Monthly Archive:: October 2023
Google unveiled the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro phones and the Pixel Watch 2 today, and while I no longer spend too many words on new phone releases on OSNews these days, this new phone does come with a rather major promise by Google. The Pixel 8 will get seven years of Android OS updates with security patches, as well as quarterly Feature Drops. Launching with Android 14, the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro will see updates to Android 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, and 21 – assuming the naming doesn’t change before 2030. We’ll have to see if Google keeps its promise – not an unreasonable concern – but if they do, this is unprecedented in the Android world, and even surpasses Apple’s OS support for the iPhone. This is the kind of meaningful, important dedication I like to see, and I sincerely hope Google sticks to its promise. Regardless, the combination of some of the new camera features – which are great for taking photos and videos of small children, which I have now – and this support promise, as well as my carrier offering a free Pixel Watch 2 with any Pixel 8 Pro purchase, has made it pretty easy for me to choose the Pixel 8 Pro as my next phone when my contract runs out 12 October.
Google has released Android 14 – for Pixel devices, anyway. Android Police’s review summarises this rather small release: After months and months of beta testing, Android 14 has finally arrived in stable. There was a tremendous buildup of excitement around this release after the rather lackluster Android 13, which only introduced some small refinements following the big Android 12 design refresh on Pixel phones. Android 14 certainly stays true to the look that Google established with Material You two years ago, but it adds much-needed refinement and customization to the mix. While the beta was buggier than usual, the final release is making up for this long period of bugs with tons of new features, thoughtful design improvements, and a more polished experience all over the place. Google’s own release announcement isn’t exactly long either, so there isn’t that much interesting going on in Android 14, it seems.
Redox OS, the Rust-based operating system aiming to be a general purpose operating system, has detailed its priorities for 2023 and 2024, and there’s ambitious stuff in there. First, the project wants to shoe up its support for server tooling so that Redox can host its own website. This will require porting a number of popular server tools, like Apache, Nginx, and so on. Second, they also want Redox to be self-hosting in the sense that it can host its own developer tooling, a project they’ve basically been working on since day one. Furthermore, a stable ABI is a must before Redox can reach 1.0.0. Before Redox can reach Release 1.0 status, we need to establish a stable ABI. This means that application binaries will be able to run on future versions of Redox without having to be recompiled. Our approach is to make our C library, relibc, the interface for the stable ABI, and to make relibc a dynamic library. This will allow us to make changes at the system call level without impacting the Redox ABI. Applications will just load the latest relibc at run time. Work needs to be done on our dynamic library support, as well as to continue to extend relibc functionality. We will also need to change programs that are currently using Redox system calls directly to use relibc instead. And finally, Redox intends to be able to run COSMIC, the Rust-based desktop environment System76 is working on for their Linux distribution. Redox’ main developer works at System76, so there’s some strong ties between System76 and Redox. This effort will include porting several applications, but also Wayland, GTK, Qt, and others, which should make porting Linux applications relatively easy. These are a set of ambitious goals, but I doubt they’d set them so specifically if they thought it’d be a fool’s errand.
When Apple decides to end update support for your Mac, you can either try to install another OS or you can trick macOS into installing on your hardware anyway. That’s the entire point of the OpenCore Legacy Patcher, a community-driven project that supports old Macs by combining some repurposed Hackintosh projects with older system files extracted from past macOS versions. Yesterday, the OCLP team announced version 1.0.0 of the software, the first to formally support the recently released macOS 14 Sonoma. Although Sonoma officially supports Macs released mostly in 2018 or later, the OCLP project will allow Sonoma to install on Macs that go back to models released in 2007 and 2008, enabling them to keep up with at least some of the new features and security patches baked into the latest release. OpenCore Legacy Patcher is an indispensable tool for Mac users, since a lot of machines no longer support by Sonoma are perfectly fast and capable enough to run Apple’s new release. No longer supporting machines that are only five years old is absolutely bonkers, and should simply not be legal. It’s a sad state of affairs people will have to resort to community tools, but at least the option is there.
The basic premise of Microsoft’s Arm64EC is that a single virtual address space can contain a mixture of ARM64 code and X64 code; the ARM64 code executes natively, whereas the X64 code is transparently converted to ARM64 code by a combination of JIT and AOT compilation, and ARM64 ⇄ X64 transitions can happen at any function call/return boundary. I wish Windows on ARM would get more traction, because I want more ARM laptops to run Linux on. It seems clear by now that Linux OEMs are not at all interested in, or capable of, making and selling ARM hardware on their own, despite Linux being in an excellent position to make using ARM on a laptop or desktop almost entirely transparent without even needing to resort to translation layers or similar tools.
