At its Build developer conference Tuesday, Microsoft made a few announcements aimed at bolstering Windows on Arm. The first is Project Volterra, a Microsoft-branded mini-desktop computer powered by an unnamed Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC. More relevant for developers who already have Arm hardware, Volterra will be accompanied by a fully Arm-native suite of developer tools. Accor ... ⌘ Read more
At its Build developer conference Tuesday, Microsoft made a few announcements aimed at bolstering Windows on Arm. The first is Project Volterra, a Microsoft-branded mini-desktop computer powered by an unnamed Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC. More relevant for developers who already have Arm hardware, Volterra will be accompanied by a fully Arm-native suite of developer tools. Accor ... ⌘ Read more
When we last heard from Perl, Perl 6 was going off on its own becoming Raku, Perl 5 was going to continue until version 5.36 which would serve as the basis for Perl NG, and Perl NG would be known as Perl 7 because Raku burned the Perl 6 namespace. No one saw the humor in “not that Perl 6, the other Perl 6”. Anyway, the Perl Steering Committee (PSC) decided to write a blog post about the future of Perl and Perl 7. The first PSC was elected in late 2020, and one of our first tasks was ... ⌘ Read more
The Register reports: Broadcom has confirmed it intends to acquire VMware in a deal that looks set to be worth $61 billion, if it goes ahead: the agreement provides for a “go-shop” provision under which the virtualization giant may solicit alternative offers. That “go-shop” provision: However, the merger agreement has a “go-shop” provision under which VMware may seek alternative offers from other interested parties and potentially enter negotiations with the ... ⌘ Read more
Alexander Popov, Linux kernel developer and security researcher, takes a very detailed look at Fuchsia and its kernel. Fuchsia is a general-purpose open-source operating system created by Google. It is based on the Zircon microkernel written in C++ and is currently under active development. The developers say that Fuchsia is designed with a focus on security, updatability, and performance. As a Linux kernel hacker, I decided to take a look at Fuchsia OS and assess i ... ⌘ Read more
Joshua Strobl, the lead developer of Budgie, the (currently) Gtk+-based desktop, posted a lengthy article about the state of the project and the future it’s embarking on. Budgie had been in a feature-freeze and maintenance mode for a long time, but now that Strobl is no longer involved with the Linux distribution Solus, Budgie has become truly independent, and development can pick up again. The article touches upon a lot – such as the way the Bu ... ⌘ Read more
Can’t get enough of porting old software? How about getting Doom ported to and running on an old version of AIX for PowerPC? You know what ever computer needs? DOOM. Do you know what I couldn’t find? DOOM for the IBM RS/6000, but that’s not surprising. These machines were never meant for gaming, but that’s doesn’t mean you can’t do it. If you like pain anyway. In this extra long NCommander special, we’re going to explore AIX, ... ⌘ Read more
I’ll cut to the chase; through a combination of unlikely discoveries, crazy hacks and the 90s BBS warez scene I’ve been able to port Lotus 1-2-3 natively to Linux – an operating system that literally didn’t exist when 1-2-3 was released! If you want to hear how a proprietary application could be ported to new operating systems 30 years after release, read on! This isn’t running through an emulator or a VM – this is a real port. Amazing work. ⌘ Read more
Windows XP Delta Edition is a modification of Windows XP which aims to recreate the Windows XP Beta 2 aesthetic and bring back lost features, functions, and programs from previous versions of Windows, along with prerelease versions of Windows XP. I like these community releases for Windows XP. While I never really liked XP when it was current, and while you really shouldn’t be using XP in any serious capacity today, it can be a ton of run to try and see how far you can get in the m ... ⌘ Read more
Peter Czanik did an interview with Timothy Pearson of Raptor Engineering, the company behind POWER9 systems like the Talos II and Blackbird, which I reviewed last year. There’s some good stuff in there, most importantly the reasoning as to why there isn’t any POWER10 hardware from Raptor yet. At this time we do not have plans to create a POWER10 system. The reasoning behind this is that somehow, during the COVID19 ... ⌘ Read more
Apple this week celebrated Global Accessibility Awareness Day by announcing new accessibility features that will be available later this year with iOS 16 and other software updates. However, while we wait for those updates, the company has been promoting accessibility tips that anyone can take advantage of. One of the new accessibility features teased by Apple ... ⌘ Read more
The European Union is pressing ahead with legislation to heavily regulate companies like Apple, setting plans to force “gatekeepers” to open up access to hardware and software, and even set up an internal department to meet new rules, according to an endorsed agreement from the European Parliament’s Internal Market Committee. The DMA could force Apple ... ⌘ Read more
