The culling of Windows features you’ve never heard of but that will affect hundreds of thousands of people because Windows is just that popular so even an unknown feature is used by gobs of people continues. The legacy console mode is deprecated and no longer being updated. In future Windows releases, it will be available as an optional Feature on Demand. This feature won’t be installed by default. Microsoft’s “Deprecated features for Windows client” page Basically, with legacy console mode you could revert to an older version of the Windows console in case some program wasn’t working correctly in the latest version installed with your copy of Windows.
Hundreds of technical experts from many of China’s biggest state-owned and private companies, including the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China Telecom, Meituan, and Baidu, all gathered in Beijing last month. The purpose behind the meeting was for their staff to receive training so they could be certified as developers on Huawei’s Harmony Operation System (OS). While most observers were looking the other way, Huawei has been quietly building an independent Chinese operating system that isn’t subject to U.S. sanctions. In the four years after the telecom giant was banned from using Google apps, the Shenzhen-based company has been making significant strides toward achieving its long-term goal: To dethrone Android and make its HarmonyOS the default operating system in China. Nina Xiang for Forbes Asia HarmonyOS is poised to succeed in beating iOS and Android where others have failed, if only because the Chinese state is pushing homegrown solutions hard. It’s already hit 10% market share in China, closing in on iOS’ 17%, but still kilometres away from Android’s 72%. However, with both local governments and the government in Beijing enacting all kinds of laws and guidelines to force companies, institutions, and people to switch to homegrown solutions, it wouldn’t surprise me to see this market share climb fast. And that’s actually okay! Setting aside the fact the Chinese government is a genocidal totalitarian surveillance nightmare apparatus, I think it’s entirely understandable, reasonable, and a good investment to have homegrown technology solutions and platforms. I wish the European Union did something similar, but that ship has probably sailed after we let Microsoft gut whatever was left of Nokia after Apple was done with it.
Starting on February 22, 2024, you can no longer use Google Groups (at groups.google.com) to post content to Usenet groups, subscribe to Usenet groups, or view new Usenet content. You can continue to view and search for historical Usenet content posted before February 22, 2024 on Google Groups. In addition, Google’s Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) server and associated peering will no longer be available, meaning Google will not support serving new Usenet content or exchanging content with other NNTP servers. Google Groups Help According to Google, the reason for removing Usenet support is the declining popularity of Usenet, claiming that “much of the content being disseminated via Usenet today is binary (non-text) file sharing, which Google Groups does not support, as well as spam”. I can’t validate that claim, but regardless, relying on Google to access Usenet was never a good idea in the first place. There’s countless proper Usenet clients out there that won’t perform a classic Google rug pull.
Windows AI Studio simplifies generative AI app development by bringing together cutting-edge AI development tools and models from Azure AI Studio Catalog and other catalogs like Hugging Face. You will be able browse the AI models catalog powered by Azure ML and Hugging Face, download them locally, fine-tune, test and use them in your Windows application. As all of the computation happens locally, please make sure your device can handle the load. Windows AI Studio Preview on GitHub Nothing particularly exciting here, until you get to the installation process, as noted by Venn Stone on Mastodon: you need to install Linux, in the form of Ubuntu 18.04 or higher on WSL, before you can use this Microsoft offering. I don’t know, but that’s just funny.
You may have seen the news that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 plans to remove Xorg. But Xwayland will stay around, and given the name overloading and them sharing a git repository there’s some confusion over what is Xorg. So here’s a very simple “picture”. Peter Hutterer A more useful visualisation than I expected.
A recent discovery that overclocking AMD’s latest chips blows a fuse to denote the chip has been overclocked has led to slightly misleading claims that it will automatically void the chips’ warranty for any type of failure. However, AMD clarified to Tom’s Hardware that overclocking AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7000 (Storm Peak) and non-Pro lineup, among the best workstation CPUs, doesn’t automatically void the processor’s warranty. Zhiye Liu at Tom’s Hardware Something about these fuses in processors doesn’t sit right with me.
We’re going to cover the Cortex A57 as implemented in the Nintendo Switch’s Nvidia Tegra X1. The Tegra X1 targets a wide range of applications including mobile devices and automobiles. It focuses on providing high GPU performance in a limited power envelope, making it perfect for a portable gaming console like the Switch. Tegra X1 consumes 117,6 mm2 on TSMC’s 20 nm (20 SoC) process and uses a quad core A57 cluster to provide the bulk of its CPU power. Each Cortex A57 core consumes just under 2 mm2 of area, and the quad core A57 cluster takes 13.16 mm2. Clamchowder at Chips and Cheese An old SoC still doing excellent work in the Switch.