As I was preparing the Windows NT RISC exhibit for VCF west, I realized that I’m missing a rather important piece of the history. While I will be showing the potentially last DEC Alpha Windows build ever – AXP64 2210, I don’t have anything earlier than NT 3.51. I would be nice to showcase the very first RTM version – NT 3.1. From time perspective, NT did not get popular until the version 3.5 and later. Windows NT 3.1 would be considered rare even on a 386, let alone on a RISC CPU! So what RISC hardware does Windows NT 3.1 run on? The early non-x86 versions of Windows NT are absolutely fascinating, and finding a machine that can run one of these versions has always been high on my list, together with the various Itanium versions of Windows. I can’t quite explain what’s so exciting and attractive about it, but it feels like you’re doing something unholy, something you’re not supposed to be doing. Especially the later versions, deeper into the Wintel era, feel like they’re illegal.
Microsoft is making the Windows 11 setup process a little more entertaining, at least on some laptops. I unboxed the Surface Laptop Studio 2 yesterday (read Monica Chin’s review here) and noticed that Microsoft now prompts you to play the modern version of its SkiFree game while you wait for updates to be applied. A fun little touch.
Meta is preparing to charge EU users a $14 monthly subscription fee to access Instagram on their phones unless they allow the company to use their personal information for targeted ads. The US tech giant will also charge $17 for Facebook and Instagram together for use on desktop, said two people with direct knowledge of the plans, which are likely to be rolled out in coming weeks. The move comes after discussions with regulators in the bloc who have been seeking to curb the way big tech companies profit from the data they get from their users for free, which would be a direct attack on the way groups such as Meta and Google generate their profits. Is anyone really stupid enough to think that even if you pay, Facebook won’t monetise your behaviour anyway? Sure, you might not see ads, but paying customer or not, your data is still going to be used for literally everything else Facebook does. I hope people don’t fall for this nonsense.
The full-featured, high-precision spreadsheet application for the Pico-8 that nobody asked for has finally arrived! PicoCalc is a feature-complete clone of the 1979 classic VisiCalc, which introduced the world to an entirely new category of business application. Steve Jobs said of VisiCalc, it’s “what really drove — propelled — the Apple ][. This is a few years old already, but still an amazing piece of work.
Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, if true (the author used to work at DuckDuckGo). Pushing Google Search users towards stores that also advertise on Google just makes sense for the company. It is yet another contributing factor as to why Google Search has become so bad.
The Verge has an excellent write-up of Satya Nadella’s day in court during the Google antitrust trial today. The power of defaults is one of the central questions of the entire US v. Google case and will continue to come up. (The witness after Nadella is former Neeva CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, who has also said his search engine was crushed in part because overcoming Google’s default status was so difficult.) Nadella is in the rare position to have seen both sides — what it’s like to be the default and what it’s like to contend when you’re not — and argued resolutely that defaults are the only thing that truly matters. Google, on the other hand, says that building the best product is the only thing that truly matters and that Bing has never come close to doing that. Which side of that debate Judge Mehta agrees with may be the story of this entire trial. It’s an excellent and at times even funny read.
One aspect of the jailbreak scene that always seemed like black magic to me, though, was the process of jailbreaking itself. The prospect is pretty remarkable: take any off-the-shelf iPhone, then enact obscene rituals and recite eldritch incantations until the shackles drop away. The OS will now allow you to run any code you point at it, irrespective of whether the code has gone through Apple’s blessed signing process, paving the way for industrious tweak developers like myself. A few weeks ago, I got a hankering to remove this shroud of mystery from jailbreaks by writing my own. One caveat: the really juicy work here has been done by my forebears. I’m particularly indebted to p0sixninja and axi0mx, who have graciously shared their knowledge via open source. The fact this isn’t a switch to flip in iOS somewhere is idiotic and will soon come to an end thanks to the EU, but at least it enticed some very creative and gifted souls to learn and experiment.
