After I wrote about the possibility of programmable Mac ROM SIMMs in Quadras a couple of months ago, I suspected that there had been a way for developers at Apple in the 68k Mac era to reflash the ROM in their Macs during development, just like BIOS updates on PCs. The reason I believed this is because the ROM SIMM socket in the Quadras brought out pins for 12V (VPP) and write enable (/WE). I had verified that the write enable pin was going into the memory controller chip in several Mac models, so I was pretty confident that in-system programming was possible. As luck would have it, multiple people pointed out to me that an Apple internal utility used for ROM flashing had been uploaded to the Macintosh Garden. It was recovered from a prototype PowerBook 520 purchased in 2020. Of course, I had to download this utility and figure out how it works. I honestly cannot believe it’s taken this long for such a tool to become available one way or the other. Classic Macs are incredibly popular in the retro community, and being able to reflash the ROMs like this is incredibly useful. It took some work and disassembly, but Doug Brown got it working.
Debian’s MIPS64EL that is a 64-bit little endian port using the N64 ABI is at risk due to declining access for building the Debian 64-bit MIPS packages. MIPS64EL is now being treated as an “out of sync” architecture due to lacking sufficient build daemon resources for timely building new packages and if the situation doesn’t improve, it may not be suitable as a release architecture for Debian 13 “Trixie”. Not all architectures last forever, and as time goes on, more and more of these once promising architectures will simply no longer be part of the modern Linux world. It makes sense – but it’s still sad.
Ironically, the second commercial game that Microsoft published, after Microsoft Adventure in 1979, was an attempt at a sports game sim. It was called Microsoft Olympic Decathlon, and like Microsoft Adventure, it was first launched as a TRS-80 PC game, this time in 1980. Microsoft has so many unexpected products in its long history.
Sunway’s new supercomputer therefore feels like a system designed with the goal of landing high on some TOP500 lists. For that purpose, it’s perfect, providing a lot of throughput without wasting money on pesky things like cache, out-of-order execution, and high bandwidth memory. But from the perspective of solving a nation’s problems, I feel like Sunway is chasing a metric. A nation doing well in advanced technology might have a lot of supercomputer throughput, but more supercomputer throughput doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll solve technological problems faster. A detailed look at China’s new supercomputer. The conclusion quoted above is very well supported by the data and research concerning this new supercomputer, and the article is a great read.
Windows Terminal is getting an optional feature – ChatGPT-powered “AI chat” on Windows 11. ChatGPT integration is now available in Terminal (Canary), a new development channel to test experimental features ahead of a wider rollout. With ChatGPT AI Chat in Terminal, you can use AI to generate commands, explain errors, and get recommendations. Microsoft wants Terminal to use the natural language AI to explain commands, such as “DISM”, or errors you might get when running commands. Similarly, it can suggest actions, like an alternate command when the original one doesn’t work. When Microsoft said it wants to shove “AI” into every aspect of Windows, they weren’t kidding.
Earlier this month, Microsoft released new preview updates with changes to make its operating systems compliant with European Union regulations. Those changes include the ability to uninstall Edge, decouple the OS from Bing, turn on third-party news feeds in Widgets, and more. Sadly, only EU citizens can enjoy those changes without messing with their PCs’ software intestines. Other people must tweak Windows Registry to spoof their location, which can lead to unnecessary complications. Luckily, there is a much simpler method that does not require editing the registry or faking your location. As it turned out (via Deskmodder), Windows manages new region policies using a JSON file inside the system32 folder. Modifying that file allows force-enabling specific features in unsupported regions. What follows is a 19 step process involving taking ownership of protected system files, dowloading additional tools, editing the registry, a few reboots, and more. A very simple process. So anyway if you want to remove Firefox from Fedora or Ubuntu or whatever, just run sudo dnf remove firefox or sudo apt remove firefox respectively, because as we all know, Linux is very hard to use and just not ready for desktop use. Good for servers, though. The tech world is a clown show.
