Monthly Archive:: October 2023
A set of merge requests were opened that would effectively drop X.Org (X11) session support for the GNOME desktop and once that code is removed making it a Wayland-only desktop environment. Going along with Fedora 40 looking to disable the GNOME X11 session support (and also making KDE Plasma 6 Wayland-only for Fedora), upstream GNOME is evaluating the prospect of disabling and then removing their X11 session support. This surely won’t be controversial.
As many of you will know from personal experience, there is a longstanding issue with VoiceOver on Mac where Safari will frequently become unresponsive with VoiceOver repeatedly announcing the message “Safari not responding.” When this issue occurs, the user’s Mac may become unusable for up to several minutes at a time. Sometimes it can be resolved by switching away from Safari. Sometimes restarting VoiceOver can resolve the issue. However, far too often, the user is unable to switch away from Safari or turn VoiceOver off, instead having to simply wait for their Mac to become responsive again. This “Safari not responding” behaviour when using VoiceOver dramatically impacts productivity and overall usability of Macs for blind and low vision users. Furthermore, it appears that the issue extends beyond just Safari – many other common applications that utilise Apple’s WebKit browser engine can also be affected by the “not responding” problem. I’m not highlighting this to make Apple look bad – for once – or to fill some quota. The fact of the matter is that in the blind and vision-impaired community, the Mac and iPhone are immensely popular for their accessibility features other platforms just cannot match. If you’ve ever seen a blind person use an iPhone, you know just how different their way of using it is from sighted people. As such, having a major bug like this is a huge deal. It impacts people who really have nowhere else to go, technology-wise, since switching to other platforms really isn’t a viable option in most cases. This issue must be fixed, and can’t be left by the wayside because it only impacts a relatively small number of people. Blind and vision-impaired folks have placed their trust in Apple because they’ve got nowhere else to go, and Apple needs to step up and take this seriously. Now.
ZFS was promised, and didn’t arrive. In fact, there were about 4 of us on the beta program who saw the original zfs implementation, and it was quite different from what we have now. What eventually landed as zfs in Solaris was a complete rewrite. The beta itself was interesting – we were sent the driver, 3 binaries, and a 3-line cheatsheet, and that was it. There was a fundamental philosophy here that the whole thing was supposed to be so easy to use and sufficiently obvious that it didn’t need a manual, and that was actually true. (It’s gotten rather more complex since, to be fair.) Peter Tribble – long-time Solaris expert and creator of Tribblix – gives a gimpse into the earliest versions of ZFS, and just how different it was from the shipped release.
Most MiniDisc aficionados are aware of unit hacking to gain access to new features. The unit that perhaps benefits the most from this is the Sony MZ-N510, which also comes in the N520 and NF610 variants. The 2001 model R700 can be hacked to add many features of its upscale brother, the R900, as well as the Type-R codec, which renders the R700 capable of performing real-time SP recordings with Sony’s last evolution of ATRAC1. I bet the market for hacking the best music format of all time is small these days, but this is still incredibly cool.
In this guide, we’ll build a very tiny Linux kernel, weighing in at 789 K, and requiring no MMU support. We’ll write some userspace code and this will be deployed on a virtual RISC-V 64-bit machine, without MMU, and we’ll run some tiny programs of our own. As a reminder, please go through the guide for a micro Linux distro to understand the concepts behind what we’re doing today: building the kernel, initramfs, etc. This guide is basically a continuation of that one and an exercise in making an absolutely minimal Linux deployment for (in theory) extremely cheap hardware. This follows up on the mentioned earlier article.
Debian is a large, complex operating system, and a huge open source project. It’s thirty years old now. To many people, some of its aspects are weird. Most such things have a good reason, but it can be hard to find out what it is. This is an attempt to answer some such questions, without being a detailed history of the project. The fact that Debian is a relatively slow-acting, complex democracy is probably why it has survived for so long, and why it’s become the bedrock for so many derivative distributions.
Little did we realise then that Sierra was going to change all that, and by Mojave we’d be enduring 4,000 and more log entries in a second, when our Macs were feeling loquacious. That was because Apple introduced the Unified log, with its entries written not in plain text but compressed binary format. This was the death-blow for the casual reader of logs: for a start, the replacement Console app was unable to access any log entries made in the past, and its tools were, and remain, woefully inadequate for tackling the increasing torrent of log entries. Despite its many great strengths, the Unified log has suffered two problems that are limiting its usefulness in Sonoma: its diminishing period of coverage, and censorship. This article highlights some real problems with the logs in macOS. Logs are so crucial in finding out why something is happening to a system so having them limited or restricted would drive me nuts.