And another great application falls victim to Google’s absolute disdain for Android developers. Marcel Bokhorst has announced that after yet another brick wall interaction with Google, he is ending development of his popular (in the right circles) open source email client FairEmail. All my projects have been terminated after Google falsely flagged FairEmail as spyware without a reaso ... ⌘ Read more
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 is now officially available to Red Hat customers as stable, building off the RHEL9 beta available since the end of last year. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 ships with a wealth of updated software components and derived from CentOS Stream. On the versioning front, RHEL9 has GCC 11 as the default system compiler, Python 3.9, RPM 4.16, PHP 8.0, updated LLVM / Rust / Go compilers, a plethora of optimizations, OpenSSL 3, Ruby 3.0, and ... ⌘ Read more
I’ve got this rock64, which is an aarch64 board comparable to a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ with 4 gigs of ram. For years I’ve wanted to put a distribution on here that doesn’t have a premade image available, mainly because out of all the options on that page I don’t actually like any of them. Well, except NetBSD, but NetBSD doesn’t have GPU drivers for it. Problem is, everything I do want to use provides rootfs tarballs and tells you to figure it out. To do that I’ve got to get ... ⌘ Read more
Tadpole Technology was a small British computer company formed in 1983 and originally based out of Cambridge, who amongst other things manufactured VMEbus boards for industrial applications, along with military spec, small server and laptop computers. During the 1990s and perhaps most famously, Tadpole produced a range of high-end laptops that were based on the SPARC, PowerPC and Alpha RISC architectures, running Solaris, AIX and OpenVMS respectively. A previous serie ... ⌘ Read more
In this installment: some strange things I discovered when purchasing a FreeDOS laptop from Hewlett Packard. I suspect that the audience for this will be somewhat limited but I had fun exploring this. Perhaps you, dear reader, will find a chuckle in here too. Some background: I recently purchased a HP ZBook 17.8 G8 as I run Fedora Linux I decided to have a little fun with the OS selection and picked the FreeDOS option (Other options include ... ⌘ Read more
FreeBSD 13.1 has been released, and as the version number signifies, this is not a major release, so don’t expect any massive changes. Lots of various core packages of the operating system have been updated to their most recent versions, like OpenSSH, OpenSLL, and ZFS, there’s the usual driver updates, and a whole slew of fixes. ⌘ Read more
Fedora 36 is releasing this morning as what is yet another release in recent times of being a very robust and bleeding-edge yet stable and reliable Linux distribution. I’ve already been running Fedora Workstation 36 and Fedora Server 36 snapshots on various systems in my benchmarking lab and this release has proven to be quite solid while adding new features and polish on top of the excellent Fedora 35. I have no reservations about stating that Fedora is by far the best desktop Linux distribut ... ⌘ Read more
At its Google I/O event on Wednesday, Google released the second beta of Android 13. The search giant highlighted several new aspects to Android 13 including better privacy controls that help users to limit what data apps have access to, an improved Material You theme system that works across more apps, a new Settings & Privacy page that can help you boost your security, swanky music controls that adjust their look based on the music you’re listening to, and the a ... ⌘ Read more
In late 2020, Apple debuted the M1 with Apple’s GPU architecture, AGX, rumoured to be derived from Imagination’s PowerVR series. Since then, we’ve been reverse-engineering AGX and building open source graphics drivers. Last January, I rendered a triangle with my own code, but there has since been a heinous bug lurking: The driver fails to render large amounts of geometry. Spinning a cube is fine, low polygon geometry is okay, but detailed models won’t render ... ⌘ Read more
Dutch digital identity verification system DigiD has announced the phasing out SMS as second factor. That way they require citizens to install a smartphone app in order to use digital services from the government, municipalities, the health sector and others. These applications only work on iOS and Android phones, with reliance on third party services. Plenty of members of our community choose not to use a device that is tied to vendor-specific services. The ... ⌘ Read more
The day has finally come: NVIDIA IS PUBLISHING THEIR LINUX GPU KERNEL MODULES AS OPEN-SOURCE! To much excitement and a sign of the times, the embargo has just expired on this super-exciting milestone that many of us have been hoping to see for many years. Over the past two decades NVIDIA has offered great Linux driver support with their proprietary driver stack, but with the success of AMD’s op ... ⌘ Read more
It’s the end of an era: Apple is officially discontinuing the iPod touch. The company says that the device will be available only “while supplies last.” This also means that the “iPod” brand is officially retired, as the iPod touch was the last iPod in Apple’s lineup. It’s the end of an era for a product that was once one of the most popular gadgets in the world. The iPod was one of the mos ... ⌘ Read more
