Monthly Archive:: March 2020

The European Commission has announced plans for new “right to repair” rules that it hopes will cover phones, tablets, and laptops by 2021. If successful, these rules will mean these devices should remain useful for longer before needing to be recycled or ending up in landfills. The plans were introduced as part of a wide-ranging set of product initiatives that also cover textiles, plastics, packaging, and food with the aim of helping the trading bloc become climate neutral by 2050. As well as introducing new “right to repair” rules, the EU also wants products to be more sustainably designed in the first place. Under the new plan, products should be more durable, reusable, upgradeable, and constructed out of more recycled materials. The EU’s hope is to reward manufacturers that achieve these goals. Finally, the EU is also considering introducing a new scheme to let consumers more easily sell or return old phones, tablets, and chargers. Good. One of the most important aspects of these rules is that the EU wants to force companies to provide spare parts to third party repair shops, which is something that’s entirely normal in, for instance, the car industry, but so far hasn’t been implemented in the technology sector yet because tech companies are special because reasons. EU-wide right-to-repair legislation will force companies like Apple and Samsung to take device longevity and repairability seriously, and these benefits will spill over to other parts of the world, such as the US, Canada, and maybe even the UK.

We are pleased to announce the official release of GNOME 3.36: “Gresik”. Version 3.36 contains six months of work by the GNOME community and includes many improvements, performance enhancements, and new features. Highlights from this release include visual refreshes for a number of applications and interfaces, particularly noteworthy being the login and unlock interfaces. The release notes provide a more detailed overview of the changes.

We don’t often talk about power supplies, but Intel’s new ATX12VO spec—that’s an ‘O’ for ‘Oscar,’ not a zero—will start appearing soon in pre-built PCs from OEMs and system integrators, and it represents a major change in PSU design. The ATX12VO spec removes voltage rails from the power supply, all in a bid to improve efficiency standards on the PC and meet stringent government regulations. But while the spec essentially removes +3.3-volt, +5-volt and -12-volt and +5-volt standby power from the PSU, they aren’t going away—they’re just moving to the motherboard. That’s the other big change, so keep reading to find out more. Power supplies are definitely one of the more cumbersome parts of a modern PC build, so any changes there can potentially have a big impact. The new Mac Pro has really shown how a modern PC can be designed to not use ugly and annoying cabling, opting instead for various pogo pins and properly aligned connectors. Sure, that would be much harder to accomplish in the open ecosystem of PCs, but for an easier building experience and thus potential access to a larger segment of the market, players in the PC industry would do well to come together and take a long, hard look at the Mac Pro and how to replicate some of its innovations into the wider PC industry.

I have been curious about data compression and the Zip file format in particular for a long time. At some point I decided to address that by learning how it works and writing my own Zip program. The implementation turned into an exciting programming exercise; there is great pleasure to be had from creating a well oiled machine that takes data apart, jumbles its bits into a more efficient representation, and puts it all back together again. Hopefully it is interesting to read about too. This article explains how the Zip file format and its compression scheme work in great detail: LZ77 compression, Huffman coding, Deflate and all. It tells some of the history, and provides a reasonably efficient example implementation written from scratch in C. One for the ages. Articles like this don’t get written every day.

Admittedly it’s been while since I last wrote about this (formerly MATE-based) desktop environment, but it’s still out there, shipping as default experience in Ubuntu Kylin, doing its thing. But not for much longer, it seems. Based on an updated shared on Chinese social media, the UKUI team appear to be rebuilding UKUI using Qt. The plan, they say, is to stick to to the same “easy, excellent, expert, elaborate” mantra that the original UKUI desktop was (supposedly) built to. I’m highlighting this here because there’s a ton of interesting Linux desktop work going on in China that we in the west rarely talk about, such as Deepin and its Qt-based Deepin Desktop Environment that’s also available on some other distributions. UKUI fits in that same bucket. There’s, of course, legitimate concerns over code from China, but since these projects are open source, it would seem there’s little to worry about on that front. The fact of the matter is that, totalitarian dictatorship or not, Chinese people are just regular folks, and many of them are probably excellent programmers and designers that can contribute a lot to the health, variety, and competition within the desktop Linux and wider open source community.

Want a more capable and less restrictive operating system on your iPhone? Enter Project Sandcastle. The iPhone restricts users to operate inside a sandbox. But when you buy an iPhone, you own the iPhone hardware. Android for the iPhone gives you the freedom to run a different operating system on that hardware. Android for the iPhone has many exciting practical applications, from forensics research to dual-booting ephemeral devices to combatting e-waste. Our goal has always been to push mobile research forward, and we’re excited to see what the developer community builds from this foundation. This project has some serious pedigree to it, from the original developers behind Android for the very first iPhone, to Corellium, a company Apple is suing because Corellium offers virtualised iOS devices in the cloud for developers. There’s so much going on here I barely know where to start. In any event, the current Android for iPhone beta only supports the iPhone 7 and 7+, but not every part of them, and other devices are clearly in the very early stages. The source code to Project Sandcastle is available on Github. I hope this will one day lead to Android running well on all sorts of iPhone models, if only because it is such a delightful slap in the face to Apple’s anti-consumer restrictions on its hardware and software.

