Notice
Just want to let y’all know that my family and I have been hit hard with bronchitis these past two weeks, and especially my recovery is going quite slowly (our kids are healthy again, and my wife is recovering quite well!). As such, I haven’t been able to do much OSNews work. I hope things will finally clear up a bit over the weekend so that I can resume normal service come Monday. Enjoy your weekend, y’all! ⌘ Read more

Eliminating memory safety vulnerabilities at the source
The push towards memory safe programming languages is strong, and for good reason. However, especially for bigger projects with a lot of code that potentially needs to be rewritten or replaced, you might question if all the effort is even worth it, particularly if all the main contributors would also need to be retrained. Well, it turns out that merely just focusing on writing new code in a memory safe language will dras … ⌘ Read more

What happened to the Japanese PC platforms?
The other day a friend asked me a pretty interesting question: what happened to all those companies who made those Japanese computer platforms that were never released outside Japan? I thought it’d be worth expanding that answer into a full-size post. ↫ Misty De Meo Japan had a number of computer makers that sold platforms that looked and felt like western PCs, but were actually quite different hardware-wise, and incompatible with the IBM PC. No … ⌘ Read more

OpenBSD now enforcing no invalid NUL characters in shell scripts
Our favorite operating system is now changing the default shell (ksh) to enforce not allowing invalid NUL characters in input that will be parsed as parts of the script. ↫ Undeadly.org As someone who doesn’t deal with stuff like this – I rarely actively use shell scripts – it seems kind of insane to me that this wasn’t the norm since the beginning. ⌘ Read more

Microsoft deprecates Windows Server Update Services, suggests cloud services instead
As part of our vision for simplified Windows management from the cloud, Microsoft has announced deprecation of Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). Specifically, this means that we are no longer investing in new capabilities, nor are we accepting new feature requests for WSUS. However, we are preserving current functionality and will continue to publish updates t … ⌘ Read more

Disable Sequoia’s monthly screen recording permission prompt
The widely–reported “foo is requesting to bypass the system private window picker and directly access your screen and audio” prompt in Sequoia (which Apple has moved from daily to weekly to now monthly) can be disabled by quitting the app, setting the system date far into the future, opening and using the affected app to trigger the nag, clicking “Allow For One Month”, then restoring the correct date. ↫ tinyapps … ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm wants to buy Intel
On Friday afternoon, The Wall Street Journal reported Intel had been approached by fellow chip giant Qualcomm about a possible takeover. While any deal is described as “far from certain,” according to the paper’s unnamed sources, it would represent a tremendous fall for a company that had been the most valuable chip company in the world, based largely on its x86 processor technology that for years had triumphed over Qualcomm’s Arm chips outside of the phone space. ↫ Richard L … ⌘ Read more

Slowly booting full Linux on the Intel 4004 for fun, art, and absolutely no profit
Can you run Linux on the Intel 4004, the first commercially produced microprocessor, released to the world in 1971? Well, Dmitry Grinberg, the genius engineer who got Linux to run on all kinds of incredibly underpowered hardware, sought to answer this very important question. In short, yes, you can run Linux on the 4004, but much as with other extremely limited and bare … ⌘ Read more

Why Apple uses JPEG XL in the iPhone 16 and what it means for your hotos
The iPhone 16 family has arrived and includes many new features, some of which Apple has played very close to its vest. One such improvement is the inclusion of JPEG XL file types, which promise improved image quality compared to standard JPEG files while delivering relatively smaller file sizes. Overall, JPEG XL addresses many of JPEG’s shortcomings. The 30-year-old format is not very e … ⌘ Read more

Nintendo and The Pokémon Company file patent lawsuit against maker of hit game Palworld
Nintendo, together with The Pokémon Company, filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court against Pocketpair, Inc. on September 18, 2024. This lawsuit seeks an injunction against infringement and compensation for damages on the grounds that Palworld, a game developed and released by the Defendant, infringes multiple patent rights. ↫ Ninten … ⌘ Read more

DirectX adopting SPIR-V as the interchange format of the future
As we look to the future, maintaining a proprietary IR format (even one based on an open-source project) is counter to our commitments to open technologies, so Shader Model 7.0 will adopt SPIR-V as its interchange format. Over the next few years, we will be working to define a SPIR-V environment for Direct3D, and a set of SPIR-V extensions to support all of Direct3D’s current and future shader programming … ⌘ Read more

