A brief history of the numeric keypad
The title is a lie. This isn’t brief at all. Picture the keypad of a telephone and calculator side by side. Can you see the subtle difference between the two without resorting to your smartphone?...
View ArticleLinux removes support for the 486, and now I’m curious what that means for...
I had to dig through our extensive archive – OSNews was founded in 1997, after all – to see if we reported on it at the time, but it turns out we didn’t: in 2006, Intel announced that in 2007, it...
View ArticleCrosscompiling for OpenBSD arm64
Following on from OpenBSD/arm64 on QEMU, it’s not always practical to compile userland software or a new kernel on some systems, particularly small SoCs with limited space and memory – or indeed QEMU,...
View ArticleCracking the Dave & Buster’s anomaly
Let’s dive into a peculiar bug in iOS. And by that I mean, let’s follow along as Guilherme Rambo dives into a peculiar bug in iOS. The bug is that, if you try to send an audio message using the...
View ArticleMicrosoft blinks, extends Office support for Windows 10 by three years
At the start of this year, Microsoft announced that, alongside the end of support for Windows 10, it would also end support for Office 365 (it’s called Microsoft 365 now but that makes no sense to me)...
View ArticleE-COM: the $40 million USPS project to send email on paper
How do you get email to the folks without computers? What if the Post Office printed out email, stamped it, dropped it in folks’ mailboxes along with the rest of their mail, and saved the USPS once...
View ArticleSilicon Valley developers need to unionise
I don’t know anything about hiring processes in Silicon Valley, or about hiring processes in general since I’ve always worked for myself (and still do, running OSNews, relying on your generous Patreon...
View ArticleOracle releases first “enthusiast” Solaris release in three years, promises...
You’d almost forget, but aside from the enterprise-focused variant of Solaris for which Oracle sells support contracts, the company has also nominally maintained and released a version of Solaris...
View ArticleXiaomi joins Google Pixel in making its own smartphone chip
Following rumors, Xiaomi today announced that it will launch its very own chip for smartphones later this month. The “XRING 01” is a chip that the company has apparently been working on for over 10...
View ArticleAccessibility on Linux sucks, but GNOME and KDE are making progress
Accessibility in the software world is a problem in general, but it’s an even bigger problem on open source desktops, as painfully highlighted by this excellent article detailing the utterly broken...
View ArticleRust celebrates ten year anniversary with Rust 1.87.0 release
I generally don’t pay attention to the releases of programming languages unless they’re notable for some reason or another, and I think this one qualifies. Rust is celebrating its ten year anniversary...
View Article“TCF” cookie consent popups violate GDPR; OSNews wants to stop using cookie...
You may not have heard of the “Transparency & Consent Framework”, but you’ve most likely interacted with it, probably on a daily basis. The TCF is used by 80% of the internet to obtain “consent”...
View ArticleWhat were the MS-DOS programs that the moricons.dll icons were intended for?
Last time, we looked at the legacy icons in progman.exe. But what about moricons.dll? Here’s a table of the icons that were present in the original Windows 3.1 moricons.dll file (in file order) and...
View ArticleRender a Guitar Pro score in real time on Linux
Tuxguitar is a quite powerful application written in a mixture of Java / C. It is able to render a score in real time either via Fluidsynth or via pure MIDI. The development of Tuxguitar started in...
View ArticleWith how user-hostile Windows and macOS are, is it any wonder people long for...
Every so often people yearn for a lost (1980s or so) era of ‘single user computers’, whether these are simple personal computers or high end things like Lisp machines and Smalltalk workstations. It’s...
View ArticleMicrosoft releases WSL as open source, announces CLI text editor to replace...
Today we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever...
View ArticleTwo weeks with AR glasses and Linux on Android
I recently learned something that blew my mind; you can run a full desktop Linux environment on your phone. […] That’s a graphical environment via X11 with real window management and compositing,...
View ArticleTelum II at Hot Chips 2024: mainframe with a unique caching strategy
Mainframes still play a vital role in today, providing extremely high uptime and low latency for financial transactions. Telum II is IBM’s latest mainframe processor, and is designed unlike any other...
View ArticleOn the relationship between Qt and KDE
Volker Hilsheimer, chief maintainer of the Qt project, says he has learned lessons from the painful Qt 5 to Qt 6 transition, the importance of Qt Bridges for using Qt from any language, and the...
View ArticleMaking video games in 2025 (without an engine)
I genuinely believe making games without a big “do everything” engine can be easier, more fun, and often less overhead. I am not making a “do everything” game and I do not need 90% of the features...
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