When it comes to famous operating systems for the Z80 and similar Zilog processors, the first and maybe only one to come to mind is CP/M, which was even made its presence known on the dual-CPU (8502 and Z80) Commodore 128. Yet Zilog also developed its own operating system, in the form of the comprehensively titled Z80 Operating System with Relocatable Modules and I/O Management (Z80-RIO for short). With limited documentation having survived, Ralf-Peter Nerlich has set out to retain and recover what information he can on RIO and the associated Programming Language Zilog (PLZ) after working with these systems himself when they were new. Catchy name, and awesome work to try and recover as much about it as possible.
In just a few days, Microsoft will end support for Windows Server 2012 after over 11 years on the market. Ironically, the launch of the server OS in 2012 was also the official end for another server product from Microsoft that had first gone on sale on October 10, 2007, nearly 16 years ago. It was called Windows Home Server, and it was an effort to expand Microsoft’s home operating systems beyond just PCs. Windows Home Server was, in my opinion, a genius product that didn’t have an audience. The idea of a very simple to set up and effectively forgettable PC with lots of storage somewhere down in the basement or the attic where the entire family backs up their important data and stores less important data is simply an excellent idea – but an idea that nobody wants. It’s boring, people just opt for cloud storage instead, and it’s yet another bag of money you have to spend on technology. I still like the idea, though. Even in the era of cloud storage, I would love to be able to buy a relatively simple PC with tons of storage that I can store my files and back-ups on. However, you can take it a step further – if friends and family you trust also have such a device, you can build a private network of “cloud” storage devices to duplicate each other’s back-ups for improved resilience and on-the-go accessibility. Everything would have to be encrypted, of course, but in such a way people could build their own little private clouds – away from the prying eyes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others. Now, all the technologies exist to build something like that, but it would require quite a bit of technical knowledge and active maintenance, and is anything but easy. If plug-and-play boxes existed that did this – I wouldn’t hesitate to buy a few and set them up at our home and those of my parents and parents-in-law.
I don’t necessarily agree. These new editing tools in smartphones are nothing a semi-decent Photoshop user can’t do in an afternoon, and editing photos is as old as photography itself. All these tools do is further democratise photo editing, and this was always going to happen, smartphones or not. Adding watermarks or other markers is never going to work, since even if it’s entirely unfalsifiable – a big if – the vast majority of people encountering edited photos would not go and look at the metadata or whatever to check of the photo is real or not. If people still fall for obvious bullshit like antivax talking points or flat earth hoaxes, a bunch of technobabble metadata isn’t going to stop them.
The VAX served DEC well throughout the ’80s and into the ’90s, but as the latter decade went on, DEC began to face stiff competition from UNIX vendors, particularly Sun Microsystems. DEC struggled to change with the times, and the company ultimately failed. In 1998, DEC was acquired by Compaq, and in 2001, Compaq was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. The DEC line, including the VAX/VMS system, was discontinued and faded from the market. And yet it lives on today. Here’s how. Getting a DEC Alpha machine has been on my list for a long time, but they’re in very high demand, and extremely expensive. It’s quite impressive to see DEC’s continuing legacy laid out like this.
In addition to several new full-screen utilities, like DEFRAG to defragment your hard disk (licensed from Symantec), MSBACKUP to efficiently backup your hard disk (also licensed from Symantec), and MSAV to check for viruses (licensed from Central Point Software), there were a number of new command-line programs, such as CHOICE, DELTREE, MOVE, MSCDEX, and SMARTDRV. But the biggest addition to MS-DOS 6.00 was a new feature called DoubleSpace (dubbed “MagicDrive” internally) that automatically compressed everything on your hard disk, providing up to “double” the amount of effective disk space – or more, or less, depending on how compressible your files were overall. Despite growing up with MS-DOS since our first computer was a 286 PC in 1990 or so, I never used any of these advanced features. I was 6-7, and just wanted to play games, basically. It’s only now that I’m much older that I actually admire the crazy things people have managed to squeeze out of – or into – DOS.
