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Once upon a time, a friend of mine accidentally took over thousands of computers. He had found a vulnerability in a piece of software and started playing with it. In the process, he figured out how to get total administration access over a network. He put it in a script, and ran it to see what would happen, then went to bed for about four hours. Next morning on the way to work he checked on it, and discovered he was now lord and master of about 50,000 computers. After nearly vomiting in fear he killed the whole thing and deleted all the files associated with it. In the end he said he threw the hard drive into a bonfire. I can't tell you who he is because he doesn't want to go to Federal prison, which is what could have happened if he'd told anyone that could do anything about the bug he'd found. Did that bug get fixed? Probably eventually, but not by my friend. This story isn't extraordinary at all. Spend much time in the hacker and security scene, you'll hear stories like this and worse.It's hard to explain to regular people how much technology barely works, how much the infrastructure of our lives is held together by the IT equivalent of baling wire.Computers, and computing, are broken.It's from 2014, but drop everything you're doing right now and read this. Go on. Don't put it off. Read it.

But the operating system is riddled with serious security vulnerabilities that make it easy for a hacker to take control of Tizen-powered devices, according to Israeli researcher Amihai Neiderman."It may be the worst code I've ever seen," he told Motherboard in advance of a talk about his research that he is scheduled to deliver at Kaspersky Lab's Security Analyst Summit on the island of St. Maarten on Monday. "Everything you can do wrong there, they do it. You can see that nobody with any understanding of security looked at this code or wrote it. It's like taking an undergraduate and letting him program your software."Raise your hand if you're surprised.

Every Apple user - professional users specifically - has known for a long time the situation with Apple's most powerful Mac, the Mac Pro, had become entirely untenable. After years of utter silence on the matter, the company has finally opened up today. John Gruber, after a meeting with several Apple executive and three other members of the press:Apple is currently hard at work on a "completely rethought" Mac Pro, with a modular design that can accommodate high-end CPUs and big honking hot-running GPUs, and which should make it easier for Apple to update with new components on a regular basis. They're also working on Apple-branded pro displays to go with them.I also have not-so-great news:These next-gen Mac Pros and pro displays "will not ship this year". (I hope that means "next year", but all Apple said was "not this year".) In the meantime, Apple is today releasing meager speed-bump updates to the existing Mac Pros. The $2999 model goes from 4 Xeon CPU cores to 6, and from dual AMD G300 GPUs to dual G500 GPUs. The $3999 model goes from 6 CPU cores to 8, and from dual D500 GPUs to dual D800 GPUs. Nothing else is changing, including the ports. No USB-C, no Thunderbolt 3 (and so no support for the LG UltraFine 5K display).During the meeting, Apple almost-but-not-quite flat-out apologised for the silence and complete lack of updates over the past three years, almost calling the current Mac Pro a mistake, a miscalculation. Apple's Phil Schiller:We're not going to get into exactly what stage we're in, just that we told the team to take the time to do something really great. To do something that can be supported for a long time with customers with updates and upgrades throughout the years. We'll take the time it takes to do that. The current Mac Pro, as we've said a few times, was constrained thermally and it restricted our ability to upgrade it. And for that, we're sorry to disappoint customers who wanted that, and we've asked the team to go and re-architect and design something great for the future that those Mac Pro customers who want more expandability, more upgradability in the future. It'll meet more of those needs.I can't stress how out-of-character this almost-apology and peek into the future Mac Pro roadmap really are. After more than three years of silence, Apple didn't really have much of a choice, especially now that we know a successor to the Mac Pro is at least a year away.Be sure to read Gruber's entire article - it's well worth it.

The research arm of StatCounter, the independent web analytics company, finds that in March, Android topped the worldwide OS internet usage market share with 37.93%, which puts it marginally ahead of Windows (37.91%) for the first time."This is a milestone in technology history and the end of an era," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter, "It marks the end of Microsoft's leadership worldwide of the OS market which it has held since the 1980s. It also represents a major breakthrough for Android which held just 2.4% of global internet usage share only five years ago."Quite a fast rise to power.This means Linux (read this!) now dominates everything from HPC down to mobile and embedded. Who knew that while everyone was off making jokes about "the year of desktop Linux", Linus' little kernel became the motor under the hood of the mobile computing revolution. The first computer for vast swaths of people all over the world runs something not from Microsoft or Apple - but from a huge, worldwide community of developers.And that's kind of nice.