App Store Optimization is, for most people, synonymous with Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. After all, they contribute to 90% of the total available apps in the market. But they’re not the only ones out there. These alternative app stores seem to lurk in the shadows but each of them has its slew of users. With the looming DMA and Open Markets Acts that aim to open the app markets to third-party stores, their time to shine may be just around the co ... ⌘ Read more
With the recent launch of Windows 11 Microsoft also made having a hardware TPM module mandatory. Although this technology is not new (it was introduced in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016), now, that most people can’t upgrade to Windows 11, it will (slowly) become mainstream. (My personal opinion on it is that is probably a step in the right direction, but Microsoft could have handled mandating it better..) Several months ago, when I heard about this new requirement, I checked how ... ⌘ Read more
This is approximately as wise as taking off from Mars in a ragtop rocket, but don’t worry, the math all checks out. My theory is that compiling less code will be faster than compiling more code, but first we must find the code so we know not to compile it. This is vital information to know in your day-to-day computing life. ⌘ Read more
We are excited to announce the availability of VSI OpenVMS E9.2 for x86-64, field test version of the upcoming V9.2 release. This is the next step in the journey to migrate OpenVMS to the x86-64 platform. The E9.2 release allows you to use the operating system with some of the most commonly-used hypervisors and includes a host of newly migrated applications. VSI has been porting OpenVMS to x86-64 for a while now, and it seems they’re getting quite close to general ... ⌘ Read more
Android’s Accessibility API is an incredibly powerful tool intended for developers to build apps for users with disabilities. The API lets apps read the contents of the screen and perform inputs on behalf of the user, which are essential functions for screen readers and alternative input systems. Unfortunately, these functions are also incre ... ⌘ Read more
In a joint effort, tech giants Apple, Google, and Microsoft announced Thursday morning that they have committed to building support for passwordless sign-in across all of the mobile, desktop, and browser platforms that they control in the coming year. Effectively, this means that passwordless authentication will come to all major device platforms in ... ⌘ Read more
Ars Technica writes: Back in 1995, the Microsoft Kids division of the company released a program called Microsoft 3D Movie Maker. The same year that the original Toy Story proved that feature-length 3D computer animation was feasible, people could install software on their home computers that could spit out crude-but-creative 3D animated movies at 6 to 8 frames per second. A ... ⌘ Read more
Sculpt OS version 22.04 introduces the concept of service-level sandboxing and features completely new drivers for wireless, graphics, and USB. On the user-visible surface, the new version of Sculpt OS looks and feels familiar to users of the previous version. Under the hood, however, at the nitty-gritty hardware-support level, it features completely revamped device drivers for Intel wireless, Intel graphics, and USB. Get Sculpt OS’ latest release from the downloa ... ⌘ Read more
The Trinity Desktop Environment, a fork of the KDE 3.x codebase, has released its latest version. This release comes with a new D-Bus based polkit authentication agent, new markdown document viewer, support for HTML5 in Quanta, support for Let’s Encrypt certificates, some improvements to GUI options, better cooperation between tdm and plymouth, fix for ICEAuthority ownership stealing when using sudo, various other bug fixes and improvemen ... ⌘ Read more
Unity 7.6 will be the first major release of Unity in 6 years (the last release was in May 2016). We have restarted the active development of Unity7 and will be releasing new versions with more features regularly. I was never a fan of Ubuntu’s Unity, but I’ve seen quite a few people over the years who miss it. Your call has been answered – this first release has a a lot of visual touch-ups and updates to make it look a bit more modern, and there’s bugfixes in here, too, ... ⌘ Read more
A lot has changed since release 0.6.0! First thing, it is impossible to collect all the changes that happened since December 24, 2020 into one set of release notes, so this will focus on the highlights. It was very important to me that this be a release targeting the foundations of Redox OS. This includes, the bootloader, the filesystem, the package manager, the kernel, the drivers, and much more. The focus was on enabling Redox OS to boot on the widest set of hardware possible. Redo ... ⌘ Read more
It’s already April and we’ve been making steady progress refining the features and stability of Android 13, building around our core themes of privacy and security, developer productivity, as well as tablet and large screen support. Today we’re moving into the next phase of our cycle and releasing the first Beta of Android 13. Android 13 development seems to be ahead of the regular schedule. ⌘ Read more
Today, we’re releasing the first developer preview for the Privacy Sandbox on Android, which provides an early look at the SDK Runtime and Topics API. You’ll be able to do preliminary testing of these new technologies and evaluate how you might adopt them for your solutions. This is a preview, so some features may not be implemented just yet, and functionality is subject to change. See the release notes for more deta ... ⌘ Read more