If you read the initial reviews of Apple’s new M3-based Macs, you’d be forgiven for thinking little had changed in their CPU cores, apart from a rejigging of numbers and an increase in the maximum frequency of their P cores. As my MacBook Pro 16-inch M3 Pro arrived three days early, this article presents a tentative first look at what has changed in their CPU cores, and from that, how you might choose the right chip for your next Apple silicon Mac. Like Apple, I’m going to make comparison between M1 and M3 chips, as in most respects discussed here, M2 CPU cores didn’t change as much from those in the M1, and I’ve had and tested four different M1 models. As the introduction suggests, there’s more here than many seem to think.
With OpenSolaris and derivatives such as illumos, we gained the ability to build a whole IT infrastructure in a single box, using virtualized networking (crossbow) to build the underlying network and then attaching virtualized systems (zones) atop virtualized storage (zfs). Some of this was present in Solaris 10, but it didn’t have crossbow so the networking piece was a bit tricky (although I did manage to get surprisingly far by abusing the loopback interface). In Tribblix, I’ve long had the notion of a router or proxy zone, which acts as a bridge between the outside world and a local virtual subnet. For the next release I’ve been expanding that into something much more flexible and capable. I’m continuously impressed by the work Peter Tribble is putting into Tribblix. Maintaining a distribution of something like OpenSolaris is hard enough as it is, but to then also add various unique functions and capabilities, while also maintaining support for SPARC, is just amazing.
We talked about Zork yesterday, and how the code for interpreters for the game was found and published on Github. Today we have a blog post detailing how to actually use one of these interpreters, the one for the PDP-11. Ok so what or where to do this?! First you need SIMH or any other good PDP-11 emulator, a copy of RT-11, and of course the source to the interpreter oddly enough named PDP11.ZIP. Just keep in mind that this is NOT a pk-zip file, it’s a text file. It’s Macro-11 assembler source. And it goes on from there. This is using an emulator, but if you’re lucky enough to have a real PDP-11 you can probably get all of this running, too.
Jason Scott posted the source code for all the Infocom games in 2019. This was pretty awesome. Everybody who is interested in that stuff cheered, and now it’s part of the common knowledge of Infocom. If you’re researching the history of those games, or want to study their design, you can dig in. So the game source was big news. Infocom’s interpreter source, however, remained obscure. This was the game-playing software for each platform: the Apple 2 interpreter, the Commodore 64 interpreter, and so on. A particular Infocom game release (“Zork 3 for the C64”, say) was a floppy containing the C64 interpreter and the Zork-3 game file. Boot the floppy, the interpreter starts up; it loads the game data and the game begins. The code for the interpreter, however, was never released as open source – until now. Andrew Plotkin posted all of the code on Github, followed later by an additional code dump by David Fillmore.
There has been quite a bit of documentation about exploiting the CANON Printer firmware in the past. For some more background information I suggest reading these posts by SYNACKTIV, doar-e and DEVCORE. I highly recommend reading all of it if you want to learn more about hacking (CANON) Printers. The TL;DR is: We’re dealing with a Custom RTOS called DRYOS engineered by CANON that doesn’t ship with any modern mitigations like W^X or ASLR. That means that after getting a bit acquainted with this alien RTOS it is relatively easy to write (reliable) exploits for it. Having a custom operating system doesn’t mean it’s more secure than popular solutions.
EE Journal reports: National Instruments (NI) recently released a new version of its LabView test automation programming environment for the latest Apple Macintosh computers based on the Arm-based Apple M1 CPU/GPU SoC. At the same time, NI let its customers know that this release would be the last one for Apple Macintosh computers, sending a shock through some portion of the company’s customer base. LabView’s importance to test and measurement cannot be overstated. It was the first graphical programming language designed exclusively for test systems. The language has been continually expanded and improved for nearly 40 years and features more than 7000 software drivers for instruments from many vendors as well as support for custom, FPGA-based instruments. LabView supports many instrument interfaces starting with IEEE-488 and extending to MXI, PXI, USB, Ethernet, and probably a few more interfaces that don’t immediately come to mind. It’s a shock to many and will likely punish higher education students and a chunk of the scientific and research segment which is still Mac dominant.
