bugs when they're discovered," says a YouTube spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. "We regularly engage with other browser vendors through standards bodies, the Web Platform Tests project, the open-source Chromium project and more to improve browser interoperability."
While we're unlikely to ever know the real story behind this particular incident, I don't doubt for a second that Google would do something like this.
It took about 30 minutes for Williamson County commissioners to unanimously approve a roughly $16 million incentive package for Apple Tuesday morning, bringing the total amount the tech giant is likely to receive in exchange for choosing Austin as the site for its newest campus to a cool $41 million. The new addition is set to be Apple's second campus in the Austin, Texas, area - located less than a mile from the company's existing facility, established five years ago. It comes with the promise of a $1 billion dollar investment from Apple in the area and the addition of up to 15,000 new jobs.
But the details of the incentive package Williamson County whipped up to woo Apple tell a slightly different story. In the contract approved by county officials, Apple committed to spending at least $400 million on the new campus and creating 4,000 jobs over 12 years. The contract says the jobs don’t necessarily have to be on the new campus in order for Apple to receive the promised incentives, but rather can be anywhere within Williamson County.
Shady and shoddy deals like these are only the tip of the iceberg - and don't think this is merely an American thing. This entire past year in The Netherlands has been dominated by our newly elected government wanting to shove through an incredibly unpopular tax cut specifically designed to appease major (partly) Dutch multinationals like Shell and Unilever - a 2 billion euro tax cut while various important social services like police, education, and healthcare desperately need better pay and working conditions.
In the end, under immense public and political pressure, the tax cut was cancelled, but it goes to show that these things happen everywhere - in large, powerful nations like the US, but also in small, insignificant welfare states like The Netherlands.
With the significant news this week that the Fuchsia SDK and a Fuchsia "device" are being added to the Android Open Source Project, now seems like a good time to learn more about the Fuchsia SDK. Today on Fuchsia Friday, we dive into the Fuchsia SDK and see what it has to offer developers who might want to get a head start on Fuchsia.
Fuchsia is the only publicly known truly new operating system designed and built by one of the major technology companies. It's strange to think this may one day power Chromebooks and "Android" devices alike.
Without question, 2018 was the year RISC-V genuinely began to build momentum among chip architects hungry for open-source instruction sets. That was then.
By 2019, RISC-V won't be the only game in town.
Wave Computing announced Monday that it is putting MIPS on open source, with MIPS Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and MIPS' latest core R6 available in the first quarter of 2019.
Good news, and it makes me wonder - will we ever see a time where x86 and x86-64 are open source? I am definitely not well-versed enough in these matters to judge just how important the closed-source nature of the x86 ISA really is to Intel and AMD, but it seems like something that will never happen.
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