One of the innovations that the V7 Bourne shell introduced was built in shell wildcard globbing, which is to say expanding things like *, ?, and so on. Of course Unix had shell wildcards well before V7, but in V6 and earlier, the shell didn’t implement globbing itself; instead this was delegated to an external program, /etc/glob (this affects things like looking into the history of Unix shell wildcards, because you have to know to look at the glob source, not the shell).

↫ Chris Siebenmann

I never knew expanding wildcars in UNIX shells was once done by a separate program, but if you stop and think about the original UNIX philosophy, it kind of makes sense. On a slightly related note, I’m currently very deep into setting up, playing with, and actively using HP-UX 11i v1 on the HP c8000 I was able to buy thanks to countless donations from you all, OSNews readers, and one of the things I want to get working is email in dtmail, the CDE email program. However, dtmail is old, and wants you to do email the UNIX way: instead of dtmail retrieving and sending email itself, it expects other programs to those tasks for you.

In other words, to setup and use dtmail (instead of relying on a 2010 port of Thunderbird), I’ll have to learn how to set up things like sendmail, fetchmail, or alternatives to those tools. Those programs will in turn dump the emails in the maildir format for dtmail to work with. Configuring these tools could very well be above my paygrade, but I’ll do my best to try and get it working – I think it’s more authentic to use something like dtmail than a random Thunderbird port.

In any event, this, too, feels very UNIX-y, much like delegating wildcard expansion to a separate program. What this also shows is that the “UNIX philosophy” was subject to erosion from the very beginning, and really isn’t a modern phenomenon like many people seem to imply. I doubt many of the people complaining about the demise of the UNIX philosophy today even knew wildcard expansion used to be done by a separate program.

Many moons ago, around the time when Andreas formally resigned from being Serenity’s BDFL, I decided that I want to get involved in the project more seriously. Looking at it from a perspective of “what do I not like about this (codebase)”, the first thing that came to mind was that it runs HERE points at QEMU and not THERE points at real hardware. Obvious oversight, let’s fix it.

↫ sdomi

There’s no way for me to summarise this cursed saga, so just follow the lovely link and read it. It’s a meandering story of complexity, but eventually, a corrupted graphical session appeared.

Now the real work starts.

VLC media player, the popular open-source software developed by nonprofit VideoLAN, has topped 6 billion downloads worldwide and teased an AI-powered subtitle system.

The new feature automatically generates real-time subtitles — which can then also be translated in many languages — for any video using open-source AI models that run locally on users’ devices, eliminating the need for internet connectivity or cloud services, VideoLAN demoed at CES.

↫ Manish Singh at TechCrunch

VLC is choosing to throw users who rely on subtitles for accessibility or translation reasons under the bus. Using speech-to-text and even “AI” as a starting point for a proper accessibility expert of translator is fine, and can greatly reduce the workload. However, as anyone who works with STT and “AI” translation software knows, their output is highly variable and wildly unreliable, especially once English isn’t involved. Dumping the raw output of these tools onto people who rely on closed captions and subtitles to even be able to view videos is not only lazy, it’s deeply irresponsible and demonstrates a complete lack of respect and understanding.

I was a translator for almost 15 years, with two university degrees on the subject to show for it. This is obviously a subject close to my heart, and the complete and utter lack of respect and understanding from Silicon Valley and the wider technology world for proper localisation and translation has been a thorn in my side for decades. We all know about bad translations, but it goes much deeper than that – with Silicon Valley’s utter disregard for multilingual people drawing most of my ire. Despite about 60 million people in the US alone using both English and Spanish daily, software still almost universally assumes you speak only one language at all times, often forcing fresh installs for something as simple as changing a single application’s language, or not even allowing autocorrect on a touch keyboard to work with multiple languages simultaneously.

I can’t even imagine how bad things are for people who, for instance, require closed-captions for accessibility reasons. Imagine just how bad the “AI”-translated Croatian closed-captions on an Italian video are going to be – that’s two levels of “AI” brainrot between the source and the ears of the Croatian user.