In what shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to Apple these past 10-15 years, the company is developing its own graphics chips. The news was revealed in a quite venomous statement from Imagination Technologies, the company whose chips Apple is using right now.From the statement:Apple has used Imagination's technology and intellectual property for many years. It has formed the basis of Graphics Processor Units ("GPUs") in Apple's phones, tablets, iPods, TVs and watches. Apple has asserted that it has been working on a separate, independent graphics design in order to control its products and will be reducing its future reliance on Imagination's technology.As a result of the news, Imagination's shares fell 70 percent, because Apple is by far Imagination's largest customer, accounting for about half of its revenue. Imagination's statement then proceeds to almost but not quite (yet) threaten Apple with patent litigation.Apple has not presented any evidence to substantiate its assertion that it will no longer require Imaginationâs technology, without violating Imagination's patents, intellectual property and confidential information. This evidence has been requested by Imagination but Apple has declined to provide it.Further, Imagination believes that it would be extremely challenging to design a brand new GPU architecture from basics without infringing its intellectual property rights, accordingly Imagination does not accept Apple's assertions.Of note here is that in the past 18 months or so, various high-level Imagination employees joined Apple.

Fuchsia is a new operating system being built more or less from scratch at Google. The news of the development of Fuchsia made a splash on technology news sites in August 2016, although many details about it are still a mystery. It is an open-source project; development and documentation work is still very much ongoing. Despite the open-source nature of the project, its actual purpose has not yet been revealed by Google. From piecing together information from the online documentation and source code, we can surmise that Fuchsia is a complete operating system for PCs, tablets, and high-end phones.The source to Fuchsia and all of its components is available to download at its source repository. If you enjoy poking around experimental operating systems, exploring the innards of this one will be fun. Fuchsia consists of a kernel plus user-space components on top that provide libraries and utilities. There are a number of subprojects under the Fuchsia umbrella in the source repository, mainly libraries and toolkits to help create applications. Fuchsia is mostly licensed under a 3-clause BSD license, but the kernel is based on another project called LK (Little Kernel) that is MIT-licensed, so the licensing for the kernel is a mix. Third-party software included in Fuchsia is licensed according to its respective open-source license.Great overview of what Fuchsia is and what it consists of. Google is really experimenting with some different approaches here. Definitely worth a read - before you comment.At this point, it's really hard to fathom what Fuchisa's part is in Google's strategy, if at has one at all. It's too big, and involves far too many notable people, to 'just' be a research project, but at the same time, they're literally doing everything from scratch with some radically different ideas here and there, which makes it unlikely that we're going to see it replace Android or whatever any time soon.My guess? Google is clearly having issues with Android in that it doesn't control the whole stack, causing Google to be at the whim of chip makers to maintain support for the Linux kernel, leading to the massive problems with Android updates we all know and hate. Fuchsia seems to be Google's response to these problems.I'm not saying Google will replace Android with Fuchsia - I'm saying Fuchsia is the answer to the thought experiment "if we could start over, what would we do differently?"

QNX Software Development Platform (SDP 7.0) includes the next generation 64-bit QNX Neutrino RTOS and the award-winning QNX Momentics Tool Suite. It provides a comprehensive, multi-level, policy-driven security model incorporating best-in-class security technologies from BlackBerry, which help guard against system malfunctions, malware and cyber security breaches. Building on existing certifications including ISO 26262, IEC 61508 and IEC 62304, QNX SDP 7.0 also brings a proven safety pedigree. Various features, including: microkernel architecture, file encryption, adaptive time partitioning, and high availability framework, make QNX SDP 7.0 the most advanced and secure embedded OS developed for use in all safety and mission critical applications.That's an incredible amount of marketing speak for such a short paragraph, and sadly, the official press release isn't much better. QNX let go of what small enthusiast support among hobbyists it had almost a decade ago, and at this point it's so buzzworded up I barely recognise it anymore.This was a long, long time ago.

JEDEC DDR5 memory will offer improved performance with greater power efficiency as compared to previous generation DRAM technologies. As planned, DDR5 will provide double the bandwidth and density over DDR4, along with delivering improved channel efficiency. These enhancements, combined with a more user-friendly interface for server and client platforms, will enable high performance and improved power management in a wide variety of applications.I'm still using DDR3, planning a PC upgrade which will include DDR4, and DDR5 is already in the pipeline.