Writing a cycle-accurate emulator for a computer system is more than just understanding all the CPU instruction timings. A computer is a complete system with peripherals, interrupts, IO bus signals, and DMA. All this comes with an array of different timings and quirks. When software like Area 5150 is written that requires perfect cycle timing, it can be a challenge to provide the level of accuracy needed for the software to function. Area 5150 in particular requires precise coordination with the CGA’s CRTC chip and timer interrupts to begin the end credits demo effect at precisely the right time. It would be very handy then if we could somehow peek into the operation of the system while it was running and understand how all these parts interact. As it turns out, we can! This process is typically referred to as ‘bus sniffing’, and there’s a lot of a technical information out there on the topic in general. Sniffing can be done on everything from ethernet networks to vending machines, and you can even bus sniff your car. This article will specifically discuss sniffing the IBM PC 5150. A very in-depth and technical article, and one that can easily lead to another weekend project.
I want to address a controversy that has gripped the Rust community for the past year or so: the choice by the prominent async “runtimes” to default to multi-threaded executors that perform work-stealing to balance work dynamically among their many tasks. Some Rust users are unhappy with this decision, so unhappy that they use language I would characterize as melodramatic. What these people advocate instead is an alternative architecture that they call “thread-per-core.” They promise that this architecture will be simultaneously more performant and easier to implement. In my view, the truth is that it may be one or the other, but not both. A very academic discussion.
Windows users who have installed the preview update may see advertisement when they interact with Copilot. Asking Copilot for the best gaming laptops returns five suggestions, similar to what Bing Chat would provide, and ads at the end of the output. Copilot for Windows has barely shipped and Microsoft is already using it to push ads into the operating system you paid for. “AI” is just a fancy autocomplete designed to push ads. Windows is grim.
While this has been a hunch for a while among the Windows enthusiast community, a new leak seems to be further providing somewhat solidifying evidence that it could indeed be the case, that Microsoft’s next-gen OS, casually referred to as Windows 12, could be a subscription-based OS. I have no innate issue with the subscription model for software – especially in the mobile world, it makes perfect sense for indie developers, as it’s a far more sustainable model than charging the single charge of €0.99 that Apple and Google drove the market down to. I also think it makes sense for more complex desktop software, like an office suite or some of the translation software I use. The subscription pricing usually ends up being cheaper than buying the latest version every few years, anyway. For Windows though – I’m not so sure. Windows is already loaded with ads and adware, and it’s only getting worse. Paying a monthly or yearly fee to have ads served to me seems dystopian, at best.
Get ready for the contents of your files in Microsoft OneDrive to be scanned and ingested by Microsoft’s “AI” efforts. As announced at Build in May and again in September we are bringing Copilot to your files in SharePoint and OneDrive so you can ask open-ended questions related to an individual file or get a summary of the content. And you can do this without opening the file and no matter where it lives, in OneDrive, SharePoint or Teams. We expect Copilot in OneDrive to become available by December for all customers who have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. I have still not used any of these “AI” tools, other than like twice to see what the fuss was about. Nothing they can supposedly do entices me, and the amount of nonsense they spew on a daily basis would make a Russian troll farm manager blush. I genuinely feel for all those Windows users who’ll have to deal with this nonsense.
Lenovo is forecasting that the vast majority of its devices will be repairable by 2025 – as will the repair parts themselves – but it is not intending to specify where customers should have their kit fixed. “On repairability, we have a plan that by 2025 more than 80 percent of the repair parts will be repaired again so that they they enter into the circular economy to reduce the impact to the environment.” He added: “More than 80 percent of our devices will be able to be repaired at the customer, by the customer or by the channel and we are enabling this with a design for serviceability kind of approach.” That’s excellent news, and I hope it’s a promise they’ll keep. The right to repair movement is scoring win after win lately, and it seems the tide has really turned on this one. It’s not just nerds anymore – regular people, common media, and even larger companies are beating the drum now.
Following preliminary objections over Google’s data terms, set out back in January by Germany’s antitrust watchdog, the tech giant has agreed to make changes that will give users a better choice over its use of their information, the country’s Federal Cartel Office (FCO) said today. The commitments cover situations where Google would like to combine personal data from one Google service with personal data from other Google or non-Google sources or cross-use these data in Google services that are provided separately, per the authority. European countries and the EU continue to get shit done when it comes to reigning in big tech.
DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has recently been working on further refinements to HAMMER2 for the next DragonFlyBSD operating system release. The latest HAMMER2 activity in the past few days has included improving its CPU performance and adding a new “hammer2 recover” directive. The HAMMER2 recover support allows for recovering/undoing single files as well as preliminary support to recover entire directory structures. DragonFlyBSD always feels like the one nobody talks about or uses, with FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD taking the spotlight instead. Are any of you folks using it? How has it been?
