After 32 Years, One of the Net’s Oldest Software Archives Is Shutting Down

Benj Edwards reports via Ars Technica: In a move that marks the end of an era, New Mexico State University (NMSU) recently announced the impending closure of its Hobbes OS/2 Archive on April 15, 2024. For over three decades, the archive has been a key resource for users of the IBM OS/2 operating system and its successors, which once competed fiercely with Microsoft Windows. In a statement made to The Register, a representative of NMSU wrote, “We have made the difficult decision to no longer host these files on hobbes.nmsu.edu. Although I am unable to go into specifics, we had to evaluate our priorities and had to make the difficult decision to discontinue the service.”

Hobbes is hosted by the Department of Information & Communication Technologies at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico. In the official announcement, the site reads, “After many years of service, hobbes.nmsu.edu will be decommissioned and will no longer be available. As of April 15th, 2024, this site will no longer exist.” The earliest record we’ve found of the Hobbes archive online is this 1992 Walnut Creek CD-ROM collection that gathered up the contents of the archive for offline distribution. At around 32 years old, minimum, that makes Hobbes one of the oldest software archives on the Internet, akin to the University of Michigan’s archives and ibiblio at UNC.

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UK To Ban Disposable Vapes

In an announcement earlier today, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said single-use vapes will be banned in Britain, with certain flavors restricted and regulations put in place around their packaging and displays. The New York Times reports: Mr. Sunak said that the ban, which is part of legislation that still has to be approved by Parliament, was intended to halt “one of the most worrying trends at the moment,” before it becomes “endemic.” “The long-term impacts of vaping are unknown and the nicotine within them can be highly addictive, so while vaping can be a useful tool to help smokers quit, marketing vapes to children is not acceptable,” he said in a statement. Andrea Leadsom, Britain’s health minister, said the measures were intended to make sure that vapes were aimed at adults who were quitting smoking, rather than children.

“Nicotine is highly addictive — and so it is completely unacceptable that children are getting their hands on these products, many of which are undeniably designed to appeal to young people,” she said in a statement. […] While it is not illegal for people under 18 to smoke or vape in Britain, it is illegal for those products to be sold to them. By banning disposable vapes, and restricting the flavors and packaging of refillable vapes, the government hopes to make it far less likely that young people will experiment with e-cigarettes.

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God Told Him to Launch a Crypto Venture, Said Pastor. Now He’s Accused of Pocketing $1.2M

In Denver, Colorado, a pastor had a message for his congregation, reports CNN.

“After months of prayers and cues from God, he was going to start selling cryptocurrency, he announced in a YouTube video last April.”

The Signature and Silvergate banks had collapsed weeks earlier, signaling the need to look into other investment options beyond financial institutions, he said. With divine wisdom, he said, he was “setting the rails for God’s wealth transfer.” Shortly afterward, Regalado and his wife, Kaitlyn Regalado, launched a cryptocurrency, INDXcoin, and began selling it to members of his Victorious Grace Church and other Christian communities in the Denver area. They sold it through the Kingdom Wealth Exchange, an online cryptocurrency marketplace he created, controlled and operated.

The Regalados raised more than $3.2 million from over 300 investors, Tung Chang, Securities Commissioner for Colorado, said in a civil complaint. The couple’s sales pitches were filled with “prayer and quotes from the Bible, encouraging investors to have faith that their investment … would lead to ‘abundance’ and ‘blessings,'” the complaint said. But Colorado state regulators say that INDXcoin was “essentially worthless.” Instead of helping investors acquire wealth, the Regalados used around $1.3 million of the investment funds to bankroll lavish expenditures, including a Range Rover, jewelry, cosmetic dentistry and extravagant vacations, the complaint said. The money also paid for renovations to the Regalados’ Denver home, the complaint said.

In a stunning video statement posted online on January 19 — several days after the civil charges were filed — Eli Regalado did not dispute that he and his wife profited from the crypto venture. “The charges are that Kaitlyn and I pocketed 1.3 million dollars, and I just want to come out and say that those charges are true,” he said, adding, “A few hundred thousand dollars went to a home remodel that the Lord told us to do….”

Regalado also said that he and his wife used about half a million dollars of their investors’ funds to pay taxes to the IRS.

CNN reports that in videos Regalado explains how God “convinced him that it was a safe and profitable investment venture.” (“You read it correctly. God’s hand is on INDXcoin and we are launching!” explains the launch video’s description.)

“The Regalados used technical terms to confuse investors and misled them into believing that the coins were valued at between $10-$12 even though they were purchased for $1.50 or, at times, given away, the complaint said.”

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ChatGPT-Powered ‘Scalene’ Offers Efficiency Suggestions for Python Programmers

The tech site IT Brew looks at an open-source tool that “uses AI to offer efficiency-minded suggestions to Python coders.”