In collaboration with Polar Signals we have committed that beginning with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, our GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) package will enable frame pointers by default for 64-bit platforms. All packages in Ubuntu, with very few exceptions, will be rebuilt with frame pointers enabled, making them easier to profile and subsequently optimise. “I’ve enabled frame pointers at huge scale for Java and glibc and studied the CPU overhead for this change, which is typically less than 1% and usually so close to zero that it is hard to measure. Frame pointers allow more complete CPU profiling and off-CPU profiling. The performance wins that these can provide far outweigh the comparatively tiny loss in performance. Ubuntu enabling frame pointers by default will be a huge win for performance engineering and the default developer experience”. said Brendan Gregg, computer performance expert and Intel Fellow. Oliver Smith on the official Ubuntu blog So I guess the very minor performance regression is supposed to be compensated for by optimisations in individual packages that frame pointers will help realise.
Three years after Fortnite-maker Epic Games sued Apple and Google for allegedly running illegal app store monopolies, Epic has a win. The jury in Epic v. Google has just delivered its verdict — and it found that Google turned its Google Play app store and Google Play Billing service into an illegal monopoly. After just a few hours of deliberation, the jury unanimously answered yes to every question put before them — that Google has monopoly power in the Android app distribution markets and in-app billing services markets, that Google did anticompetitive things in those markets, and that Epic was injured by that behavior. They decided Google has an illegal tie between its Google Play app store and its Google Play Billing payment services, too, and that its distribution agreement, Project Hug deals with game developers, and deals with OEMs were all anticompetitive. Sean Hollister for The Verge Good news, of course, but it does make one wonder why a judge in Epic’s case versus Apple ruled the exact opposite as the jury did today. We don’t yet know what this verdict will mean for Google in a practical sense – that’s up to the judge, and Google intends to appeal, for course – so if consumers will actually see any benefit from this remains to be seen.
As part of our transition to subscription and a simplified portfolio, beginning today, we will no longer sell perpetual licenses. All offerings will continue to be available as subscriptions going forward. Additionally, we are ending the sale of Support and Subscription (SnS) renewals for perpetual offerings beginning today. Krish Prasad of VMware This sucks. Every few years, I would buy a cheap VMware license on eBay for like EUR10 or something, to keep my Windows virtual machine going for the incredibly rare cases where I need one for my job because some popular CAT tools are Windows-only. I really do not wish to buy a subscription for that. I guess it’s time to transition to VirtualBox.
The Timeline feature in Maps helps you remember places you’ve been and is powered by a setting called Location History. If you’re among the subset of users who have chosen to turn Location History on (it’s off by default), soon your Timeline will be saved right on your device — giving you even more control over your data. Just like before, you can delete all or part of your information at any time or disable the setting entirely. If you’re getting a new phone or are worried about losing your existing one, you can always choose to back up your data to the cloud so it doesn’t get lost. We’ll automatically encrypt your backed-up data so no one can read it, including Google. Marlo McGriff, Director of Product, Google Maps, at Google’s official blog All else being equal, moving location data from residing unencrypted in the cloud to on your device is a good thing. That being said, if Google is giving up access to this data, it most likely means they’ve gotten really good at estimating your whereabouts using other data instead.
Today, Apple pushed out the public releases of iOS 17.2, iPadOS 17.2, macOS Sonoma 14.2, watchOS 10.2, and tvOS 17.2. iOS 17.2 and iPadOS 17.2’s flagship feature is the new Journal app, which Apple teased when it first introduced iOS 17 earlier. The app mimics several existing popular journaling apps in the App Store from third-party developers but leverages data from your Photos, workouts, and other Apple apps to make journaling suggestions. Other features include the ability to tap a “catch-up arrow” to scroll to the first missed message in a conversation in Messages, the ability to take spatial video photos for later viewing on Vision Pro, and several tweaks and additions to the Weather app. Samuel Axon for Ars Technica Makers of journalling applications for iOS are not going to be in a good mood today, I reckon.
NetDrive is a DOS device driver that allows you to access a remote disk image hosted by another machine as though it was a local device with an assigned drive letter. The remote disk image can be a floppy disk image or a hard drive image. Michael B. Brutman An incredibly useful tool for modern-day DOS work.
Porporo is an experimental operating system specification for Varvara, written in TAL and ANSI C. This is a work in progress, for more details follow the development during december. rabbits So, what is Varvara? Varvara is a specification for devices communicating with the Uxn CPU intended to run little audio and visual programs. Varvara official website …so, what is the Uxn CPU? This one-page computer, programmable in Uxntal, was designed with an implementation-first mindset and a focus on creating portable graphical tools and games. It lives at the heart of the Varvara personal computer. Official Uxn CPU website I have no idea what any of this means, but I feel like there’s something incredibly cool going on here.
