Microsoft is continuing its efforts to release early versions of DOS as open source, and today we’ve got a special one. We’re stoked today to showcase some newly available source code materials that provide an even earlier look into the development of PC-DOS 1.00, the first release of DOS for the IBM PC.
When Apple unveiled the Vision Pro, almost three (!) years ago, I concluded: If there’s one company that can convince people to spend $3500 to strap an isolating dystopian glowing robot mask onto their faces it’s Apple, but I still have a hard time believing this is what people want.
Young Blood (Zebra Books, March 1994). Cover uncredited Young Blood, from Zebra 1994, Edited by Mike Baker. Cover looks like a photo: Artist unknown. Here’s another book I picked up originally because it had a Robert E.
A procedure that could be done in half an hour, and prepared ahead of time, could seriously reduce blood loss from severe wounds, such as during surgery
An experiment with a carbon material in a magnetic field has revealed a novel way for electrons to move, which doesn't fully belong in two or three spatial dimensions
A wave of dinosaur discoveries over the past decade has completely reshaped our understanding of these long-extinct animals. Palaeontologist Dave Hone spills the secrets of how dinosaurs lived, from how social they were to how much they really fought
Reports suggest that Apple is using defective chips originally destined for high-end devices to create its latest affordable laptop. Reusing partially broken chips is common practice for all device makers and produces less waste
I recently picked up a pair of books from Matthew Bieniek: Barnstormers: The Adventures of Kiki and Bridget. Set in 1925 during the post-World War I barnstormer era, this is the kind of story we might have gotten in the aviation pulps.
Many scorpion species use blends of iron, zinc and manganese to enhance the toughness of their deadly weaponry
Europe, the fastest-warming continent, saw unprecedented wildfires and heatwaves in 2025, including a three-week hot spell that hit 30°C inside the Arctic circle
Obesity might be to blame for part of the increase in cancer among young people, a study in the UK has found, but the causes largely remain a mystery
Executive Summary:
- The Information reports that OpenAI projects that its $20-a-month ChatGPT Plus subscriptions will decrease from 44 Million subscribers in 2025 to a projected 9 million subscribers in 2026.
- OpenAI projects to make up the difference by increasing its ad-supported ChatGPT Go ($5 or $8-a-month depending on the region)
It seems like Apple is finally going to remove support for AFP from macOS, twelve years after first moving from AFP to SMB for its default network file-sharing technology. This change shouldn’t impact most people, as it’s highly unlikely you’re using AFP for anything in 2026.
If you liked this piece, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI&
Hello premium subs! This is your ad-free free newsletter for the week. Questions? Queries? Email me at ez@betteroffline.com, and if you have a scoop, ezitron.76 is my Signal.
Yesterday morning, GitHub Copilot users got confirmation of something I’d reported a week ago — that all
Millions of dollars are being spent on wagers predicting measles outbreaks in the US, which could help researchers modelling the spread of the disease
People are increasingly placing bets that predict measles outbreaks in the US, which could help researchers modelling the spread of the disease
The idea that everything that exists can be built from the bottom up has long held sway among physicists. Now, a new kind of science is under construction that centres conscious experience – and might unravel the universe’s biggest mysteries
Robots can now run a half-marathon faster than humans and are rapidly homing in on the 100-metre sprint record. But why are companies so keen to create speedy robots that have no obvious application in homes or factories?
Good afterevenmorn, Readers! So… I’m a nerd. I know, surprising, right? What might actually be surprising, though, is that I’ve never actually played a game of Dungeons & Dragons.
The ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz has seen energy prices soar, but Alice Klein pays just A$25 (£13) a month for her electricity, even when charging an electric car or running an air conditioner.
A revolutionary cancer treatment is now being applied to a wide range of autoimmune disorders. Columnist Michael Le Page finds it is proving to be even more effective than expected
Tommy Dixon in the end of our extremely online era.:
And I think we won't realize how sick we were, how sick and sad and confused it makes us, until after it's over. We will look back on these times with a compassionate sadness. Shake our heads at how ignorant and naive we all were, to give up so much for so little. And wonder why we ever cared so much about strangers on the Internet.