Did you ever load up your modern Windows 10 PC, ready to install your favourite application or game, only to be greeted by a dialog telling you it won’t run, and then you realise you’re trying to run a 16 bit application on your modern 64 bit Windows 10 installation? I swear to god, this happens to me all the time. Luckily, there’s a solution to this problem. In fact, there’s multiple solutions to this problem. Of course, you can always just fire up a virtual machine with 32 bit Windows, Windows 3.1, or OS/2 for massive style points, but that’s cumbersome and uncool (except for OS/2. OS/2 is always cool). There’s a better way. Enter winevdm by otya128, which is a combination of MAME’s i386 emulation and the 16 bit part of wine. It allows you to run 16 bit applications on modern 64 bit versions of Windows. Edward Mendelson created a handy installer with some additional useful tools to make the process even easier. As a sidenote, there’s also NTVDMx64, which is a version of Microsoft’s own NTVDM (Windows NT’s virtual DOS machine) adapted for 64 bit (Mendelson made a handy installer for this one, too). By its very nature, NTVDMx64 doesn’t run Windows 16 bit applications; only DOS ones. It is also important to note that NTVDMx64 is based on leaked Windows NT source code, so please be careful in which settings you use it. There’s no real reason I’m talking about this today, other than the fact I that I ran into this stuff a few days ago when watching a YouTube video about running the IBM WorkPlace Shell for Windows 3.x on Windows 10, and thought it was fascinating. It might prove useful for some of you working at companies still running old 16 bit stuff, or if you’re digging around in your old floppy collection.

For those unfamiliar, PowerShell 7 is the latest major update to PowerShell, a cross-platform (Windows, Linux, and macOS) automation tool and configuration framework optimized for dealing with structured data (e.g. JSON, CSV, XML, etc.), REST APIs, and object models. PowerShell includes a command-line shell, object-oriented scripting language, and a set of tools for executing scripts/cmdlets and managing modules. Do we have any PowerShell users on OSNews? If so, why are you using it, and what for?

Today we have the launch of the Ampere Altra Arm CPUs. This is a completely new design built specifically for cloud providers. It has up to 80 cores and is designed to go head-to-head with AMD EPYC 7002 “Rome” series processors as well as 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Refresh parts. Ampere is launching today but we do not have a test system as we have had for all of the other major server chip launches recently. It sounds like Ampere is shipping mass production units soon, but not at the time we were briefed. Hopefully, we can get more hands-on insights in the near future. In this article, we are going to discuss the architecture based on the documents we have and our discussion with the company. We are going to check performance claims and help our readers critically analyze what they are being shown. We are then going to discuss systems disclosed with the chips before getting to our final thoughts. This seems like an impressive piece of engineering, but we’ll definitely need test systems and proper reviews to test the claims about the chip. While I’m very happy AMD is back in the game and we’ve got some real competition to Intel, we as consumers would benefit even more from proper ISA competition, something we haven’t seen in a long time.

This post will give you a quick intro to the basics of GUI programming for SerenityOS. A one-line introduction that covers the article perfectly. A rarity, indeed. We covered SerenityOS late last year.

Speaking about LSDJ, the premiere music software for the Game Boy, George Buckenham writes: But it also got me thinking about chorded input schemes. LSDJ is a workhorse of a program, able to do a lot of stuff. And it’s designed to let you do that stuff quickly – to let you iterate fast, put down a tune fast, adjust things while you’re standing on stage. But also… a Gameboy has 8 buttons – 4 directions, A, B, SELECT and START. So it has to make those buttons work hard. And that’s where chording comes in. Chording is a means of inputting commands to software by holding down multiple buttons at once. Ctrl-C is an example of a chorded command. Hold down Ctrl, then press C while you’re doing it. Text copied. But you can also make chording work harder than that. It requires a lot of planning and thinking to make a complex application controllable by only a few buttons, such as the mere 8 buttons on the original Game Boy. I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of developers who have to make things work with limitations such as these.

The Chinese government has facilitated the mass transfer of Uyghur and other ethnic minority citizens from the far west region of Xinjiang to factories across the country. Under conditions that strongly suggest forced labour, Uyghurs are working in factories that are in the supply chains of at least 83 well-known global brands in the technology, clothing and automotive sectors, including Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen. The current coronavirus outbreak is showing us once again just how dependent the world is on Chinese manufacturing. The companies implicated in this report – technology companies in particular, since this is OSNews – need all these Chinese workers to function, to exist, and to grow their revenue and Cayman Islands money piles even more, more, more. Do you really think Tim Cook loses one night of sleep over a few thousand Muslims ground to minced meat between the cogs of his manufacturing empire?

The other day I set out to solve a seemingly simple problem: With a DOS extended application, lock down memory buffers using DPMI and use them for bus-mastering (BusLogic SCSI HBA, though the exact device model isn’t really relevant to the problem). Now, DPMI does not allow querying the physical address of a memory region, although it does have provisions for mapping a given physical memory area. But that doesn’t help here–mapping physical memory is useful for framebuffers where a device memory needs to be mapped so that an application can access it. In my case, I needed the opposite, allowing a bus-mastering device to use already-allocated system memory. I think I may have understood some of these words.

In software development, and especially Google’s development cycles, there’s usually a point where the developers “eat their own dogfood” or use their own work, before letting normal users try it. It seems that Google’s long-in-development Fuchsia OS may finally be reaching this “dogfood” stage. And yet, we’re still no closer to what, exactly, Fuchsia is going to be for.