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.
A few months ago, I talked about the only PC ever shipped with BeOS preinstalled, the Flora Prius from Hitachi. However, due to illegal pressure from Microsoft, Hitachi disabled the special bootloader required to boot into BeOS, so while the best operating system ever made was right there on the hard drive, buyers couldn’t actually use it without manually restoring the bootloader and BeOS partitions. Of course, I now have to try and find a working example of this Hitachi Flora Prius computer line. They were apparently only sold in Japan, so the odds of finding one anywhere seem slim, at best. It doesn’t help that most people who bought one of these had no idea BeOS was installed or what BeOS even was, so the historical significance was lost on them. I also think these weren’t particularly noteworthy computers otherwise – most likely one of the many dime-a-dozen beige boxes sold all over the world. Searches on eBay and Japanese auction sites yield no results. I got an e-mail today from an OSNews reader, informing me of something quite rare. On the Japanese auction site mercari.com, someone is selling a BeBox, which in and of itself is already a very rare occurrence, as few BeBoxen were ever sold (1800 in total). To further add to the rarity, it’s the dual 133 MHz model, which is the rarer of the two configurations (800 pieces sold). These machines don’t come up for sale very often, and I’m pretty sure the seller is going to net a good price for this museum piece, which seems to be in almost pristine condition, without scratches of scuffs. The price is set at ¥950000 (€5821) excl. shipping (shipping costs to e.g. Europe or the US would be substantial), but I’m pretty sure the seller could ask for more. Seeing a BeBox for sale is already quite exciting, but browsing through the accompanying pictures, there’s something even rarer: documentation and software CD-ROMs for the Hitachi Floria Plus 330j and BeOS. The machine itself is not part of the auction, but even seeing the documentation and CD-ROMs for it is entirely unique, and most likely something we won’t be seeing anywhere else anytime soon. Since the Floria Plus was sold as a generic, uninteresting PC, probably long forgotten and scrapped by most people, I doubt one will ever be found. The documentation and software in this auction might be one of the last surviving tangible relics of the only PC ever sold with BeOS preinstalled.
The PARC facility also is known for the invention of Ethernet, a networking technology that allows high-speed data transmission over coaxial cables. Ethernet has become the standard wired local area network around the world, and it is widely used in businesses and homes. It was honored this year as an IEEE Milestone, a half century after it was born. Truly one of the success stories of the technology world. Sure, those first Ethernet cables and accessories have changed a lot over the decades, but we’re still using it to this day, and we’ll be using it for many more decades to come.
Shortly after announcing the end of three services, one of which is as old as MS-DOS, Microsoft deprecated the Tips app. Now, another utility is about to get the axe: Microsoft has updated its Windows documentation again, detailing the end of the story for Steps Recorder (psr.exe). Steps Recorder is an old utility from the Windows 7 era that lets you, as the name implies, record your steps while doing something in Windows. Although long abandoned, Steps Recorder is a handy tool for describing to your grandma how to perform specific actions in Windows, troubleshoot apps, or report bugs. Steps Recorder is simple and very effective, and you can launch it by pressing Win + R and typing psr. With Windows being as massively popular as it is, even removals of weird, obscure utilities and services that small percentages of Windows users used, still means hundreds of thousands of people can be affected. So, let’s pour one out for psr.
In order to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, Microsoft is planning a number of changes to Windows to comply with this new legislation. Ars sums them up nicely: All of the above will be exclusive to the EU/EEA, so Windows users elsewhere are out of luck.
With these changes in place, we’ve seen support for Manifest V3 increase significantly among the extension developer community. Specifically, we are encouraged by our ongoing dialogue with the developers of content blocking extensions, who initially felt Manifest V3 could impact their ability to provide users with the features they’ve come to expect. Google has made several changes to Manifest V3 specifically to ease concerns among developers of content blocking extensions, and it seems those changes have been positively received. The maximum number of active rulesets has been increased, as well as the number of dynamic rules, which are rules ad blocker developers can change and update without having to update the extension as a whole. Regardless of these changes, I would still advise everyone to get a Raspberry Pi or whatever and run Pi-Hole – this will block ads for your entire network, and all devices, regardless of browser or operating system.