After a few minor delays, FreeBSD 14.0 has officially been released. The highlights according to the FreeBSD team itself: For more details, you can dive into the release notes, and if you’re already using FreeBSD you know exactly how to upgrade.
Firefox users across the internet say that they are encountering an “artificial” five-second load time when they try to watch YouTube videos that exists on Firefox, but not Chrome. Google, meanwhile, told 404 Media that this is all part of its larger effort against ad blockers, and that it doesn’t have anything to do with Firefox at all. I’m sure it doesn’t, Google.
While Elementary OS commits to Wayland, the development team of the Budgie desktop is changing course and will work with the Xfce developers toward Budgie’s Wayland future. There is general consensus now that the future of graphical desktops on Linux lies in Wayland rather than X11, but the path is still not a smooth and easy one. While in Latvia for the Ubuntu Summit, the Reg FOSS desk met with the developers behind Ubuntu Budgie, who told us that the Budgie project is charting a new course toward the brave new Wayland world. It seems that using EFL – the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries – wasn’t the right choice for Budgie, and so they’re now exploring working with Xfce on their Wayland efforts, instead. Considering Enlightenment’s desktop Linux presence is negligible, at best, joining forces with Xfce so that both Xfce and Budgie can make progress on Wayland faster seems like the more optimal choice for the wider desktop Linux community.
Today we want to focus on what came next, Symbian Anna, which arrived a year after the launch of Symbian^3 (Symbian^2 launched only in Japan). Anna was unveiled in early 2011 alongside the Nokia X7 and Nokia E6. The E6 was a bar phone with a QWERTY keyboard (and a 2.45″ touch display), but the X7 was all touch (4.0″ display). Even better, owners of certain older Nokias would receive Anna as an update, that was the case for the Nokia N8 and E7. The Nokia C7 and C6-01 got it too. I have a few Symbian Anna and Belle (its successor) devices, and they’re not exactly great. The software is slow, cumbersome, clunky, and unpleasant to use, and simply no competition for the iPhone and Android, even at the time they came out. They’re fun novelties to play with now, but I genuinely feel sorry for the people who bought into these things back when they were new, thinking they’d get something on the level of the iPhone or Android.
The seL4 microkernel is currently the only kernel that has been fully formally verified. In general, the increased interest in ensuring the security of a kernel’s code results from its important role in the entire operating system. One of the basic features of an operating system is that it abstracts the handling of devices. This abstraction is represented by device drivers – the software that manages the hardware. A proper verification of the software component could ensure that the device would work properly unless there is a hardware failure. In this paper, we choose to model the behavior of a device driver and build the proof that the code implementation matches the expected behavior. The proof was written in Isabelle/HOL, the code translation from C to Isabelle was done automatically by the use of the C-to-Isabelle Parser and AutoCorres tools. We choose Isabelle theorem prover because its efficiency was already shown through the verification of seL4 microkernel. Some light reading that would’ve been for the weekend had I not gotten sick and unable to work on OSNews much.
In the best case, we may be able to avoid feeding the data through the compositing pipeline of the compositor as well, if the compositor supports direct scanout and the dmabuf is suitable for it. In particular on mobile systems, this may avoid using the GPU altogether, thereby reducing power consumption. I don’t understand what’s happening but it seems like a good idea? Can anyone help?
Apple has officially ceased the sale of OS X Lion 10.7 and Mountain Lion 10.8 from its online store. That’s it. That’s the post.
OpenVMS on x86 is now available for hobbyists! Almost a year after the official release. This is a part 1 of my getting started guide, showing you how to install OpenVMS on VirtualBox on Windows 10/11. More parts will follow, documenting license installation, network setup, ssh, application installation etc. If you want to give OpenVMS for x86 a try, this is the series of articles to read and follow along with. Excellent work by Remy van Elst.
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