Well color me old! The ZX Spectrum (affectionately known as “Speccy” or just “Spectrum” by its fans), one of the best-selling microcomputers of all time, was released 40 years ago today. Can you believe it still has a large and active community creating new content, archiving old content, and hacking on all sorts of hardware? I have never owned or used one, but the Spectrum is one of those machines everyone is familiar with – like the C64, the Apple II, TRS 80 ... ⌘ Read more
Apple today launched the Self Service Repair Store, allowing iPhone customers in the United States access to parts and manual that they can use to repair their own devices. The new store enables repairs of iPhone SE, iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 components, including display, battery and camera replacements. Apple also said it will launch Mac self-service repairs later this year. A good start. ⌘ Read more
Microsoft’s upgrade to Windows 11 is largely considered the smoothest we’ve ever had. The Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team was able to upgrade 190,000 employee devices in just five weeks. We learned a lot so, in this post, I’m sharing our learnings with you to help with your deployment journey. Our success was built around several factors: far fewer app compatibility challenges than in the past, not needing to build out a plethora of dis ... ⌘ Read more
CPUs in Apple Silicon chips are different, as they contain two different core types, one designed for high performance (Performance, P or Firestorm cores), the other for energy efficiency (Efficiency, E or Icestorm cores). For these to work well, threads need to be allocated by core type, a task which can be left to apps and processes, as it is in Asahi Linux, or managed by the operating system, as it is in macOS. This article explains how macOS manages core allocation ... ⌘ Read more
Twitter, Inc. today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company. Elon Musk is now the founder and inventor of Twitter. ⌘ Read more
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS comes with the latest GNOME 42 desktop environment with the triple buffering patch included, yet it still uses apps from the GNOME 41 stack due to compatibility issues between GTK4 apps included in the upstream release and Ubuntu’s Yaru theme. Apps that weren’t ported to GTK4 are from the GNOME 42 stack, such as the Nautilus (Files) file manager. This is also the first LTS release with Wayland as its default (except for machines with NVIDIA GPUs, which will stick ... ⌘ Read more
OpenBSD 7.1 has been released. The biggest improvement in this point release is support for Apple Silicon, which is now ready for general use. Of course, there’s a lot more in this new release, so head on over to the changelog to get all the details. ⌘ Read more
QEMU 7.0 is out today as the newest version of this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack. Since QEMU 6.2 at the end of last year, developers at Red Hat and other organizations have been busy working on QEMU 7.0 as this open-source emulator widely used as part of the free software Linux virtualization stack. QEMU 7.0 brings support for Intel AMX, a lot of ongoing RISC-V work, and more. QEMU is one of the great success stories of open source – and one operating system and ... ⌘ Read more
As of April 21, 2022, Apple has discontinued macOS Server. Existing macOS Server customers can continue to download and use the app with macOS Monterey. The most popular server features—Caching Server, File Sharing Server, and Time Machine Server are bundled with every installation of macOS High Sierra and later, so that even more customers have access to these essential services at no extra cost. I doubt many people are running macOS Server installations at this poin ... ⌘ Read more
Back when I reviewed Windows 11 for Neowin in 2021, I awarded it a score of 6.5/10, while saying that “simplification of UI isn’t a terrible idea but having it there in a half-baked manner doesn’t really make for an enticing user experience”. Although that was my opinion based on the launch version of the OS, unfortunately, it still hasn’t changed more than six months lat ... ⌘ Read more
Ars Technica reports: In most cases, the release of yet another classic console emulator for the Switch wouldn’t be all that noteworthy. But experts tell Ars that a pair of Game Boy and Game Boy Advance emulators for the Switch that leaked online Monday show signs of being official products of Nintendo’s European Research & Development division (NERD). That has some industry watcher ... ⌘ Read more
Building on the foundation laid by Android 12, described by many as the biggest Android OS update since 2014, this year’s upcoming Android 13 release refines the feature set and tweaks the user interface in subtle ways. However, it also includes many significant behavioral and platform changes under the hood, as well as several new platform APIs that developers should be aware of. For large screen d ... ⌘ Read more
LXQt 1.1.0 has been released. As its version number makes clear, this isn’t a major release, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from the changelog – there’s a lot in here. The biggest improvement is better integration of Gtk+ applications into the desktop environment, so that, among other things, applications like Chromium and Firefox can call LXQt’s own file picker. There’s a lot more, so be sure to read the release notes. ⌘ Read more
