Monthly Archive:: February 2023
Apple’s iPhone 15 series will officially only support USB-C accessories that have been certified by Apple’s own Made for iPhone (MFi) program, potentially limiting the functionality of accessories not approved by Apple, an established leaker has now claimed. So you’re getting USB-C, but not really. Leave it to Apple to milk even something as mundane as this.
In the last three weeks, we also launched the new AI-powered Bing into preview for more than 1 million people in 169 countries, and expanded the new Bing to the Bing and Edge mobile apps as well as introduced it into Skype. It is a new era in Search, Chat and Creation and with the new Bing and Edge you now have your own copilot for the web. Today, we take the next major step forward adding to the incredible breadth and ease of use of the Windows PC by implementing a typable Windows search box and the amazing capability of the new AI-powered Bing directly into the taskbar. Putting all your search needs for Windows in one easy to find location. I feel like adding a glorified autocomplete that tricks people into thinking it’s a real artificial intelligence to the Windows taskbar is not exactly what Windows users are looking for, but I guess that services revenue cash register has to keep dinging. I’m getting major cryptocurrency, NFT, and web3 vibes from all this, and I can’t wait for the whole thing to come crashing down once again.
One interesting aspect of a computer’s instruction set is its addressing modes, how the computer determines the address for a memory access. The Intel 8086 (1978) used the ModR/M byte, a special byte following the opcode, to select the addressing mode. The ModR/M byte has persisted into the modern x86 architecture, so it’s interesting to look at its roots and original implementation. In this post, I look at the hardware and microcode in the 8086 that implements ModR/M and how the 8086 designers fit multiple addressing modes into the 8086’s limited microcode ROM. One technique was a hybrid approach that combined generic microcode with hardware logic that filled in the details for a particular instruction. A second technique was modular microcode, with subroutines for various parts of the task. This is way above my pay grade, but I know quite a few of you love this kind of writing. Very in-depth.
The merge request for landing the first of “many” parts of the Wayland driver for Wine was opened this morning. This is part of the effort of allowing Windows games/applications running under Wine to operate natively on Wayland rather than having to go through XWayland. Excellent work.
I believe that learning MINIX is probably the best way to learn about operating systems. Until now, I have not been able to find a MINIX 3 project that allows you to compile the code that is referenced in the book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (3e) (v3.1.0). It was tricky to get a reasonable development setup to make it possible for newbies like myself to learn from the book. This is an attempt to fix that and make it easy to browse, edit, recompile, and execute the code. An easy way to get started with MINIX, the famous microkernel teaching operating system from the university I got my two degrees at – although I’m not entirely sure if that’s a ringing endorsement.
The E-Class is a bit of a sneak peek into the upcoming Mercedes-Benz Operating System (MB.OS). Mercedes CTO Markus Schaefer said, “The E-Class will be a precursor in the space of infotainment. We call it the 0.8 version of MB.OS.” While the shoutout of the E-Class is apt, the reality is the upcoming MB.OS is a huge change for Mercedes, which plans to own the entire software stack, giving it control over every aspect of the vehicle. It’s a big deal for a company that sees over-the-air updates, subscriptions, and digital purchases as an integral part of its future. The chip-to-cloud Linux and QNX-based MB.OS platform will be part of the upcoming MMA (Mercedes Modular Architecture). At a high level, QNX will handle safety and the dash cluster, and Linux will take care of the infotainment aspect. The first vehicle based on the platform will be introduced in the later part of 2024, with the vehicle reaching showrooms in 2025. I’d love to review this new upcoming operating system from Mercedes-Benz. I’m sure David, OSNews’ owner, is more than willing to buy me an E-Class in 2025, right David? In all seriousness, I would love to review the operating system and UI experience of modern cars, as I feel there’s a lot of innovation and experimentation taking place in this space – some for good, and lots for… Not so good – but for obvious reasons, this is very hard to do. I’ve contemplated contacting local dealers here, but they have very little to gain from a tech site with an audience almost exclusively outside of the north of Sweden reviewing their products. In short, I accept donations in the form of cars.
Being the default out-of-the-box browser on Windows 10 and 11 makes Microsoft Edge a go-to utility for downloading Chrome or another browser. That upsets Microsoft so much that it constantly comes with more aggressive and user-hostile methods to make customers stay on Edge. An attempt to install Chrome using Edge Canary now results in the browser displaying two ads: the first (tiny one) will pop on the screen when the Chrome website loads, and the second, a humongous full-size banner, will appear once the download starts. Yikes! Yikes indeed. Probably s suggestion by their glorified autocomplete.