It seems subtitles and closed captions are going to be the next area where technology companies are going to slash costs, without realising – or, more likely, without giving a shit – that this will hurt users who require accessibility or translations more than anything. Seeing even an open source project like VLC jump onto this bandwagon is disheartening, but not entirely unexpected – the hype bubble is inescapable, and a lot more respected projects are going to throw their users under the bus before this bubble pops.

…wait a second. Why is VLC at CES in the first place?

On Monday at CES 2025, Nvidia unveiled a desktop computer called Project DIGITS. The machine uses Nvidia’s latest “Blackwell” AI chip and will cost $3,000. It contains a new central processor, or CPU, which Nvidia and MediaTek worked to create.

Responding to an analyst’s question during an investor presentation, Huang said Nvidia tapped MediaTek to co-design an energy-efficient CPU that could be sold more widely.

“Now they could provide that to us, and they could keep that for themselves and serve the market. And so it was a great win-win,” Huang said.

Previously, Reuters reported that Nvidia was working on a CPU for personal computers to challenge the consumer and business computer market dominance of Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Qualcomm.

↫ Stephen Nellis at Reuters

I’ve long wondered why NVIDIA wasn’t entering the general purpose processor market in a more substantial way than it did a few years ago with the Tegra, especially now that ARM has cemented itself as an architecture choice for more than just mobile devices. Much like Intel, AMD, and now Qualcomm, NVIDIA could easily deliver the whole package to laptop, tablet, and desktop makers: processor, chipset, GPU, of course glued together with special NVIDIA magic the other companies opting to use NVIDIA GPUs won’t get.

There’s a lot of money to be made there, and it’s the move that could help NVIDIA survive the inevitable crash of the “AI” wave it’s currently riding, which has pushed the company to become one of the most valuable companies in the world. I’m also sure OEMs would love nothing more than to have more than just Qualcomm to choose from for ARM laptops and desktops, if only to aid in bringing costs down through competition, and to potentially offer ARM devices with the same kind of powerful GPUs currently mostly reserved for x86 machines.

I’m personally always for more competition, but this time with the asterisk that NVIDIA really doesn’t need to get any bigger than it already is. The company has a long history of screwing over consumers, and I doubt that would change if they also conquered a chunky slice of the general purpose processor market.

Hey there! In this book, we’re going to build a small operating system from scratch, step by step.

You might get intimidated when you hear OS or kernel development, the basic functions of an OS (especially the kernel) are surprisingly simple. Even Linux, which is often cited as a huge open-source software, was only 8,413 lines in version 0.01. Today’s Linux kernel is overwhelmingly large, but it started with a tiny codebase, just like your hobby project.

We’ll implement basic context switching, paging, user mode, a command-line shell, a disk device driver, and file read/write operations in C. Sounds like a lot, however, it’s only 1,000 lines of code!

↫ Seiya Nuta

It’s exactly what it says on the tin.

We’ve all had a good seven years to figure out why our interconnected devices refused to work properly with the HDMI 2.1 specification. The HDMI Forum announced at CES today that it’s time to start considering new headaches. HDMI 2.2 will require new cables for full compatibility, but it has the same physical connectors. Tiny QR codes are suggested to help with that, however.

The new specification is named HDMI 2.2, but compatible cables will carry an “Ultra96” marker to indicate that they can carry 96GBps, double the 48 of HDMI 2.1b. The Forum anticipates this will result in higher resolutions and refresh rates and a “next-gen HDMI Fixed Rate Link.” The Forum cited “AR/VR/MR, spatial reality, and light field displays” as benefiting from increased bandwidth, along with medical imaging and machine vision.

↫ Kevin Purdey at Ars Technica

I’m sure this will not pose any problems whatsoever, and that no shady no-name manufacturers will abuse this situation at all. DisplayPort is the better standard and connector anyway.

No, I will not be taking questions.

An OPO (compiled OPL) interpreter written in Lua and Swift, based on the Psion Series 5 era format (ie ER5, prior to the Quartz 6.x changes). It lets you run Psion 5 programs written in OPL on any iOS device, subject to the limitations described below.

↫ OpoLua GitHub page

If you’re pining for that Psion Series 5, but don’t want to deal with the hassle of owning and maintaining a real one – here’s a solution if you’re an iOS users. Incredibly neat, but with one limitation: only pure OPL programs work. Any program that also has native ARM code will not work.