AT&T has a YouTube channel, where a few times a week they post old videos from the glory days. A few years ago, they posted a cool video from 1982 called The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive. It's worth a watch. There's lots of other gems on the channel. For example, how about an interview with Arthur C Clarke from 1976?

Relive the glory of 80's 8-bit computing! This is a full-featured emulator of a TRS-80 Model III microcomputer. It is free of charge and all source code is publicly available.

Samsung officially unveiled its Galaxy S8 today. Since the device was leaked extensively, there's very little in the way of news here, but there are still a few things I thought were interesting.Most notably: DeX, a dock which turns your Galaxy S8 into a desktop computer. An old idea, of course, but still a holy grail companies are trying to obtain. The DeX dock looks kind of clever, and my absolute favourite part of it is that it has a fan to keep the phone cool while it's in desktop mode. Any application with proper Nougat support works just fine with windowing, but developers can also optimise for Samsung's own windowing features - which no developer will, of course, so you can forget that right away.Curiously, the S8 comes with a new personal assistant built by Samsung with its own dedicated hardware button on the side of the device. It sports a 3.6mm headphone jack, and comes with a 99 USD wired Harman AKG headphones in the box, which is a nice touch.The S8 will start at 750 USD or 799 EUR, and will be available this April.

The Creators Update represents more solid incremental improvement to Windows 10. With features such as Night Light, Microsoft is showing that it can use the new Windows 10 development and release model to react more quickly to work done by its competitors, and to put new features in front of Windows users more quickly than before. While the changes to the privacy settings won't make everyone happy, they show that the company is also able to respond to user demands more rapidly than in the past, too.That said, the "creators" theme feels like a stretch. The release doesn't include everything originally planned - the People Hub, demonstrated at last year's launch event, was pushed back - but even if that were included, it wouldn't make the build seem any more creator-y. Some of the work, such as the VR support, is foundational rather than something people are going to run out and use. Others, such as Game Mode, are (I hope) a taste of things to come rather than a finished product.I have the Creator's Update running already, and it's really not all that noticeable. General availability will be on 11 April.

The United States, a country in North-America bogged down by extensive corruption, just passed a bill allowing ISPs to share and sell users' browsing history without their consent.Internet providers now just need a signature from President Trump before theyâre free to take, share, and even sell your web browsing history without your permission.The House of Representatives passed a resolution today overturning an Obama-era FCC rule that required internet providers to get customers' permission before sharing their browsing history with other companies. The rules also required internet providers to protect that data from hackers and inform customers of any breaches.The corrupt US senator who sponsored this clearly atrocious bill, Marsha Blackburn, from an area in the southern part of the country called Tennessee, received 693,000 US dollar in bribes from AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and other related companies who operate in the country's dysfunctional telecommunications sector.In the United States, officially a representative democracy, it is entirely normal for high-level figures - up to and including the president of the troubled nation, a man named Donald Trump - to receive vast sums of money to enact laws written by corporations, regardless of their effects on civil liberties or the poor and needy people of the country. Americans, as citizens of the nation are called, often lack access to basic necessities such as healthcare, parental leave, clean drinking water, high-quality infrastructure, and so on. This is in spite of the country's vast natural resources and wealth, to which only a few percent of the country's population of 320 million have access to.

The Amiga has what is with no doubt in my mind, the absolute finest sound chip inside of any computer or console throughout the 1980's as well as most, if not all of the 1990's. Full disclosure; I have an MT-32... And the Amiga can actually do a piano. Yes, in a time when the vast majority of IBM and compatible PC owners were using a small speaker stuck deep inside of a metal tomb, Amiga users had a quality of sound nobody else could touch for that price.[...]To combat the story that has long been shaped that the Amiga was not popular to musicians because it did not have built in MIDI connectors I give you this quote given directly to me from the creator of the sequencing program Music-X, Talin:"The story with MIDI is actually much more complex than most people realize. You see, the early Amiga models had a hardware bug which made the serial port unreliable at high data rates. Basically the problem was that the serial port hardware had only a one-byte buffer, and if you didn't grab that byte before the next byte came in then data would be lost. Unfortunately, the Amiga's four timer chips would generate a software interrupt at regular intervals, during which time the serial port could not be serviced. And while MIDI speed wasn't super-high, it was high enough that you'd get a dropped byte every 10 minutes or so depending on how many notes you were sending over. Note that this did not affect the higher-end MIDI adapters which had their own dedicated serial point, but those were considerably more expensive."Interesting article about past MIDI challenges with the Amiga and how to hook up a modern synth to an Amiga to make music.