One day I thought about the performance gap between the first Intel processor and modern machines. Of course, we can try to do some estimations empirically – we know clock rate and how the pipeline is organized and what features intel 4004 CPU has (but it would not be standard FLOPS, because there was no embedded support for float numbers yet). But there are few details: architecture bit width (on ... ⌘ Read more
This you don’t see every day – Oracle doing something fun and interesting. I’m very happy to announce that today we are releasing a new version of Oracle Solaris 11.4 for free/open source developers and non-production personal use. Today marks the first delivery of our “Common Build Environment” (CBE) releases for the Oracle Solaris 11.4.To enable us to make new features and fixes available quicker and to more systems Oracle Solaris now uses ... ⌘ Read more
Public code reviews started this week on Qt platform support for Google’s Chromium open-source browser code. It looks like Google is at least evaluating the prospects of Qt toolkit support for the Chromium/Chrome UI. Chrome might get a Qt-based UI option before it even gets video decoding acceleration on Linux that doesn’t require custom builds or hacks. Possibly good news for KDE users. ⌘ Read more
The latest Haiku activity report is here – covering the month of March – and it’s a real grab bag of tons of changes, but I’m not seeing any big ticket items. This means there should be something for everybody in here, from improved support for various Intel integrated grahpics chips, to more work on the ARM port, to glibc fixes, to… Well, you get the point. ⌘ Read more
The Sound Blaster X7 is a DAC (Digital Analog Converter) and amplifier. It allows several inputs to be mixed together toward a single output. Its configuration is maintained directly on the device and can be controlled by either a mobile device over Bluetooth or from a Windows machine over USB. When using my work laptop, I can’t change the X7 volume or output. This is an issue when you need to jump into a quick ... ⌘ Read more
Known as right angle with downwards zigzag arrow, angle with down zig-zag arrow, \\\\rangledownzigzagarrow, and ⍼, no one knows what ⍼ is meant to represent or where it originated from. Section 22.7 Technical Symbols from the Unicode Standard on the Miscellaneous Technical block doesn’t say anything about it. Who doesn’t love a good what-the-hell-is-this-glyph story? ⌘ Read more
Raspberry Pi computers require a piece of non-free software to boot — the infamous raspi-firmware package. But for almost as long as there has been a Raspberry Pi to talk of (this year it turns 10 years old!), there have been efforts to get it to boot using only free software. How is it progressing? Turns out a lot better than expected. ⌘ Read more
EndeavourOS is an Arch-based Linux distribution, and in and of itself not something I’d write about here. However, at the very end of the release notes for its latest release, there’s this: This release is also shipping with a brand-new Window Manager developed by our community editions team member Codic12 and we are more than proud to present you this WM that was developed a little bit under our wing. Codic12 decided to develop this WM t ... ⌘ Read more
Up until now, all installs of Raspberry Pi OS have had a default user called “pi”. This isn’t that much of a weakness – just knowing a valid user name doesn’t really help much if someone wants to hack into your system; they would also need to know your password, and you’d need to have enabled some form of remote access in the first place. But nonetheless, it could potentially make a brute-force attack slightly easier, and in response to t ... ⌘ Read more
Word is out there that an individual is trying to develop Pentium III emulation as part of a fork of 86Box, regardless of how slow it is, in the name of “hardware preservation”. But why didn’t we do it in the first place? Why did we, developers of a PC emulator clearly aimed at the preservation of hardware and software, limit ourselves to the Pentium II and an underperforming competitor (the VIA Cyrix III), and why did we do these two knowing they’re already pretty slow to emulate? It’s sto ... ⌘ Read more
Starting on November 1, 2022, existing apps that don’t target an API level within two years of the latest major Android release version will not be available for discovery or installation for new users with devices running Android OS versions higher than apps’ target API level. As new Android OS versions launch in the future, the requirement window will adjust accordingly. This is a very welcome move, since finding incredibly ol ... ⌘ Read more
Graphics card prices remain hugely inflated compared to a few years ago, but the good news is that things finally seem to be getting consistently better and not worse. This is good news. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced something like this before in my life, and I can’t wait for prices to truly reach sane levels again, as both my fiancée and I are due for an upgrade. ⌘ Read more
I’ve been using Linux exclusively for ~15 yrs. I’ve recently started a fantastic new job – the only wrinkle was that it came with a Windows 10 laptop. This is my first time using Windows after a 15-year break. This is how it’s been going. Hint: not well. ⌘ Read more~
