Source: OSNews
The following chart shows how the Adobe Reader installer has grown in size over the years. When possible, 64-bit versions of installers were used.
↫ Alexander Gromnitsky
Disk space is cheap, sure, but this is insanity.
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hack a Day
We usually at least recognize old computer hardware and software names. But [Asianmoetry] taught us a new one: Pick OS. This 1960s-era system was sort of a database and sort of an operating system for big iron used by the Army. The request was for an English-like query language, and TRW assigned two guys, Don Nelson and Dick Pick, to the job.
The planned query language would allow for things like “list the title, author, and abstract of every transportation system reference with the principal city ‘Los Angeles’.” This was GIM or generalized information management, and, in a forward-looking choice, it ran in a virtual machine.
TRW made one delivery of GIM, but the program that funded it was in trouble. Since TRW didn’t protect GIM, Dick took his program and formed a business. That business sold the rights to the software to Microdata, a minicomputer company, which used it under the name ENGLISH.
After a lawsuit with Microdata, Pick was able to keep his software, but Microdata retained its rights. Pick dabbled in making hardware, but decided to sell that part of the enterprise and focus on licensing Pick OS.
The first sale was to Honeywell. The virtual machine concept made it easy to port to new machines. Pick had a very IBM-like structured file system, where all data is a string, and dictionaries organize the underlying data.
In addition to a database, there was a programming language like BASIC, a text editor, and even a spreadsheet program. Why haven’t we heard of it? Part of the problem is that the computers using it typically renamed it and didn’t say it was Pick under the hood.
In the early 1980s, Pick’s appearance on the PC and the ability to support ten users on a single PC were notable features. The resellers didn’t appreciate the thrust to sell directly to users, and more lawsuits emerged.
Pick also struggled to get a GUI going when that was taking off. After Dick died, the system sort of coasted through several acquisitions. There are echoes of it in OpenQM, and there’s at least one fork of that on GitHub.
It is amazing how a system can utilize something like this and then become locked in, even after things change. This explains why Japan still uses floppy disks for certain things.
Source: Hack a Day
We usually at least recognize old computer hardware and software names. But [Asianmoetry] taught us a new one: Pick OS. This 1960s-era system was sort of a database and sort of an operating system for big iron used by the Army. The request was for an English-like query language, and TRW assigned two guys, Don Nelson and Dick Pick, to the job.
The planned query language would allow for things like “list the title, author, and abstract of every transportation system reference with the principal city ‘Los Angeles’.” This was GIM or generalized information management, and, in a forward-looking choice, it ran in a virtual machine.
TRW made one delivery of GIM, but the program that funded it was in trouble. Since TRW didn’t protect GIM, Dick took his program and formed a business. That business sold the rights to the software to Microdata, a minicomputer company, which used it under the name ENGLISH.
After a lawsuit with Microdata, Pick was able to keep his software, but Microdata retained its rights. Pick dabbled in making hardware, but decided to sell that part of the enterprise and focus on licensing Pick OS.
The first sale was to Honeywell. The virtual machine concept made it easy to port to new machines. Pick had a very IBM-like structured file system, where all data is a string, and dictionaries organize the underlying data.
In addition to a database, there was a programming language like BASIC, a text editor, and even a spreadsheet program. Why haven’t we heard of it? Part of the problem is that the computers using it typically renamed it and didn’t say it was Pick under the hood.
In the early 1980s, Pick’s appearance on the PC and the ability to support ten users on a single PC were notable features. The resellers didn’t appreciate the thrust to sell directly to users, and more lawsuits emerged.
Pick also struggled to get a GUI going when that was taking off. After Dick died, the system sort of coasted through several acquisitions. There are echoes of it in OpenQM, and there’s at least one fork of that on GitHub.
It is amazing how a system can utilize something like this and then become locked in, even after things change. This explains why Japan still uses floppy disks for certain things.