European Commission to order Apple to take interoperability measures after company refuses to comply with DMA
The European Commission has taken the next step in forcing Apple to comply with the Digital Markets Act. The EC has started two so-called specification proceedings, in which they can more or less order Apple exactly what it needs to do to comply with the DMA – in this case covering the interoperability obligation s … ⌘ Read more

GNOME 47 released with accent colours and completely new open/save file dialogs
The GNOME project has released their newest major version, GNOME 47, and while it’s not the most groundbreaking release, there’s still a ton of good stuff in here. Two features really stand our, with the first one being the addition of accent colours. Instead of being locked into the default GNOME blue accent colour, you can now choose between a variety of colours, which is … ⌘ Read more

Intel to spin off its chipmaking business
Intel’s woes are far from over. Pat Gelsinger, the company’s CEO, has announced that Intel’s chipmaking business will be spun off and turned into a separate company. A subsidiary structure will unlock important benefits. It provides our external foundry customers and suppliers with clearer separation and independence from the rest of Intel. Importantly, it also gives us future flexibility to evaluate independent sources of funding and optimize the … ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 13.4 released
FreeBSD 13.4 has been released. This is already the fifth release in the FreeBSD 13 series, and contains the usual set of security fixes, driver updates, important updated packages, like openssh, LLVM, clang, and so on. If you’re running FreeBSD 13, you already know how to upgrade, and if you want to start using FreeBSD 13, here’s the download page. ⌘ Read more

Things you really should know about Windows Input, but would rather not
Are you developing a game for Windows, and are you working on input handling? At first, it could reasonably be assumed that mouse and keyboard should be the simplest parts of this to deal with, but in reality, they are not – at least if we are talking about Windows. In fact, several extremely popular AAA games ship with severe mouse input issues when specific high-end mice are used, and som … ⌘ Read more

A brief history of QuickTime
We all know about the Desktop Publishing revolution that the first Macs and their PostScript LaserWriter printers brought in the late 1980s, but many have now forgotten the Desktop Video revolution that followed in the next decade. At its heart was support for multimedia in Apple’s QuickTime. QuickTime isn’t a single piece of software, or even an API in Classic Mac OS, but a whole architecture to support almost any media format you could conceive of. It defines container an … ⌘ Read more

Releasing Windows as open source is the only viable way forward for Microsoft, and it’s going happen
Last week, Julio Merino published an article I wish someone had written ages ago: a fair, unbiased look at the differences between Windows NT in its original form and UNIX roughly at the time of the initial releases of Windows NT. Merino, who has a long career in tech and has made contributions to several operating systems, does a gre … ⌘ Read more

Apple releases iOS/iPadOS 18, macOS 15, and a ton more
It’s Apple operating system release day, so if you’re in the Apple ecosystem, it’s like Christmas morning, but for your devices. The two major platforms are, of course, iOS/iPadOS 18: ‌iOS 18‌ adds new customization options for the Home Screen, with the option to arrange apps and widgets with open spaces and add new tints to app icons. Control Center has been entirely overhauled with support for multiple pages, third-party c … ⌘ Read more

Chrome on the Mac uses less battery than Safari
It’s one of the most pervasive common wisdoms shared all over the web, no matter where you go – it’s one of those things everybody seems to universally agree on: Chrome will absolutely devastate your battery life on the Mac, and you should really be using Safari, because Apple’s special integration magic pixie dust sprinkles ensures Safari sips instead of gulps electricity. Whether you read random forum posters, Apple PR spokespeople, o … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.11 released
Linus Torvalds just tagged the Linux 6.11 kernel as stable. There are many changes and new features in Linux 6.11 including numerous AMD CPU and GPU improvements, preparations for upcoming Intel platforms, initial block atomic write support for NVMe and SCSI drives, the DRM Panic infrastructure can now display a monochrome logo if desired, easier support for building Pacman kernel packages for Arch Linux, DeviceTree files for initial Snapdragon X1 laptops, and much more. ↫ Michael Larabel Es … ⌘ Read more