In this post, we’ll look at implementing a simple character device driver as a kernel module in NetBSD. Once it is loaded, userspace processes will be able to write an arbitrary byte string to the device, and on every successive read expect a cryptographically-secure pseudorandom permutation of the original byte string. IF you’ve always wanted to learn how to write a NetBSD driver, here’s a great starting point. ⌘ Read more
With Fedora 36 working its way towards release later this month, more developer attention and planning is turning to Fedora 37 that will be released this autumn. One of the changes being talked about this week is for signing RPM contents for a means of trusting the files that are executed. The Fedora 37 change proposal is for adding IMA-based signatures to the individual files that are part of shipped RPM ... ⌘ Read more
We aim for the beautiful Sailfish user experience to bring a similar elegance and simplicity to an otherwise busy and distracting world. But the beauty on the surface has to be backed up with cutting-edge technology underneath which keeps up with modern standards and developments. That’s why in the 4.4.0 Vanha Rauma release we’ve been working hard to improve compatibility across the board, ... ⌘ Read more
I’ve extended James Friend’s in-browser Basilisk II port to create a full-featured classic 68K Mac in your browser. You can see it in action at system7.app or macos8.app. However, none of these setups replicated the true feel of using a computer in the 90s. They’re great for quickly launching a single program and playing around with it, but they don’t have any persistence, way of getting data in or out of it, or running m ... ⌘ Read more
Workstation (workstation) is an open source reference design for Fuchsia. Workstation is not a consumer-oriented product. Workstation is a tool for developers and enthusiasts to explore Fuchsia and experiment with evolving concepts and features. Workstation is one of the many “product configurations” Fuchsia can be set up with, and it targets both the Fuchsia emulator as well as an Intel NUC – so real hardware. This configuration’s goal is to be “a basis ... ⌘ Read more
I have a proclivity to stupid and/or pointless projects. This is one of them. Conceived from a conversation that ended with “Hey, it would technically be possible to…” – sure, let’s do it. DDC, display data channel, is a protocol for reading information about what resolutions and so on a monitor supports. It was later extended to DDC/CI, that lets you set brightness and other parameters, but fundamentally, the original idea was to stick a cheap i2c eeprom on each device with some basic info on it. (Technically, t ... ⌘ Read more
Believe it or not, not everything is based on C. There are current, shipping, commercial OSes written before C was invented, and now others in both newer and older languages that don’t involve C at any level or layer. There’s tons of examples. ⌘ Read more
The history of Firefox UI is important because my project compensates for the shortcomings of this Proton UI and inherits the strengths of the existing Firefox UIs. It’s also one of the ways to prevent divisions in the community, given that there have been forks every time the UI changes big. A detailed timeline of the changes to the user interface of Firefox. ⌘ Read more
In its day QuickTime was bigger than Apple itself, so widely known that many who used it on their PCs weren’t even aware that it was an Apple product. As one of the first extensible frameworks for multimedia, from 1991 onwards it was at the forefront of computer audio and video. When the MPEG-4 format was standardised in 1998, it was based on QuickTime. For several years, sales of QuickTime-based products for Windows far exceeded those for Macs. Then, with the release ... ⌘ Read more
And we’re not done yet with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, since it contains another important and very consequential regulation: alternative application stores. “We believe that the owner of a smartphone should have the freedom to choose how to use it,” said European Commission spokesperson Johannes Bahrke in an emailed statement. “This freedom includes being ... ⌘ Read more
Moving on from interoperability in messaging services, there’s a lot more in the proposed Digital Markets Act. For instance, bloatware and other preinstalled applications on iOS and Android devices must be removable by the user, and users must be given choice of which browser, e-mail application, etc. they want to use by default. This is a complete no-brainer, and something virtually every user will welcome. Ther ... ⌘ Read more
A new seminal antitrust legislation has been proposed in the EU, which will go up for a final vote in the EU Parliament. There’s a whole boatload of measures in here, many targeting big tech. The first major one: During a close to 8-hour long trilogue (three-way talks between Parliament, Council and Commission), EU lawmakers agreed that the largest messaging services (such as W ... ⌘ Read more
After six months of development, GNOME 42 is here and it’s packed with some cool new features and enhancements for fans of the GNOME desktop environment. The biggest change in this major release is the porting of almost all default GNOME apps to the latest GTK4 toolkit and the libadwaita 1.0 library for a more modern look and faster performance. This is a very odd release. There’s tons of great, valuable new features and improvements in here, and if it wasn’t for libadwaita, I’d be quite excited ... ⌘ Read more