All Chromebook Plus laptops offer faster processors and double the memory and storage, giving you the power to get more done, easily. All Chromebook Plus laptops also come with a Full HD IPS display — which means you get a full 1080p HD experience when watching streaming content, and crisp, clear viewing for reading, creating content or editing photos and videos. Finally, there’s a 1080p+ webcam with temporal noise reduction for smoother, more lifelike video calls. So basically, because the Chromebook market is dominated by cheap crap, Google has had to create a new category of Chromebooks that are slightly less crap, so that buyers who don’t want crap but instead want slightly less crap can distinguish the slightly less crap from the crap so they end up buying the crap they want. Like gaming Chromebooks, I give this like two years before Google sees something shiny and this whole Chromebook Plus thing is dead and gone.
A lot has changed in 20 years. In 2003, the main question was: what encoding is this? In 2023, it’s no longer a question: with a 98% probability, it’s UTF-8. Finally! We can stick our heads in the sand again! The question now becomes: how do we use UTF-8 correctly? Let’s see! Everything you ever wanted to know about how Unicode works, and what UTF-8 does. Plus some annoying website design tricks, for which In apologise, even if it’s obviously not our site we’re linking to.
Budgie 10.8.1 is the first minor release in the 10.8 series of our Budgie Desktop environment. This release adds dark style preference support, squashes some bugs around our new StatusNotifierItem implementation, adds keyword support for search, and more! The Budgie Desktop renaissance continues.
The X220 ThinkPad is the greatest laptop ever made and you’re wrong if you think otherwise. No laptop hardware has since surpassed the nearly perfect build of the X220. New devices continue to get thinner and more fragile. Useful ports are constantly discarded for the sake of “design”. Functionality is no longer important to manufacturers. Repairability is purposefully removed to prevent users from truly “owing” their hardware. It’s a mess out there. But thank goodness I still have my older, second-hand X220. I don’t agree with the author, but he’s also not wrong. Luckily, things do seem to be improving somewhat, thanks to Framework being a decent success. Other OEMs are starting to make some noise about repairability, as are lawmakers around the world. We might be getting a new X220.
I picked pico-8 as the engine simply because I know I work better with constraints and the limited size and capabilities of it would ensure I would not attempt perfection since I know I do not have the skills to reach it anyway. I have been a professional developer for 10+ years so code syntax is not my biggest issue, but knowing how to architect things, deal with the art and sound. By sticking within what pico-8 provides I thought I could achieve this, where I had previously failed with tools like Game Maker. Pico-8 really seems like a great first experience with game development.
I often see a lot of confusion with regard to OpenBSD, either assimilate as a Linux distribution or mixed up with FreeBSD. Let’s be clear, OpenBSD is a stand alone operating system. It came as a fork of NetBSD in 1994, there isn’t much things in common between the two nowadays. While OpenBSD and the other BSDs are independant projects, they share some very old roots in their core, and regularly see source code changes in one being imported to another, but this is really a very small amount of the daily code changes though. Just like OSNews (more information about the OSNews Gemini capsule), this article is also available on Gemini.
A circuit called the flip-flop is a fundamental building block for sequential logic. A flip-flop can hold one bit of state, a “0” or a “1”, changing its value when the clock changes. Flip-flops are a key part of processors, with multiple roles. Several flip-flops can be combined to form a register, holding a value. Flip-flops are also used to build “state machines”, circuits that move from step to step in a controlled sequence. A flip-flops can also delay a signal, holding it from from one clock cycle to the next. Intel introduced the groundbreaking 8086 microprocessor in 1978, starting the x86 architecture that is widely used today. In this blog post, I take a close look at the flip-flops in the 8086: what they do and how they are implemented. In particular, I will focus on the dynamic flip-flop, which holds its value using capacitance, much like DRAM. Many of these flip-flops use a somewhat unusual “enable” input, which allows the flip-flop to hold its value for multiple clock cycles. More in-depth chip content. This type of content has been coming up a lot lately.
Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 will end on October 10, 2023. After this date, these products will no longer receive security updates, non-security updates, bug fixes, technical support, or online technical content updates. If you cannot upgrade to the next version, you will need to use Extended Security Updates (ESUs) for up to three years. ESUs are available for free in Azure or need to be purchased for on-premises deployments. Windows Server 2012 was the first release of Windows Server to entirely remove the Windows classic UI, if I recall correctly and my quick research today didn’t fail me. Meaning, if you want the latest version of Windows that still carries the classic user interface, you’re going to have to go all the way back to Windows Server 2008.
