Zoologist and author Desmond Morris dies aged 98
buff.ly/PglQMn4
Morris was best known for his book, The Naked Ape, which was published in 1967. It framed modern humans as still being fundamentally ape-like despite our technological advances and evolution.
He was also a surrealist painter […]
A mass shooting that took the lives of eight children should stop this country in its tracks. Instead, the Shreveport tragedy disappeared from the headlines in a day. We cannot allow this level of violence to fade into background noise. Ending America’s gun‑violence epidemic is a moral oblligation.
Linux 7.1 will have an optional new NTFS driver
www.theregister.com/2026/04/20/l...
Good news for those working with Windows, bad news for Paragon Software
<- by me on @theregister.com
I didn't know that. 😅
Like most drug discovery researchers, I’ve been watching the “peptides for everything” craze with a mixture of amusement and alarm:
This Is Just To Say
I have turned off
the AI features
that were in
the update
and which
you were probably
hoping
to monetize
Fuck you
they were stupid
so unnecessary
and so annoying
All true. But bizarrely the reverse is also true.
Atari hired a bunch of ex-Commodore engineers led by Shiraz Shivji, one of the lead designers of the C64.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiraz_...
So just as the Amiga was former Atari folks, the ST was former Commodore folks!
The emergency replacement OSes both have a similar problem: they worked near miracles on very limited hardware, but the price of this was tying them so closely to the hardware that they couldn't be upgraded to utilise newer, more capable h/w.
This is probably some sort of rule.
Could be. I know of nothing that delivered on ARX's promise until Oberon, maybe even A2.
I think it's interesting that both the original Amiga OS, CAOS, & the original Archimedes OS, ARX, similarly got cancelled & replaced with much less ambitious efforts.
They both aimed too high for the time.
(BTW I'm aware that's a poor and not very relevant link but I was in a hurry. It does show they were talking.)
PalmOS up to 4.x was. For PalmOS 5.x it wrote its own new Arm kernel and emulator.
There was nearly a deal to use Symbian instead. That would have been great. It might have saved both companies. But Palm backed out, the fools.
www.theregister.com/2000/12/14/p...
Yes, webOS was a very strange decision, but even so, I'm glad it lived on.
I have very big hands, so I like very big phones, while the whole selling point of the Palm Pre was that it was tiny.
One component of Cobalt did live on. The Android inter-process communication component, Binder.
source.android.com/docs/core/ar...
medium.com/@python-java...
This is based on the PalmOS Binder, written by Be folks.
www.osnews.com/story/13674/...
It looked pretty good. This is long before I joined, but El Reg reported on it:
www.theregister.com/2004/09/27/p...
Nobody ever shipped retail kit running it.
Access bought Be and created the multitasking, media-native PalmOS 6, codenamed "Cobalt".
www.palmsource.com/palmos/cobal...
It didn't work – internet appliances needed broadband & wifi, & today we call them "iPads" – and it was cancelled:
www.osnews.com/story/73/son...
Be found a way round it: a dedicated internet appliance OS. Sony shipped that:
www.zdnet.com/article/be-o...
This was widely documented at the time. The article "He Who Controls the Bootloader" became justly famous.
birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30...
No, you have your history wrong again. (Yet again!)
OEMs _did_ want to ship BeOS. Microsoft wouldn't let them. It threatened vast price rises for Windows if they did.
Hitachi dared. MS found another way to screw them.
www.osnews.com/story/136392...
I lived in Africa as a kid. Grew up in Nigeria. Pet cats were _extremely_ unusual & I think owners had to keep them indoors, or the wildlife would eat the cats rather than the other way round.
Tolkien: here's my story about heroes who live sustainably, never take more resources than they need, are kind to each other, and lead by supporting and nurturing their followers.
Tech bros:
`curl > /dev/sda` – How I made a Linux distro that runs `wget | dd`
buff.ly/7nTcWgd
This is part 0 of a four-part series about doing weird things in early Linux boot.
<-
1. brilliant & inspired
2. scary
3. initramfs is _way_ too complicated & we should eliminate it
I don't like them either.
Cats are fine. Indoor cats are a good pet. Outdoor cats are an ecological disaster and should be banned worldwide.
But I'm not interested in pics or videos of other people's cats. I'm not interested in other people's cats at all.
Apple nearly acquired Be for BeOS. That would have killed it IMHO. NeXT brought SOTA dev tools _and_ Steve Jobs.
But Acorn had an SMP PCI Arm desktop workstation (the RISC PC 2) nearly ready to go. Acorn & Be might have saved one another: Be had the only lightweight SMP OS in the business.
Apple escaped by ditching CPU _and_ OS & moving to a new CPU platform _& then a whole new OS_:
68k -> PowerPC -> NeXTstep -> x86 -> ARM
It investigated ARM in the Möbius project, which would also have unified Apple II, IIGS & Mac lines, but decided against it.
www.theregister.com/2024/09/04/w...
Acorn's OS became a critical limitation it only escaped by axing the computer division.
But its CPU & chipset thrived – & still does today.
Other vendors were _also_ crippled by their OSes, but lacking CPUs, had nothing else left. This doomed Commodore, Atari, & all the Unix vendors.
That's not how I see it.
Other vendors were forced to abandon backwards compatibility because of of the limitations of 3rd party CPUs.
(Apple tried & nearly made it – more later.)
Acorn was in a way forced to keep it because of the cancellation of its ambitious in-house OS.
(cont'd…)
What he had was a gun.
Surely, of all the newspaper audiences in the country, #Mail readers would be the most likely to stubbornly insist the fateful decision taken in June ten years ago was the right one?
Well, no. Very much no.
Hilarious
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!