Came across this piercing piece of writing by way of Tommy's follow up, How to end your extremely online era. Start with the first, the follow his somewhat practical guide.
I'll do the same.
Dillo is an amazing web browser for those of us who want their web browsing experience to be calmer and less flashing. Dillo also happens to be a very UNIX-y browser, and their latest release, 3.3.0, underlines that.
Ubuntu, being one of the more commercial Linux distributions, was always going to jump on the “AI” bandwagon, and Jon Seager, Canonical’s VP Engineering, published a blog post with more details.
Scientists were shocked to find that the Houtman Abrolhos Islands’ coral reefs survived a prolonged extreme heatwave in 2025 virtually unharmed, which may reveal how to protect corals elsewhere
You may think of the high-fat, low-carb eating plan as a faddish way to lose weight. But the keto diet is now being used to tackle conditions from severe depression to bipolar disorder and anorexia, with transformative results
You may not be aware that the home of Robert E. Howard in Cross Plains, Texas, is in need of vital repairs. This has been reported by the Robert E. Howard Foundation on its website and in videos on YouTube.
Coincident with the rise of the dinosaurs, a large landmass filled most of the Arctic circle, potentially contributing to global cooling that advantaged the famous reptiles
NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has been searching for exoplanets since its launch in 2018, and it turns out it may have found plenty more of them than we had thought
The Coen Brothers are among the finest filmmakers of my lifetime. Joel and younger brother Ethan started with Blood Simple in 1984, writing, directing, and producing together for the next few decades. And they produced some of the era’s best films.
Smartwatches commonly use heart rate variability to monitor stress. Columnist Helen Thomson explores what this metric actually tells us, and whether it could also predict and diagnose depression – and help improve your mental health more generally
Physicists have long assumed that the universe is uniform at very large scales, but evidence is emerging this is wrong and suggests a way to resolve some of the biggest cosmological mysteries
Noah Hawley in What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat for the Atlantic:
It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back.
Fascinating insights from someone who spent a weekend inside Bezos' private circus exhibition.
I’ve defined Heroic Fantasy (HF) as a type of fiction in which a heroic (bigger than life) figures use a combination of physical strength and edged weapons (Swords, Axes, Spears) to face bigger than life foes.
If you've done much with modern cellphones, you've probably noticed just how odd
the architecture can be around audio. Specifically, I mean call audio: modern
smartphones have made call audio less of a special case (mostly by just becoming
more complicated in general), but in older phones you would often find
arrangements where the cellular modem had direct analog audio to the
microphone and speaker, perhaps via some switching to share amplifiers.
Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth by Jack Kirby (DC Comics, October 1972 and February 1973). Covers by Jack Kirby Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth, written and illustrated by Jack “King” Kirby (1917-1994), has long been an inspiration to my creative works.
A recording of my recent Q&A with subscribers
Rewatched Interstellar tonight. First time since back when it came out.
Great movie. Very intense. Amazing music. Sure hits different when you're a parent. Cried like a baby.
It also triggers an immense longing. Something deep inside me. A desperate urge to know. What's beyond? I need to know. I must! It's almost a temptation.
Great movie. Fantastic, even. But I don't think I shall ever watch it again.
When it is time, I'll finally know.
Jeremy in Finally Finishing Ocarina of Time:
Ocarina of Time is one of those games that gets talked about so much that I’ve sort of always felt like a fake gamer for never finishing it, even nearly 30 years after release.
I don't know why Jeremy needs to exaggerate (or, alternatively, make me feel so old) when opening this otherwise great post. Was great reading some thoughts — thirty years on, apparently — about the game that defined my youth. Jeremy points out that the combat experience has aged well. I would agree. Every battle in every 3D Zelda game since has felt like a natural evolution of the standard set by Ocarina of Time. It was groundbreaking at the time, and even three decades later it holds up well.
Raymond Chen published a blog post about how a crappy uninstaller on Windows caused a mysterious spike in the number of Explorer (Windows’ graphical shell) crashes. It turns out the buggy uninstaller caused repeated crashes in the 32bit version of Explorer on 64bit systems, and – hold on a minute.