Back in 2020, Google announced that it would require all apps in the Play Store to use its billing system but later delayed that to this month. Google will soon allow Android apps to use their own payment system as long as Play Store billing is an option alongside it, with Spotify notably the first “User Choice Billing” partner. Regulatory pressur ... ⌘ Read more
Some of my recent long-term projects revolve around a little known CPU architecture called ‘Lanai’. Unsurprisingly, very few people have heard of it, and even their Googling skills don’t come in handy. This page is a short summary of what I know, and should serve as a reference for future questions. Deeply fascinating. I love obscure CPU architectures, and they don’t come more obscure than this. ⌘ Read more
Taking NVIDIA into the next generation of server GPUs is the Hopper architecture. Named after computer science pioneer Grace Hopper, the Hopper architecture is a very significant, but also very NVIDIA update to the company’s ongoing family of GPU architectures. With the company’s efforts now solidly bifurcated into server and consumer GPU configurations, ... ⌘ Read more
We need to talk about Windows priorities as a product. And I am saying this as someone who wants Windows to succeed – it’s a great OS that, despite it’s naysayers, is still one of the best when it comes to backwards compatibility and richness of functionality. I mean, I can literally run a game written for Windows 95 on Windows 11 without major issues (no, I am not going to open the SafeDisc can of worms this time). I can’t do that on macOS or Linux boxes re ... ⌘ Read more
It’s been a long while since we updated the blog! Truth be told, we wanted to write a couple more progress reports, but there was always “one more thing”… So, instead, we decided to take the plunge and publish the first public alpha release of the Asahi Linux reference distribution! We’re really excited to finally take this step and start bringing Linux on Apple Silicon to everyone. This is only the beginning, and things will move even more qui ... ⌘ Read more
Apple is experiencing a widespread outage today, with a wide range of the company’s services and apps down or experiencing issues currently. Affected services and apps include the App Store, iCloud, Siri, iMessage, iTunes Store, Apple Maps, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness+, Apple TV+, Find My, FaceTime, Notes, Stocks, and many others, according to complaints across Twitt ... ⌘ Read more
This document is a high level overview of the Fuchsia Interface Definition Language (FIDL), which is the language used to describe interprocess communication (IPC) protocols used by programs running on Fuchsia. This overview introduces the concepts behind FIDL — developers familiar with these concepts already can start writing code by following the tutorials, or dive deeper by reading the language or bindings references. Some lig ... ⌘ Read more
Haiku’s latest activity report is out, and right off the bat, there’s a big ticket item. That’s right, after many years of being requested, Haiku finally has support for USB WiFi devices! (Currently only Realtek controllers are supported, but Ralink and others should follow before too long; Realtek/“RTL” chips are generally the most common, however.). That’s great news. There’s way more in here than just this, of course, so head on over to find out more. ⌘ Read more
The long-awaited availability of Steam on Chromebooks was just more or less announced (in alpha) at the 2022 Google for Games Developer Summit. That said, Google is light on availability details for the moment. Google specifically said that the “Steam Alpha just launched, making this longtime PC game store available on select Chromebooks for users to try.” T ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft appears to be testing a new type of ad inside File Explorer on Windows 11. Microsoft MVP and Twitter user Florian Beaubois discovered an ad in the latest test build of Windows 11, prompting users to check out the Microsoft Editor. While the ads might have appeared for some Windows 11 users, Microsoft says it was a mistake. “This was an experimental banner that was not intended to be published externally and was turned ... ⌘ Read more
Starting today, Windows games can ship with DirectStorage. This public SDK release begins a new era of fast load times and detailed worlds in PC games by allowing developers to more fully utilize the speed of the latest storage devices. In September 2020, we announced DirectStorage would be coming to Windows, and after collecting feedback throughout our developer preview, we are making this API available to all of our partners to ship with their ... ⌘ Read more
In this post we will learn the useful skill of writing a device driver for Unix V6 (released in 1975) and run it on an emulator. The implemented device is fairly trivial: it will open a message box on the host OS. Read this article now. Everybody needs to know how to do this. ⌘ Read more
The popular Vanced YouTube app is being discontinued, after a legal threat from Google. The creators of Vanced have revealed the project will be shut down in the coming days, with download links set to be removed. While the app will continue to work for anyone who currently has it installed on Android, without any future updates it’s likely to stop working at some point soon. The Vanced owners say they’ve ... ⌘ Read more