An SBX container is composed of a collections of blocks with size submultiple/equal to that of a sector, so they can survive any level of fragmentation. Each block has a minimal header that includes a unique file identifier, block sequence number, checksum, version. Additionally, non-critical info/metadata are contained in block 0 (like name, file size, crypto-hash, other attributes, etc.).If disaster strikes, recovery can be performed simply by scanning a volume/image, reading sector-sized slices and checking block signatures and then CRCs to detect valid SBX blocks. Then the blocks can be grouped by UIDs, sorted by sequence number and reassembled to form the original SeqBox containers.This was submitted to us by the author of the project, so hopefully she or he can answer possibly questions in the comments.

Who is winning the race for jobs between robots and humans? Last year, two leading economists described a future in which humans come out ahead. But now theyâve declared a different winner: the robots.The industry most affected by automation is manufacturing. For every robot per thousand workers, up to six workers lost their jobs and wages fell by as much as three-fourths of a percent, according to a new paper by the economists, Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University. It appears to be the first study to quantify large, direct, negative effects of robots.These effects are only "negative" effects because of the way our society currently works. Nobody is going to stop automation, but automation is going to make our capitalist systems wholly and deeply untenable. Those countries who recognise and adapt to this fact the earliest, will be the ones coming out on top once the dust settles.Countries that look backwards and thereby artificially stunt their economic growth by investing in wholly outdated and destructive industries... Well. Good luck.

DragonFly version 4.8 brings EFI boot support in the installer, further speed improvements in the kernel, a new NVMe driver, a new eMMC driver, and Intel video driver updates.A ton of changes in this release.

Apple has released iOS 10.3, which brings with it a major change you should really, really be aware of before you install this update.iOS 10.3 introduces a new Apple File System (APFS), which is installed when an iOS device is updated. APFS is optimized for flash/SSD storage and includes improved support for encryption. Other features include snapshots for freezing the state of a file system (better for backups), space sharing, and better space efficiency, all of which should result in a more stable platform. Customers updating to iOS 10.3 should first make a backup given that the update installs a new file system.While everything should work out just fine with this update, I'd take additional precautions to make sure all your important data is properly backed up.In addition, Apple also released macOS Sierra 10.12.4, which introduces Night Shift to the Mac.

Modern computer science is dominated by men. But it hasn't always been this way.A lot of computing pioneers - the people who programmed the first digital computers - were women. And for decades, the number of women studying computer science was growing faster than the number of men. But in 1984, something changed. The percentage of women in computer science flattened, and then plunged, even as the share of women in other technical and professional fields kept rising.What happened?An older article from 2014 that - sadly - just refuses to become irrelevant.

March has been a particularly fecund time for new Android Wear watch announcements, though unlike previous years, the brands behind these devices are almost all from the fashion and luxury spheres of business. Tag Heuer, Montblanc, Hugo Boss, Tommy Hilfiger, Diesel, Emporio Armani, Michael Kors, and Movado are just some of the well known names announcing Wear 2.0 smartwatches. This wave of new products is symptomatic of a broader trend in the tech industry: one where a high degree of component and software integration has made it almost trivial to launch a new tech product, whether or not you're actually a tech company.Maybe this is the right strategy for Android Wear. I've definitely seen some nice Wear 2.0 devices for later this year, and we wouldn't have this much variety if Google had kept Wear 2.0 close to its chest, much like what Apple does with the Apple Watch. If you don't like a square watch - and which sane person does? - you're out of luck on Apple's side of things.That being said, none of these have actually come out yet, so I'm not holding my breath on any of them being any good. All I want is an understated, simple smartwatch that doesn't have all this useless garbage like NFC, Wi-Fi, or LTE sucking up battery. I have my eyes on the LG Watch Style for exactly that reason, but they don't sell it in The Netherlands.