As part of our combined efforts, the Ubuntu flavors have made a joint decision to adjust some of the default packages on Ubuntu: Going forward, the Flatpak package as well as the packages to integrate Flatpak into the respective software center will no longer be installed by default in the next release due in April 2023, Lunar Lobster. Users who have used Flatpak will not be affected on upgrade, as flavors are including a special migration that takes this into account. Those who haven’t interacted with Flatpak will be presented with software from the Ubuntu repositories and the Snap Store. We think this will improve the out-of-the-box Ubuntu experience for new users while respecting how existing users personalize their own experiences. However, we don’t want this to come as a surprise. If you have comments specific to this change you are welcome to respond here on discourse. Canonical’s got Snap to peddle, so FlatPak is a competitor. That’s all there’s to it. I maintain they’re all bad and unnecessary – a .deb, an .rpm, and your source code is all you need to cover 99.9% of Linux users in a standard, easy-to-use, uncompromising way.
A keyboard, mouse, a NIC, VGA output, 16MB of RAM and a whole gig (you wish) of read-only optical drive space with a 200MHz Hitachi SuperH SH-4 CPU faulting its paltry 8K of I-cache and 16K of D-cache non-stop. Now freshly refurbished, its cooling fan runs louder than my Power Mac Quad G5 at idle and the drive makes more disk seeking noise than when I can’t find a lost floppy. And since the buzzword with Linux distros today is immutability, what could be more immutable than an ephemeral, desperately undersized RAM disk overlaid on a live CD? i want a DreamCast.
The way Haiku handles package management and its alternative approach to an “immutable system” is one of those ideas I find really cool. Here’s what it looks like from a desktop user’s perspective – there’s all the usual stuff like an “app store”, package updater, repositories of packages and so on. It’s all there and works well – it’s easily as smooth as any desktop Linux experience. However, it’s the implementation details behind the scenes that make it so interesting to me. Haiku takes a refreshingly new approach to package management. A deep dive into Haiku’s surprisingly robust and full-featured package management system.
Paul Weissmann, maintainer of OpenPA, the definitive source of information on HP’s PA-RISC hardware and software, has published an article about how the state of information preservation on this topic has changed substantially since OpenPA’s founding in 1999. The main challenges for OpenPA at the time were both finding all the available information, as search engines were still young in the late 1990s, as well as making sense of it all as it was just so much and new sources kept appearing. This went on until the mid to late 2000s, when solid and stable sources could be found and referenced, which OpenPA did. The Internet and information on it changed since then, slowly but surely, in a profound way. Many original sources have disappeared and so much information has been lost in only two decades – making OpenPA the authoritative source for PA-RISC in some ways. A long journey from documenting complex information of the 1990s to an historic archive on the PA-RISC era. OpenPA is an amazing resource, so if you happen to have any information worth sharing with Weissmann, please do so.
It’s been many years since Intel Itanium processors made a convincing story and faced a slow demise over the past decade. While the last of the Itanium 9700 “Kittson” processors shipped in 2021, just two years later now the Linux kernel is already looking at possibly seeing its IA-64 support removed over having no maintainers or apparent users. I have a morbid curiosity when it comes to Itanium, and I’ve been on the lookout for an Itanium workstation for two decades now. This is the first time where one of these “Linux to deprecate some old unused architecture” posts might actually affect me at some point, and I’m outraged. Outraged, I tell you!
Our mobile Internet Service Provider (ISP) has a bundle where they provide a 4G modem for internet access, and a separate TV set-top box that can be used to watch their TV content or to watch streaming services. This device was sent to us as part of the bundle, but at Zeus, we don’t really have a use for it: we don’t really watch television in our space. What we do have a need for, however, are low-power computers that can run Linux. In this blog post, we will hack this set-top box to run Linux instead of Android TV. Just some good ol’ fashioned hackery for the weekend. You’ll need a soldering iron.
Google has 175,000+ capable and well-compensated employees who get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year. Like mice, they are trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, documents, meetings, bug reports, triage, OKRs, H1 plans followed by H2 plans, all-hands summits, and inevitable reorgs. The mice are regularly fed their “cheese” (promotions, bonuses, fancy food, fancier perks) and despite many wanting to experience personal satisfaction and impact from their work, the system trains them to quell these inappropriate desires and learn what it actually means to be “Googley” — just don’t rock the boat. As Deepak Malhotra put it in his excellent business fable, at some point the problem is no longer that the mouse is in a maze. The problem is that “the maze is in the mouse”. I have never worked at any company – other than the hardware store for 7-8 years when I was a teenager and during university – so I have no idea if this is uncommon, but this sounds like my personal version of hell. No wonder Google has such a massive graveyard.