The Sophon SG2042 is the world’s first commodity 64-core RISC-V CPU for high performance workloads and an important question is whether the SG2042 has the potential to encourage the HPC community to embrace RISC-V. In this paper we undertaking a performance exploration of the SG2042 against existing RISC-V hardware and high performance x86 CPUs in use by modern supercomputers. Leveraging the RAJAPerf benchmarking suite, we discover that on average, the SG2042 delivers, per core, between five and ten times the performance compared to the nearest widely available RISC-V hardware. We found that, on average, the x86 high performance CPUs under test outperform the SG2042 by between four and eight times for multi-threaded workloads, although some individual kernels do perform faster on the SG2042. The result of this work is a performance study that not only contrasts this new RISC-V CPU against existing technologies, but furthermore shares performance best practice. Nick Brown, Maurice Jamieson, Joseph Lee, Paul Wang The Sophon SG2042 is the RISC-V processor found in the Milk-V Pioneer workstation, which was recently featured on LTT as well, for the video crowd among us. There’s definitely still a way to go for RISC-V, but the gains over the past few years are clear, and if this keeps progressing this way, it won’t be long before RISC-V becomes a valid, competitive architecture.
The Unix philosophy of using compact expert tools that do one thing well and pipelining them together to manipulate data is a great idea and has worked well for the past few decades. This philosophy was outlined in the 1978 Foreword to the Bell System Technical Journal describing the UNIX Time-Sharing System: Items i and ii are oft repeated, and for good reason. But it is time to take this philosophy to the 21st century by further defining a standard output format for non-interactive use. Kelly Brazil This seems like a topic people will have calm opinions about.
It’s 1995 and I’ve been nearly two years in the professional workspace. OS/2 is the dominant workstation product, Netware servers rule the world, and the year of the Linux desktop is going to happen any moment now. If you weren’t running OS/2, you were probably running Windows 3.1, only very few people were using that Linux thing. What would have been the prefect OS at the time would have been NT with a competent POSIX subsystem, but since we were denied that, enter Hiroshi Oota with BSD on Windows. neozeed at Virtually Fun This is absolutely wild.
According to my sources, the new Windows bosses are now returning to an annual release cycle for major versions of the Windows platform, meaning Windows is going back to having just one big feature update a year instead of multiple smaller ones throughout. Microsoft may still use Moment updates sparingly, but they will no longer be the primary delivery vehicle for new features going forward. Zac Bowden at Windows Central Raise your hand if you still have any idea how Windows updates, feature additions, and new versions even work at this point. The number of weird codenames and Microsoftisms in this article are through the roof. According to my sources, Microsoft’s blockbuster new feature will be the introduction of an AI-powered Windows Shell, enhanced with an “advanced Copilot,” that’s able to constantly work in the background to enhance search, jumpstart projects or workflows, understand context, and much more. Sources say these AI features will be “groundbreaking.” Zac Bowden at Windows Central If you thought Windows 11 was bad now, it’s only going to get worse. Much, much worse.
But it’s worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit. Cory Doctorow Another excellent banger of an article by Cory Doctorow. Even here on OSAlert, I fully support anyone who uses an adblocker to remove any ads you might find on this website. Your computer, your rules. Sure, it’d be nice to get some income from the ads, and we do offer more direct and far better ways to support the website (Patreon, Ko-Fi, Liberapay, merch), but even if you choose to block every ad, and not send us a single cent in donations, that’s entirely within your rights. As someone who runs a website accessible to anyone, I consider your right to only see on your display what you want to see to be sacred. Just because you opened this website to read some tech news does not mean you also consent to seeing ads. We could probably make a lot more money by filling this site with SEO crap, boatloads of ads, countless newsletter prompts, and god knows what else – but not only would that be the death of OSAlert, I would also just find it personally revolting. I regularly get emails from people interested in enshittifying OSAlert, but I’ve never budged, and I hope I never have to thanks to those of you who choose to support us financially. Websites are the easiest to “downgrade”, ad Doctorow calls it, and we’ve all seen how the wider tech news landscape has been downgraded a lot over the years. I hope I can keep OSAlert as it’s been since its launch way back in 1998.
This is a website dedicated to a project of mine, Sol-1. Sol-1 is a homebrew CPU and Minicomputer built from 74HC logic. Paulo Constantino Sol-1 has user and kernel priviledge mode, a maximum of 256 processes in parallel, paged virtual memory, serial ports, parallel ports, IDE interface, realtime clock, a DMA channel, and much more. There’s also an accompanying operating system called Solarium.
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