Dell has announced it’s rebranding literally its entire product line, so mainstays like XPS, Latitude, and Inspiron are going away. They’re replacing all of these old brands with Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max, and within each of these, there will be three tiers: Base, Plus, and Premium. Of course, the reason is “AI”.

The AI PC market is quickly evolving. Silicon innovation is at its strongest and everyone from IT decision makers to professionals and everyday users are looking at on-device AI to help drive productivity and creativity. To make finding the right AI PC easy for customers, we’ve introduced three simple product categories to focus on core customer needs – Dell (designed for play, school and work), Dell Pro (designed for professional-grade productivity) and Dell Pro Max (designed for maximum performance). 

We’ve also made it easy to distinguish products within each of the new product categories. We have a consistent approach to tiering that lets customers pinpoint the exact device for their specific needs. Above and beyond the starting point (Base), there’s a Plus tier that offers the most scalable performance and a Premium tier that delivers the ultimate in mobility and design.

↫ Kevin Terwilliger on Dell’s blog

Setting aside the nonsensical reasoning behind the rebrand, I do actually kind of dig the simplicity here. This is a simple, straightforward set of brand names and tiers that pretty much anyone can understand. That being said, the issue with Dell in particular is that once you go to their website to actually buy one of their machines, the clarity abruptly ends and it gets confusing fast. I hope these new brand names and tiers will untangle some of that mess to make it easier to find what you need, but I’m skeptical.

My XPS 13 from 2017 is really starting to show its age, and considering how happy I’ve been with it over the years its current Dell equivalent would be a top contender (assuming I had the finances to do so). I wonder if the Linux support on current Dell laptops has improved since my XPS 13 was new?

The more than two decades since Half-Life 2‘s release have been filled with plenty of rumors and hints about Half-Life 3, ranging from the official–ish to the thin to the downright misleading. As we head into 2025, though, we’re approaching something close to a critical mass of rumors and leaks suggesting that Half-Life 3 is really in the works this time, and could be officially announced in the coming months.

↫ Kyle Orland at Ars Technica

We should all be skeptical of anything related to Half-Life 3, but there’s no denying something’s buzzing. The one reason why I personally think a Half-Life 3 might be happening is the imminent launch of SteamOS for generic PCs, possibly accompanied by prebuilt SteamOS PCs and consoles and third-party Steam Decks. It makes perfect sense for Valve to have such a launch accompanied by the release of Half-Life 3, similar to how Half-Life 2 was accompanied by the launch of Steam.

We’ll have to wait and see. It will be hard to fulfill all the crazy expectations, though.

I’d like to write a full-fledged blog post about these adventures at some point, but for now I’m going to focus on one particular side quest: getting acceptable video output out of the 1000H when it’s running Windows 3.11 for Workgroups.

By default, Windows 3.x renders using the standard “lowest common denominator” of video: VGA 640×480 at 16 colours. Unfortunately this looks awful on the Eee PC’s beautiful 1024×600 screen, and it’s not even the same aspect ratio.

But how can we do better?

↫ Ash Wolf

If you ever wanted to know how display drivers work in Windows 3.x, here’s your chance. This definitely falls into the category of light reading for the weekend.

Apple’s first-generation Vision Pro headset may have now ceased production, following reports of reduced demand and production cuts earlier in the year.

↫ Hartley Charlton at MacRumors

I think we’ll live.

The RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 are receiving their final updates. According to two highly reliable leakers, the RTX 5090 is officially a 575W TDP model, confirming that the new SKU requires significantly more power than its predecessor, the RTX 4090 with TDP of 450W.

According to Kopite, there has also been an update to the RTX 5080 specifications. While the card was long rumored to have a 400W TDP, the final figure is now set at 360W. This change is likely because NVIDIA has confirmed the TDP, as opposed to earlier TGP figures that are higher and represent the maximum power limit required by NVIDIA’s specifications for board partners.

↫ WhyCry at VideoCardz.com

These kinds of batshit insane GPU power power requirements are eventually going to run into the limits of the kind of airflow an ATX case can provide. We’re still putting the airflow stream of GPUs (bottom to top) perpendicular to the airflow through the case (front to back) like it’s 1987, and you’d think at least someone would be thinking about addressing this – especially when a GPU is casually dumping this much heat into the constrained space within a computer case.