The rumors are true: Microsoft has built its own custom AI chip that can be used to train large language models and potentially avoid a costly reliance on Nvidia. Microsoft has also built its own Arm-based CPU for cloud workloads. Both custom silicon chips are designed to power its Azure data centers and ready the company and its enterprise customers for a future full of AI. Microsoft’s Azure Maia AI chip and Arm-powered Azure Cobalt CPU are arriving in 2024, on the back of a surge in demand this year for Nvidia’s H100 GPUs that are widely used to train and operate generative image tools and large language models. There’s such high demand for these GPUs that some have even fetched more than $40,000 on eBay. Amazon and Google, the two other major cloud providers, are already using all kinds of custom, in-house silicon in their datacentres, so it’s not exactly surprising Microsoft is following in their footsteps.
The European Union making tech better for everyone. We’ll have to wait and see if supporting RCS will be enough to prevent the EU from requiring Apple open up iMessage.
With this release, .NET reshapes the way we build intelligent, cloud-native applications and high-traffic services that scale on demand. Whether you’re deploying to Linux or Windows, using containers or a cloud app model of your choice, .NET 8 makes building these apps easier. It includes a set of proven libraries that are used today by the many high-scale services at Microsoft to help you with fundamental challenges around observability, resiliency, scalability, manageability, and more. Integrate large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT directly into your .NET app. Use a single powerful component model to handle all your web UI needs with Blazor. Deploy your mobile applications to the latest version of iOS and Android with .NET MAUI. Discover new language enhancements that make your code more concise and expressive with C# 12. It’s still wild to me to that Microsoft provides detailed installation instructions for .NET for a variety of Linux distributions, down to stuff like Alpine.
Google today is announcing strengthened protections for Android developers publishing apps to its Google Play store. The changes are a part of Google’s broader efforts at keeping low-quality and unsafe apps out of its app store and off consumers’ devices, which also recently included the launch of a new real-time app scanning feature to combat malicious apps. Today, the company says it will now require new Android developers with personal accounts to test their app with a minimum of 20 people for at least 2 weeks prior to publication. It additionally plans to increase its investment in the app review processes, warning of potential slowdowns in approvals for a small number of apps as these changes roll out. At first glance, this sounds like a good idea – more testing leads to better applications, is the reasoning – but it’s going to be a massive burden for many small indie developers to even find 20 testers. In my experience, it’s usually the small indie teams or individual developers that make the best applications on Android, while the large, well-known brands release steady streams of garbage. In other words, this is going to disproportionately affect the wrong people.
It’s definitely clear that Huawei is pulling the plug on Android apps, but it’s still rather hard to believe that the company is throwing away Android (AOSP) entirely. For that, we’ll just have to wait and see, as more digging can be done when “Next” hits the scene next year. The Chinese market is big enough to sustain its own application ecosystem, and many western services are banned in China anyway, so the Play Store is of lesser value there. It makes sense for Huawei to not waste time and resources on maintaining Android application compatibility.
I tried to launch BattleTech over and over and had zero success. I couldn’t figure out why it was struggling on my model 80 board, where it runs just great on 86Box. What is going on? One thing I had stumbled upon was that if I launched an ancient Infocom game in a DOS box, and then launched BattleTech it had a much higher chance of running. But this did not always equate to it working. How is launching an old COM file from the early 80’s excise the ‘devil’ of some 1988 EXE from running? As the title suggests, it’s got to do with the math coprocessor. I know I say this often, but I’m so glad people dive into these sorts of things decades later to figure out what’s going on. It makes for great reading.
Phoronix listed some of the major work happening in 6.7 for the RISC-V architecture: Merged last week was support for cbo.zero in user-space, support for CBOs on ACPI-based RISC-V systems, support for software shadow call stacks, improvements for the T-Head cache flushing operations, and other clean-ups and fixes. Meanwhile sent out today was a secondary pull request of more RISC-V changes for Linux 6.7. This latest pull has support for handling misaligned accesses in S-mode, performance improvements for TLB flushing, support for many new relocations in the module loader, and other enhancements. Momentum is definitely going for RISC-V.