Known as “Scalene,” the profiler — a kind of debugger for performance issues — has been downloaded more than 900,000 times on GitHub. “It’s awesome in general, and amazing for an academic project,” UMass professor Emery Berger, who worked with PhD students Sam Stern and Juan Altmayer Pizzorno on the open-source tool, told IT Brew…

Scalene measures how much time and memory is spent on each line of code — both on average and at peak, [and] how much time is spent in efficient libraries and how much is spent in Python… By selecting a lightning-bolt icon, a user can “leverage the engine that powers ChatGPT to get an optimization” suggestion, Berger said. In one demo he showed IT Brew, an output recommended a less-memory-intensive move to reduce a very large array created by the code…

“If your Python code already runs fast enough, then you don’t need a profiler. But if it’s running slow, I think it’s a very convenient profiler to reach for,” Berger said.

Link via Dev News .

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Halo’s Trailer for Season 2 Teases More Covenant

Halo — the TV series — launches its second season on February 8th. But today a trailer premiered during halftime of the pre-Super Bowl football playoff.

Gizmodo reports:
Even though the Covenant are the other side of Halo’s ongoing conflict, the first season of Paramount+’s TV series largely represented them through a human proxy named Makee. With the upcoming second season, the coalition of alien races is set to become a more prominent threat, and that means they’ll be getting more proper screentime.

IGN had written that Season 1 “isn’t a perfect adaptation of the games, but it ultimately succeeds in expanding the series’ mythology and taking a more character-driven approach to Master Chief’s adventures.” This week Paramount+ also released a 28-minute compilation of “Epic Battle Scenes from Season 1, a season which reportedly cost $200 million to film.
And now the entertainment site Collider reports on what comes next:

While on the set for Halo Season 2, Collider’s Steve Weintraub and some other reporters got the chance to sit down with stars Schreiber and Kate Kennedy to discuss how the show will further flesh out the Covenant in the upcoming episodes. Part of that involves expanding their arsenal with new vehicles like the corvette, a class of ships used in the Halo canon by the Covenant for reconnaissance, stealth, and much more. Kennedy placed it among her favorite Season 2 set designs, saying… “It’s huge, and what the set guys did for it, and the art department, is really, really impressive. They turned it around so quickly, and it’s, like, awe-inspiring, it’s huge.”

Aside from making the Covenant more formidable, Season 2 will also focus on making them more understandable. Part of that involves diving into the thought process of key players within the alien faction, including two that Schreiber could tease. “Yeah, we definitely go into the Covenant mind-state, mentality,” he said… In future seasons, Schreiber believes Halo will only continue to develop the Covenant, their motives, and the relationships and allegiances within the coalition as the story of intergalactic war unfolds.

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Famed Financial Analyst’s Final Forecast? ‘The Dollar is Finished’ as World Reserve Currency

An anonymous reader shared this report from the The New York Times:

Over his 54 years as a financial analyst, Richard X. Bove perfected the art of grabbing attention… American Banker once called him “the country’s most quotable bank analyst.” Last week, a few hours after completing a spot on Bloomberg television, the 83-year-old announced his retirement. He took that weekend off — and then jumped right back in. In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Bove (pronounced “boe-VAY”), who goes by Dick, shared a dire outlook on the U.S. economy and his former profession.

“The dollar is finished as the world’s reserve currency,” Mr. Bove said matter-of-factly, perched in an armchair outside his home office just north of Tampa, from which he predicted that China will overtake the U.S. economy. No other analysts will say the same because they are, as he put it, “monks praying to money,” unwilling to speak out on the mainstream financial system that employs them…

As he spoke, a technician was trying to restore his home internet after his final employer, the boutique brokerage Odeon Capital, pulled the plug on his last day…

He sees the offshoring of American manufacturing as the ultimate threat to the financial sector and the dollar, because “the people making the goods elsewhere are getting greater and greater control of the means of production and therefore greater and greater control of the world economy and therefore greater and greater control of money.”

The article notes that Bove was once called “The Loneliest Analyst.”

“One way that’s still true is that he endorses cryptocurrency — an area that few other financial analysts will touch — which he sees as a natural beneficiary of the decline of the dollar.”

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Remembering Unix Desktops – and What We Can Learn From Them

“As important as its historically underhanded business dealings were for its success, Microsoft didn’t have to cheat to win,” argues a new article in the Register.

“The Unix companies were doing a great job of killing themselves off.”

You see, while there were many attempts to create software development standards for Unix, they were too general to do much good — for example Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) — or they became mired in the business consortium fights between the Open Systems Foundation and Unix International, which became known as the Unix wars.