Source: Hacker News
Source: The Verge - All Posts
The US is investing $8.9 billion into Intel, but most of the funds come from money that the government was supposed to pay the embattled chipmaker anyway. In an announcement on Friday, Intel said the federal government will fund its investment using the remaining $5.7 billion in grants it hasn’t yet received under the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act, in addition to the $3.2 billion received as part of the Secure Enclave program.
President Donald Trump confirmed the investment during a press briefing before the formal announcement, saying Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan agreed to give the government a 10 percent stake. Earlier this month, Trump called on Tan to resign over his ties to China, and today he positioned the deal as a way for the executive to “keep his job.”
Trump told reporters that he floated the offer during negotiations with Tan. “I said, ‘I think it would be good having the United States as your partner,’” Trump said. “They’ve agreed to do it, and I think it’s a great deal for them.” Intel has already received $2.2 billion under the CHIPS Act.
The government’s investment in Intel “will be a passive ownership, with no Board representation or other governance or information rights,” according to Intel. “We are grateful for the confidence the President and the Administration have placed in Intel, and we look forward to working to advance U.S. technology and manufacturing leadership,” Tan says in the press release.
The confirmation of the deal comes just days after SoftBank announced plans to invest $2 billion into Intel to “further expand” chipmaking in the US.
The federal government’s stake in the embattled chipmaker marks yet another move that blurs the line between government and business, as reports suggest that the Trump administration has demanded that Nvidia and AMD give the government a 15 percent cut of chip sales to China.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hinted at the government’s potential investment this week, saying during an interview with CNBC that it “would be a conversion of grants” meant to “stabilize the company for chip production here in the US.”
It doesn’t seem like this is the end for Trump’s approach to deal-making, as he said during the briefing that “he’ll do more of them” in the future.
Update, August 22nd: Added information from Intel.
Source: NYT > U.S.
The founder of the evangelical group Focus on the Family, he spent decades denouncing what he saw as the unraveling of the social order.
Source: Boing Boing
Welp, if you live in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, or West Virginia, and you've recently bought shrimp at Walmart, you're going to want to check to make sure you didn't get the ones that are radioactive. — Read the rest
The post FDA warns public to throw out potentially radioactive shrimp appeared first on Boing Boing.
Source: Hacker News
Source: OSNews
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Hi, FAB 2025 is still happening in Prague and it has been a wonderful event. It’s been great to meet so many people from our community at home, in Czechia! But during my chats with the attendee’s, there was one topic which was emerging time and time again, and that is the state of open hardware. I cannot talk about all of the open hardware, but I can share experience from 3D printing. And it is not good! Open hardware in 3D printing is dead – you just don’t know it yet. This is an opinion piece, imagine we are talking about this topic over a cold Pilsner…
↫ Josef Prusa
What happens when the Chinese government lists 3D printing as an industry it wants to dominate? Well, an explosion in bogus patents and the death of tons of smaller, local brands, leaving only major players from China and perhaps one or two bigger non-Chinese brands. That’s the conclusion by Josef Prusa, founder of Prusa Research, a major 3D printer maker from Prague, Czechia. Prusa’s printers used to be entirely open source, but starting in 2023, this is no longer the case – ostensibly because being open source hardware meant that competitors were copying their work wholesale without contributing anything back, or worse, stealing their work entirely and keeping it all closed, despite the copyleft license in use.
Looking at the numbers, it seems clear that smaller companies will not be able to deal with the onslaught of bogus patents, as fighting patent infringement claims in court and getting patents invalidated, even if prior art exists in abundance, is prohibitively expensive and incredibly time-consuming. It’s a game of really expensive whack-a-mole against people with far deeper pockets than you.
Still, this whole thing does taste a bit sour considering Prusa’s abandonment of its open source roots and ideals. There’s a business to be run here, I understand that, but principles do matter, and if not even a company priding itself on producing open source hardware stands by its ideals, why should anyone else?