KDE Plasma 5.27, a Long Term Support release and the final release in the Plasma 5 series which is based on Qt 5, has been released. Plasma 5.27 brings exciting new improvements to your desktop, and the first thing you’ll notice when firing up Plasma is our new Konqi-powered wizard which will guide you through setting up the desktop. Other big new features include a window tiling system, a more stylish app theme, cleaner and more usable tools, and widgets that give you more control over your machine.
Bing AI did a great job of creating media hype, but their product is no better than Google’s Bard. At least as far as we can tell from the limited information we have about both. I am shocked that the Bing team created this pre-recorded demo filled with inaccurate information, and confidently presented it to the world as if it were good. I am even more shocked that this trick worked, and everyone jumped on the Bing AI hype train without doing an ounce of due diligence. Bing AI is incapable of extracting accurate numbers from a document, and confidently makes up information even when it claims to have sources. It is definitely not ready for launch, and should not be used by anyone who wants an accurate model of reality. Tools like ChatGPT are fun novelties, and there’s definitely interesting technology underpinning them, but they are so clearly not very good at what they’re supposed to be good at. It is entirely irresponsible of Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google to throw these alpha versions out there where the Facebook boomers can find them. Have they learned nothing from social media and its deeply corrupting influence on the general population’s ability to separate truth from fiction? And now we have “artificial intelligences” telling these very same gullible people flat-out lies as truth, presented in a way that gives these lies even more of a veneer of reliability and trustworthiness than a tweet or Facebook post ever did? These tools are going to lead to a brand new wave of misinformation and lies, and society is going to pay the price. Again.
These two men were joined by William Joy and Scott McNealy, and on the 24th of February in 1982, they founded Sun Microsystems. All of these men are Stanford graduates (except for Joy who went to Berkley), and the name “Sun” is derived from Stanford University Network. This is well named as from the start, Sun systems included network capability. Employee 5, John Gage, went so far as to say “the network is the computer,” which became the Sun slogan. Funding for this adventure was provided by Eastman Kodak, AT&T, Olivetti, and Xerox. I have a soft spot for Sun. I don’t care much for Java, but their hardware – especially their workstations and thin clients – were unique and cool, and it’s incredibly sad the company couldn’t keep their workstation business operational. SPARC actually managed to hold on for quite a while – more so than other non-x86 architectures – but Oracle was not at all interested in the workstation market, which was probably the right financial call. I’m still looking for a Sun Ultra 45 that doesn’t cost my me firstborn.
Calmira Reborn is fourth in the line of Calmira projects. It is a fork of Calmira LFN 3.32 by Alexandre Rodrigues de Sousa, itself a fork of Calmira II 3.3 by Calmira Online!, itself a fork of Calmira 2.2SR by Li-Hsin Huang. This fork does not place much emphasis on new features and instead focuses on fixing issues I’ve discovered with Calmira LFN while using it on my old computers. Calmira should ring a bell for most Windows users of the ’90s. Calmira adds a Windows 95-like desktop environment to replace Program Manager on Windows 3.x, along with tons of other features and niceties. It makes using Windows 3.x a lot less cumbersome, and I am definitely going to set up a new Windows 3.11 install in PCem to try this new release out.
An SDK for developing DOS software for x86 machines, including IBM PC compatibles and NEC PC-98 This SDK (Software Development Kit) is modeled after the Amiga NDK (Native Development Kit). The Amiga NDK contains a set of header files and libraries for both assembly and C development, which provides all the required constants, flags, data structures and whatnot to interface directly with the hardware, and having readable code making use of human-readable symbols and type definitions. An equivalent for the IBM PC platform, or PC DOS/MS-DOS/compatible environments has never been available to my knowledge. This SDK attempts to fill that void. Think of it as Ralfs Interrupt List and Bochs ports.lst turned into .inc/.asm and .h/.c files ready for use in a programming environment. What an awesome initiative.
Companies like Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft have versions of their web browsers on Apple’s iOS and iPadOS App Stores, but these versions come with a big caveat: The App Store rules require them to use Safari’s WebKit rendering engine rather than the engines those browsers use in other operating systems. But that could be changing. According to The Register, Google and Mozilla have recently been spotted working on versions of Chromium and Firefox that use their normal Blink and Gecko rendering engines, respectively. This only makes sense. It’s very likely the rules around browser engines is going to go away, so I’m glad the competition is getting ready for this inevitability. If for some reason I’m ever forced at gunpoint to use iOS, I’d at least have access to real Firefox.
Submitted by 
Guest post by