I don’t want more glass and gamer lights. I want case makers to hire at least one proper fluid dynamics engineer.

We’ve just entered the new year, and that means we’re going to see some overviews about what the past year has brought. Today we’re looking at AROS, as AROS News – great name, very classy, you’ve got good taste, don’t change it – summarised AROS’ 2024, and it’s been a good year for the project. We don’t hear a lot about AROS-proper, as the various AROS distributions are a more optimal way of getting to know the operating system and the project’s communication hasn’t always been great, but that doesn’t mean they’ve been sitting still.

Perhaps the most surprising amount of progress in 2024 was made in the move from 32bit to 64bit AROS.

Deadwood also released a 64-bit version of the system (ABIv11) in a Linux hosted version (ABIv11 20241102-1) and AxRuntime version 41.12, which promises a complete switch to 64-bit in the near future. He has also developed a prototype emulator that will enable 64-bit AROS to run programs written for the 32-bit version of the system.

↫ Andrzej “retrofaza” Subocz at AROS News

This is great news for AROS, as being stuck in 32bit isn’t particularly future-proof. It might not pose many problems today, as older hardware remains available and 64bit x86 processors can handle running 32bit operating systems just fine, but you never know when that will change. Int the same vein, Deadwood also released a 64bit version of Oddysey, the WebKit-based browser, which was updated this year from August 2015’s WebKit to February 2019’s WebKit. Sure, 2019 might still be a little outdated, but it does mean a ton of complex sites now work again on AROS, and that’s a hugely positive development.

Things like Python and GCC were also updated this year, and there was, as is fitting for an Amiga-inspired operating system, a lot of activity in the gaming world, including big updates to Doom 3 and ScummVM. This is just a selection of course, so be sure to read Subocz’s entire summary at AROS News.

Do you think streaming platforms and other entities that employ DRM schemes use the TPM in your computer to decrypt stuff? Well, the Free Software Foundation seems to think so, and adds Microsoft’s insistence on requiring a TPM for Windows 11 into the mix, but it turns out that’s simply not true.

I’m going to be honest here and say that I don’t know what Microsoft’s actual motivation for requiring a TPM in Windows 11 is. I’ve been talking about TPM stuff for a long time. My job involves writing a lot of TPM code. I think having a TPM enables a number of worthwhile security features. Given the choice, I’d certainly pick a computer with a TPM. But in terms of whether it’s of sufficient value to lock out Windows 11 on hardware with no TPM that would otherwise be able to run it? I’m not sure that’s a worthwhile tradeoff.

What I can say is that the FSF’s claim is just 100% wrong, and since this seems to be the sole basis of their overall claim about Microsoft’s strategy here, the argument is pretty significantly undermined. I’m not aware of any streaming media platforms making use of TPMs in any way whatsoever. There is hardware DRM that the media companies use to restrict users, but it’s not in the TPM – it’s in the GPU.

↫ Matthew Garrett

A TPM is imply not designed to handle decryption of media streams, and even if they were, they’re far, far too slow and underpowered to decode even a 1080P stream, let alone anything more demanding than that. In reality, DRM schemes like Google’s Widevine, Apple’s Fairplay, and Microsoft’s Playready offer different levels of functionality, both in software and in hardware. The hardware DRM stuff is all done by the GPU, and not by the TPM. By focusing so much on the TPM, Garrett argues, the FSF is failing to see how GPU makers have enabled a ton of hardware DRM without anyone noticing.

Personally, I totally understand why organisations like the Free Software Foundation are focusing on TPMs right now. They’re one of the main reasons why people can’t upgrade to Windows 11, it’s the thing people have heard about, and it’s the thing that’ll soon prevent them from getting security updates for their otherwise perfectly fine machines. I’m not sure the FSF has enough clout these days to make any meaningful media impact, especially in more general, non-tech media, but by choosing the TPM as their focus they’re definitely choosing a viable vector.

Of course, over here in the tech corner, we don’t like it when people are factually inaccurate or twisting and bending the truth, and I’m glad someone as knowledgeable as Garrett stepped up to set the record straight for us tech-focused people, while everyone else can continue to ignore this matter.