Not too long ago I had a need and an opportunity to re-acquaint myself with the mechanism used for software emulation of the 8087 FPU on 8086/8088 machines. ↫ Michal Necasek Look, when a Michal Necasek article starts out like this, you know you’re in for a learnin’ ol’ time.
Sebastian Wick has a great explanation of why opening files – programmatically – is a lot more complex and fraught with dangers than you might think it is. This issue was relevant for Wick as he is one of the lead developers of Flatpak, for which a number of security issues have recently been discovered, and it just so happens that many of these issues dealt with this very topic.
In that reading „AI“ is a machine for the creation of epistemic injustice and the replacement of truth with what a tech elite wants it to be in order to control the population. This is a Fascist project that not so subtly aligns with Fascism’s totalitarian will to power and control as well as its reliance in replacing reasoning and debate with belief in power and the leader.
Measuring the strength of gravity is extraordinarily difficult, and different experiments have always disagreed – but a new test is paving the way to finally understanding nature’s most enigmatic force
People with cognitive decline or early-stage dementia saw their symptoms improve when given bespoke treatment plans that targeted their personal nutritional deficiencies, ongoing infections and environmental exposures
Green Peyton Wertenbaker was born on December 23, 1907 in New Castle, Delaware. He attended the University of Virginia. After graduation, he worked as a technical writer and eventually a journalist in addition to writing fiction.
Just the latest moral and logistical atrocity.
Over a month in and we're still discovering fresh new consequences to Donald Trump's insane intervention in Iran.
Physicists have long suspected that there is a layer of physical reality beneath quantum theory and a new mathematical model unveils just how strange it might be
A clinical trial to reverse age-related vision conditions using stem cell treatment could finally deliver on the promise of a major discovery in ageing and regeneration made 20 years ago, says columnist Graham Lawton
The movie Return to Silent Hill (2026) is an adaptation of the psychological horror Silent Hill 2 (SH2) video game that was rebooted by Konami under Bloober Team in 2024. This ‘return’ film is directed by Christophe Gans, who championed the original 2006 film (which loosely adapted the first video game released in 1999).
WU LYF are back!
Their 2012 show at Parkteatret in Oslo is one of my all time favourite concerts. Fourteen and a half years later, they have a new record out and they're coming back to Oslo.
I'll be there at John Dee in September. Cannot wait!
I’m not sure many OSNews readers still use Ubuntu as their operating system of choice, and from the release announcement of today’s Ubuntu 26.04 it’s clear why that’s the case. Resolute Raccoon builds on the resilience-focused improvements introduced in interim releases, with TPM-backed full-disk encryption, improved support for application permission prompting, Livepatch updates for Arm-based servers, and Rust-based utilities for enhanced memory safety.
During the Cretaceous, 19-metre-long predatory octopuses swam the seas, and evidence from their fossilised remains suggest they may have been highly intelligent hunters
A powerful AI kept from public access because of its ability to hack computers with impunity is making headlines around the world. But what is Mythos, does it really represent a risk and might it even be used to improve cybersecurity?
Infecting mice with RSV, a common virus that causes cold-like symptoms, prevented breast cancer cells from reaching their lungs. This was due to the release of proteins that stop viruses from replicating in the lungs also making it harder for cancer cells to seed new tumours
The Epstein-Barr virus seems to affect gene expression and cell signalling in a way that causes the autoimmune condition multiple sclerosis
The Mardi Gras Mystery is an interesting novella by H. Bedford-Jones that appeared in Short Stories in the August 1920 issue. I got the edition reprinted by Steeger Books in its H. Bedford-Jones Library.
Lords of Dyscrasia by S. E. Lindberg (IGNIS Publishing, July 7, 2011). Cover by S. E. Lindberg One of the most unique voices working in Sword & Sorcery today is S. E. Lindberg. I met Seth a few years back and we’ve corresponded frequently as well as running into each other here at Black Gate, where he is the Managing Editor, and at Goodreads.
Herman in The commodification of travel:
Perhaps once sunglasses cameras take off and people can record their entire lives they can finally experience where they are, instead of trying to capture it perfectly for later.
