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  • Microsoft is paywalling features in Notepad and Paint

    2:47am By Thom Holwerda
    There’s some bad news for Windows users who want to use all of the built-in features of the operating system and its integrated apps. Going forward, Microsoft is restricting features in two iconic apps, which you’ll need to unlock with a paid subscription.…
  • Chromium Ozone/Wayland: the last mile stretch

    2:28am By Thom Holwerda
    Lets start with some context, the project consists of implementing, shipping and maintaining native Wayland support in the Chromium project. Our team at Igalia has been leading the effort since it was first merged upstream back in 2016. For more historical…
  • 1972 UNIX V2 “beta” resurrected from old tapes

    Thu 6:58pm By Thom Holwerda
    There’s a number of backups of old DECtapes from Dennis Ritchie, which he gave to Warren Toomey in 1997. The tapes were eventually uploaded, and through analysis performed by Yufeng Gao, a lot of additional details, code, and software were recovered from…
  • Mozilla once again confirms it’s all about ads and “AI” now

    Wed 7:42pm By Thom Holwerda
    We’ve recognized that Mozilla faces major headwinds in terms of both financial growth and mission impact. While Firefox remains the core of what we do, we also need to take steps to diversify: investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue…
  • NES86: x86 emulation on the NES

    Wed 7:26pm By Thom Holwerda
    The goal of this project is to emulate an Intel 8086 processor and supporting PC hardware well enough to run the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset (ELKS), including a shell and utilities. It should be possible to run other x86 software as long as it doesn’t…
  • The generative AI con

    Wed 11:38am By Thom Holwerda
    Everywhere you look, the media is telling you that OpenAI and their ilk are the future, that they’re building “advanced artificial intelligence” that can take “human-like actions,” but when you look at any of this shit for more than two seconds…
  • Broadcom, TSMC weigh possible Intel deals that would split storied chip maker

    Wed 11:02am By Thom Holwerda
    Broadcom has been closely examining Intel’s chip-design and marketing business, according to people familiar with the matter. It has informally discussed with its advisers making a bid but would likely only do so if it finds a partner for Intel’s…
  • Humane is shutting down the AI Pin and selling its remnants to HP

    Tue 7:31pm By Thom Holwerda
    Humane is selling most of its company to HP for $116 million and will stop selling AI Pin, the company announced today. AI Pins that have already been purchased will continue to function normally until 3PM ET on February 28th, Humane says in a support…
  • AIDA64 drops support for Windows 95, 98, and ME

    Tue 4:05pm By Thom Holwerda
    AIDA64, the popular benchmarking tool for Windows, released a new version today. I don’t particularly care about benchmarking – even less so benchmarking on Windows – but this new release comes with an interesting line in the release notes. Discontinued…
  • ArcaOS 5.1.1 released

    Mon 6:28pm By Thom Holwerda
    It’s been two years since the release of ArcaOS 5.1, which was a hugely important release because it brought UEFI support to this continuation of IBM’s OS/2, ensuring longevity for the project for years to come. Since I don’t think much is known about…
  • UNIX man pages

    Mon 5:23pm By Thom Holwerda
    What might be somewhat more surprising though considering its research origins is that Unix almost since the very beginning had a comprehensive set of online reference documentation for all its commands, system calls, file formats, etc. These are the the…
  • Did the Windows 95 setup team forget that MS-DOS can do graphics?

    Mon 4:49pm By Thom Holwerda
    One of the reactions to my discussion of why Windows 95 setup used three operating systems (and oh there were many) was my explanation that an MS-DOS based setup program would be text-mode. But c’mon, MS-DOS could do graphics! Are you just a bunch of morons?…
  • JotaleaOS: a very tiny hobby operating system

    Feb 13, 2025, 7:00 pm By Thom Holwerda
    JotaleaOS is an open source, minimalistic, experimental operating system made by Jotalea, designed for extreme low-resource environments. It does not support external programs or games, as it lacks a standard application execution environment. The system is…
  • Fedora should not push its users to its own Flatpak repository

    Feb 13, 2025, 6:49 pm By Thom Holwerda
    Unlike most (all?) other distributions with built-in Flatpak support, Fedora maintains its own repository of Flatpak applications. Everyone else defaults to using Flathub, where developers of applications themselves tend to publish their Flatpaks. Fedora’s…
  • KDE Plasma 6.3 brings drawing tablet improvements

    Feb 11, 2025, 11:31 am By Thom Holwerda
    Speaking of KDE, Plasma 6.3 has been released. It brings with it a ton of improvements aimed at digital artists, such as much improved management and configuration of drawing tablets. You can now map an area of the tablet’s surface to a part of the screen,…
  • Moving KDE’s styling into the future

    Feb 11, 2025, 11:10 am By Thom Holwerda
    One of the major issues with KDE’s styling system is the fact that over the year, it has accumulated four ways of styling applications – which makes themeing and changing aspects of the default theme far more cumbersome than it should be. In fact, with the…