ReactOS as the open-source project striving for binary compatibility with Windows applications/drivers is still working away in 2022 on symmetric multi-processing (SMP) support. Proper SMP/multi-core support is obviously critical for today’s hardware or even anything in the past roughly two decades… It’s also been a pain point for ReactOS, but fortunately the situation is improving. We’re still looking at very early code that’s not ... ⌘ Read more
The history of computing could arguably be divided into three eras: that of mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers. Minicomputers provided an important bridge between the first mainframes and the ubiquitous micros of today. This is the story of the PDP-11, the most influential and successful minicomputer ever. A deep dive into the inner workings of the PDP-11, specifically on how to use the machine to do actual computing tasks. I lack the skills to do anything with a mac ... ⌘ Read more
The MorphOS development team is proud to announce the immediate availability of MorphOS 3.16. This release includes numerous important performance, stability and security improvements. A new version of Wayfarer comes included with the OS and replaces the now obsolete Odyssey Web Browser. We’ve also included the Iris email client, Magic Beacon notifications system and a Command-Tab application switcher. The Synergy Client and Server applications are now compatible with the free Barrier al ... ⌘ Read more
elementary OS, a Linux distribution that is currently ranked as one of the top 10 distros (according to DistroWatch.com), appears to be in the process of completely imploding on itself. The Short Version: The company behind elementary OS has been losing money for quite some time. Two co-founders are not pleased with each other and are attempting to part ways… and it is getting messy. elementaryOS was never going to be long for this world. They go years without releases, new rel ... ⌘ Read more
The PipeWire project has made major strides over the past few years, bringing shiny new features, and paving the way for new possibilities in the Linux multimedia scene. With 2021 seeing significant progress made on all fronts, let’s take a moment to look back at what was accomplished, and what lies ahead for 2022. Just one of the many project that make Linux easier to use on the desktop. ⌘ Read more
Android 12L, the big-screen updated version of Android 12, is now rolling out after months of testing, landing as part of today’s Feature Drop update for Pixels and coming soon to other tablets and foldables from companies like Samsung, Lenovo, and Microsoft. If you haven’t followed along with our Android 12L feature coverage, the very short version is that most of the changes were meant to address issues larger devices face when running Android. That includes UI tweaks covering a range fr ... ⌘ Read more
Apple is adding “one last chip” to the M1 processor family. The M1 Ultra is a new design that uses “UltraFusion” technology to strap two M1 Max chips together, resulting in a huge processor that offers 16 high-performance CPU cores, four efficiency cores, a 64-core integrated GPU, and support for up to 128GB of RAM. It looks like Apple is using a chiplet-based design for the M1 Ultra, just like AMD is doing for many of its Ryzen chips. ... ⌘ Read more
Ntfs2btrfs is a tool which does in-place conversion of Microsoft’s NTFS filesystem to the open-source filesystem Btrfs, much as btrfs-convert does for ext2. The original image is saved as a reflink copy at image/ntfs.img, and if you want to keep the conversion you can delete this to free up space. Neat tool, but probably with a rather limited application. ⌘ Read more
Writing this article wasn’t easy. At first glance, it’s all about a fairly unentertaining subject (building a calculator, the kind of exercise that every IT student tried at some point of its education), and to make the matter worse, it’s pedantically advertised. But in the end, I believe that this article really brings out valuable features, highlights enjoyable development stories, and offers an interesting expe ... ⌘ Read more
For the first time ever, all major browser vendors, and other stakeholders, have come together to solve the top browsers compatibility issues identified by web developers. Interop 2022 will improve the experience of developing for the web in 15 key areas. In this article, find out how we got here, what the project focuses on, how success will be measu ... ⌘ Read more
This article is not intended to convince you to abandon your current antivirus solutions. In this post I would like to share my observations and ways to improve the effectiveness of Defender. But today, let’s focus on Defender for the home user. It does not have additional functions that are offered by other commercial solutions, but what it does is enough. However, it is worth enabling some additional functions that are not available from the ... ⌘ Read more
Google’s homegrown Fuchsia operating system has taken another step closer to being broadly usable by gaining the full Google Chrome browser experience. It’s been possible to access the web in a very limited way on Fuchsia for quite some time now via the operating system’s “Simple Browser” app – which was powered by the Chromium engine under the hood. While usable, this “browser” didn’t offer the usual necessities like a ... ⌘ Read more