While the Unix companies were busy ripping each other to shreds, Microsoft was smiling all the way to the bank. The core problem was that the Unix companies couldn’t settle on software standards. Independent Software Vendors (ISV) had to write applications for each Unix platform. Each of these had only a minute desktop market share. It simply made no business sense for programmers to write one version of an application for SCO OpenDesktop (also known as OpenDeathtrap), another for NeXTStep, and still another one for SunOS. Does that sound familiar? That kind of thing is still a problem for the Linux desktop, and it’s why I’m a big fan of Linux containerized desktop applications, such as Red Hat’s Flatpak and Canonical’s Snap.

By the time the two sides finally made peace by joining forces in The Open Group in 1996, it was too late. Unix was crowded out on the conventional desktop, and the workstation became pretty much a Sun Microsystems-only play.
Linux’s GPL license created an “enforced” consortia that allowed it to take over, according to the article — and with Linus Torvalds as Linux’s single leader, “it avoided the old Unix trap of in-fighting…

I’ve been to many Linux Plumbers meetings. There, I’ve seen him and the top Linux kernel developers work with each other without any drama. Today’s Linux is a group effort… The Linux distributors and developers have learned their Unix history lessons. They’ve realized that it takes more than open source; it takes open standards and consensus to make a successful desktop operating system.
And the article also points out that one of those early Unix desktops “is still alive, well, and running in about one in four desktops.”

That operating system, of course, is macOS X, the direct descendent of NeXT’s NeXTSTEP. You could argue that macOS, based on the multi-threaded, multi-processing microkernel operating system Mach, BSD Unix, and the open source Darwin, is the most successful of all Unix operating systems.

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Did a Lake on Mars Once Contain Life?

UPI reports:

New research published Friday offers hope that the sediment samples picked up by the Mars rover Perseverance could reveal traces of life — if it ever existed on the Red Planet.

The rover already has confirmed an ancient lake on Mars. The new research published in Science Advances shows the Jezero Crater, where Perseverance verified lake sediments, is theorized to have been filled with water that deposited layers of sediments on the crater floor. “The delta deposits in Jezero Crater contain sedimentary records of potentially habitable conditions on Mars,” the research article’s abstract stated. “NASA’s Perseverance rover is exploring the Jezero western delta with a suite of instruments that include the RIMFAX ground penetrating radar, which provides continuous subsurface images that probe up to 20 meters below the rover.”

The research by UCLA and the University of Oslo shows the lake subsequently shrank and the sediments carried by a river formed a large delta… [R]adar images revealed sediments shaped like lake deposits on Earth. Their existence was confirmed by the new research.

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Mozilla Says Apple’s New Browser Rules Are ‘as Painful as Possible’ for Firefox

Apple’s new rules in the European Union mean browsers like Firefox can finally use their own engines on iOS. Although this may seem like a welcome change, Mozilla spokesperson Damiano DeMonte tells The Verge it’s “extremely disappointed” with the way things turned out. From a report: “We are still reviewing the technical details but are extremely disappointed with Apple’s proposed plan to restrict the newly-announced BrowserEngineKit to EU-specific apps,” DeMonte says. “The effect of this would be to force an independent browser like Firefox to build and maintain two separate browser implementations — a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear.” In iOS 17.4, Apple will no longer force browsers in the EU to use WebKit, the underlying engine that powers Safari. The change opens the door for other popular engines, such as Blink, which is used by Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, as well as Gecko, the engine used by Firefox. It also means third-party browsers could become fully functional on iOS without any of the limitations that come along with WebKit.

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Apple’s Large Language Model Shows Up in New iOS Code

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple is widely expected to unveil major new artificial intelligence features with iOS 18 in June. Code found by 9to5Mac in the first beta of iOS 17.4 shows that Apple is continuing to work on a new version of Siri powered by large language model technology, with a little help from other sources. In fact, Apple appears to be using OpenAI’s ChatGPT API for internal testing to help the development of its own AI models. According to this code, iOS 17.4 includes a new SiriSummarization private framework that makes calls to the OpenAI’s ChatGPT API. This appears to be something Apple is using for internal testing of its new AI features. There are multiple examples of system prompts for the SiriSummarization framework in iOS 17.4 as well. This includes things like “please summarize,” “please answer this questions,” and “please summarize the given text.”

Apple is unlikely to use OpenAI models to power any of its artificial intelligence features in iOS 18. Instead, what it’s doing here is testing its own AI models against ChatGPT. For example, the SiriSummarization framework can do summarization using on-device models. Apple appears to be using its own AI models to power this framework, then internally comparing its results against the results of ChatGPT. In total, iOS 17.4 code suggests Apple is testing four different AI models. This includes Apple’s internal model called “Ajax,” which Bloomberg has previously reported. iOS 17.4 shows that there are two versions of AjaxGPT, including one that is processed on-device and one that is not.

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