However, there was a secret weapon hidden in ANS AIX most of us at the time never knew about. Built-in to the operating system was a fully Unix-native AppleTalk stack and support for receiving and sending Apple Events, surfaced in the form of Apple’s disk administration tools and AppleShare. But Apple had a much more expansive vision for this feature: full server-client “symbiotic” applications that could do their number-crunching on the ANS and present the results on a desktop Mac. Using the Program-to-Program Communication Toolbox (“PPCToolbox”), and because AIX’s throughput far exceeded anything the classic Mac OS ever could ever handle, an ANS could augment a whole bunch of Macs at once that didn’t have to stop to do the work themselves. Well, today we’re going to write one of those “symbiotic” applications doing something this little Mystic Color Classic could never efficiently do itself — accessing and processing a JSON API over TLS 1.3 — and demonstrate not only how such an client application looked on the Mac side, but also how the server component worked on the AIX side. If you’re lucky enough to have an ANS running AIX too, you can even compile and run it yourself. But before we do that, it might be a little instructive to talk about how the Apple Network Server came to run AIX in the first place. I had no idea the ANS could do this. That’s an incredibly cool feature, and clearly fits in the whole “the network is the computer” idea that dominated the late ’90s.
Remember when we linked to David Revoy’s story about how his drawing pen’s buttons stopped working properly due to a Linux kernel update? Well, it turns out that Linux kernel developers took this one up, and a fix is already being tested. This solution is still W.I.P. and I still have some homework to send more data about my tablets after this blog post, but in overall I’m already using a newer kernel (Linux workstation 6.5.10-200.fc38.x86_64) and I don’t have the problem with the eraser mode on the top button of my XPPen Artist 24 Pro and XPPen Artist 16 Pro Gen2 styluses. The buttons are also now perfectly customisable via xsetwacom CLI tool. Yay! That’s why I wanted to share this blog-post as soon as possible. Be sure to read the whole article for an in-depth explanation of what’s being done to fix this.
“Microsoft steals access data” – When the well-known German IT portal “Heise Online” uses such drastic words in its headline, then something is up. If Microsoft has its way, all Windows users will have to switch to the latest version of Microsoft Outlook. But: Not only can the IMAP and SMTP access data of your e-mail account be transferred to Microsoft, but all e-mails in the INBOX can also be copied to the Microsoft servers, even if you have your mailbox with a completely different provider such as mailbox.org. They’re going to use it for AI, I’m assuming. In any event, don’t use the new Outlook – it’s a web app anyway and there’s better clients for Windows. I think. I’m not sure people are still developing e-mail clients for Windows.
Yep you read that right, we’ve decided to throw the lever and go Wayland by default! The three remaining showstoppers are in the process of being fixed and we expect them to be done soon–certainly before the final release of Plasma 6. So we wanted to make the change early to gather as much feedback as possible. Excellent news. Of course, distributions will still be able to opt for the unmaintained, deprecated X.org if they want to, but most distributions will opt for Wayland, as all the major ones have been doing for a while now.
The year was 1983. Microsoft was slowly becoming a well-known tech company in the PC space. Two years before, in 1981, Its MS-DOS operating system would be installed in the first IBM PC. It launched its first-word processing program, Word, earlier in 1983, along with its first Microsoft Mouse product. It even made Mac and PC hardware expansion cards. However, 40 years ago today, on November 10, 1983 at a press event in New York City, Microsoft first revealed its plans to launch an all-new graphical user interface-based PC operating system. The company called the OS Windows. If you’ve ever used Windows 1.0 – either because you’re old and remember it as new, or in a VM – you’ll know just how limited and useless Windows 1.0 really was. Still, it set the stage for one of the most successful tech products of all time, and few products in tech can boast about being on the market for four decades. That being said, I’m not exactly sad Windows seems to be in its twilight years.