Yeah, I don't know it's going to be as peaceful as that. I think Black Mirror got it spot with The Entire History of You back in 2011.
Otherwise, I fully agree with what Herman's saying about travel. What I will say is that this long predates social media. Although social media has certainly exacerbated the tendency beyond all hope.
You can find beauty in the oddest of places. WSL9x runs a modern Linux kernel (6.19 at time of writing) cooperatively inside the Windows 9x kernel, enabling users to take advantage of the full suite of capabilities of both operating systems at the same time, including paging, memory protection, and pre-emptive scheduling.
Despite years of apparent stagnation and reported mass layoffs, it seems the Solaris team at Oracle has found somewhat of a renewed stride recently. Both branches of Solaris – the one for paying customers (SRU) and the free one for enthusiasts (CBE) – are receiving regular updates again, and there seems to be a more concerted effort to let the outside world know, too.
I'll be hosting a Zoom call with subscribers on April 24 at 12 pm PDT / 3 pm EDT
Photographer Yuri Segalerba explores how dengue has spread to Nepal's Himalayan districts, and how locals are fighting back
The food industry has made big promises to reduce emissions and become more sustainable, but a review concludes that many of the pledges are not backed up by evidence
The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week
Feedback, always on the hunt for absurd units of measurement, is delighted by recent attempts to convey the 406,771 kilometres that the Artemis II crew travelled from Earth
Discovering he is getting old before his time, David Cox tries to lower his biological age by changing his diet in a helpful new book, The Age Code, says Graham Lawton
A seaside town is devastated when a small fishing boat, the Rose of Nevada, disappears at sea. Thirty years later, the boat reappears in the harbour and sets off a moving story, says Bethan Ackerley
The idea that EV batteries age poorly is a misconception – and a new report has found they often outlive the cars themselves
Executive Summary:
- Internal documents reveal Microsoft’s planned rollout for token-based billing for all GitHub Copilot customers starting in June.
- Copilot Business Customers will pay $19 per-user-per-month and receive $30 of pooled AI credits.
- Copilot Enterprise customers will pay $39 per-user-per-month and receive $70 of pooled AI credits.
The rise of a new generation of radiotherapies means we will soon need much greater quantities of radioactive atoms. That's why companies are scrambling to refine them from all manner of radioactive waste
A robot built by Sony AI is rapidly learning how to beat the world's very best table tennis players
Exercise has been touted as a tool for managing and treating long covid, but much of the evidence has neglected one of its most debilitating symptoms: post-exertional malaise
We got the third issue of RevERBerate, a fanzine devoted to Edgar Rice Burroughs, in January 2026. Like the previous ones, this one is again 48 pages, printed on high-quality, glossy stock, perfect-bound with color cardstock covers.
Simon Singh's exploration of mathematical proof – in particular Pierre de Fermat's last theorem – remains an absolute treasure, almost three decades after it was first published
A final-stage trial has started of an mRNA vaccine against the bird flu strain infecting many animals – and occasionally people – worldwide
Executive Summary:
- In the later afternoon of April 21 2026, Anthropic removed access to Claude Code for its $20-a-month "Pro" Plans on various pricing pages.
"It's the right thing to do"
I'll be hosting a Zoom call with paid subscribers on Friday 24 April at 12 PDT / 3 EDT
Most of Titan’s surface is oddly flat and smooth, and it may be because it is coated by as much as a metre of fluffy organic material that snowed down from the icy moon’s thick atmosphere
If you liked this piece, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI&
Some seemingly simple sequences of multiplication and addition grow so quickly that they question the very foundations of mathematics. In doing so, they demand a whole new level of logic
Some seemingly simple sequences of multiplication and addition grow so quickly that they question the very foundations of mathematics. In doing so, they demand a whole new level of logic
The ongoing conflict around the Strait of Hormuz has become a situation in game theory known as a war of attrition. The maths behind it can help explain what's going on, says Petros Sekeris
Excalibur (141 minutes; 1981) Written by Rospo Pallenberg and John Boorman. Directed by John Boorman. Loosely based on Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory. What is it? A classic telling of the story of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, the quest for the Holy Grail, and the magical sword Excalibur.