You may recall that a couple of years ago we ran a piece talking about how Ada County, the most populous county in Idaho, was desperately looking for Zip disks and drives to help keep its aging voting machines running.As it turns out, Ada County isn't alone. Apparently a lot of counties are in the same boat.Once, while buying a PowerMac G4 from someone (factory-equipped with an internal Zip drive), I stumbled upon his huge collection of external Zip drives and disks, which he promptly handed over as a gift. Other than playing with them out of idle curiosity, I never used them for anything.Instead of disposing of them years later, I guess I should've sent those 15 or so external Zip drives and 30-odd disks as emergency foreign aid to America. Underfunding democracy seems like a terrible idea.

This was freaky. When you owned any 8-bit computer, you became intimately familiar with its colour scheme. This simple photograph blew my mind. That blue colour just wasn't possible.According to the caption, by presenting two colours to the eye and alternating them quickly enough, a whole new colour emerged. What would this new, secret colour look like on your crappy early-90s CRT television? The screenshot was only a hint. Would it glow? Would it flicker?Twenty-six years later, I found out the answer.This article is all about colour switching on the Commodore 64. There are interactive examples to play with below. I haven't found anything else on the topic, so it's possible this is the only resource on the subject.It's amazing what talented programmers can eke out of old 8bit machines.

There's a new Android tablet you can go and buy, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S3. Here's our review of it, where Jake notes that apps freeze if they're not in the foreground. Which is a good reminder: Android apps on tablets have never really been very good. They usually end up feeling like stretched-out phone apps.Things have gotten better in the past couple years, but it's still a problem. In fact, it has always been a problem. I wonder if anybody ever told Google that it was a problem and it should try to do a better job incentivizing developers to make apps that work better on tablets.Oh, wait, somebody has.Brutal, but true.Devil's advocate take: since tablets don't matter, do tablet apps really matter?

About four years ago, we shared our plans for playing premium video in HTML5, replacing Silverlight and eliminating the extra step of installing and updating browser plug-ins. Since then, we have launched HTML5 video on Chrome OS, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, Firefox, and Edge on all supported operating systems. And though we do not officially support Linux, Chrome playback has worked on that platform since late 2014. Starting today, users of Firefox can also enjoy Netflix on Linux. This marks a huge milestone for us and our partners, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Mozilla that helped make it possible.It wasn't that long ago we barely dared to imagine HTML5 video taking over from Flash and Silverlight.

Google has released the first Developer Preview for Android O, which is probably going to be released somewhere in the Fall. There's a lot changes in this one, but the biggest one is probably the limits Android O is going to place on applications running in the background.Building on the work we began in Nougat, Android O puts a big priority on improving a user's battery life and the device's interactive performance. To make this possible, we've put additional automatic limits on what apps can do in the background, in three main areas: implicit broadcasts, background services, and location updates. These changes will make it easier to create apps that have minimal impact on a user's device and battery. Background limits represent a significant change in Android, so we want every developer to get familiar with them. Check out the documentation on backgroundexecution limits and background location limits for details.There's more - improvements in keyboard navigation, Navigation Channels for managing notifications, picture-in-picture on smartphones, wide-gamut colour support for applications, several new Java 8 features, and more. A big one for audio people: Sony has contributed a lot of work to audio in Android O, adding the LDAC wireless audio codec.It's available on the usual Nexus devices.

In the early life of the Nintendo Switch, when it was still codenamed Nintendo NX, there were a lot of rumors floating around about the device. We saw a console with an oval shape and a screen that seemed built into the buttons and rumors that the new device would run Android as its operating system.While the product we have today resembles nothing of those early prototypes, it looks like the Android rumor may not have been far off. Cyanogen's Kirt McMaster tweeted early this morning to say that Nintendo had approached him about designing a custom Android-based operating system for their new console, but he had some choice words for the company.Add this to the list of terrible business decisions by Cyanogen and its CEO.

In this video you'll see the first machine and the last machine as well as some in-between. There's talk about MD-LP, Net-MD and HiMD. It's a personal retrospective of a format that was loved by many people around the world but one that is all too often is judged purely on its lack of performance in the US market.Great video by a great channel.I'm one of those MiniDisc people. MiniDisc was fairly successful in The Netherlands, and quite a few people around me were MiniDisc users as well. I've had countless machines over the years, and I was still using HiMD well into the smartphone era - and carried both a smartphone and my HiMD player for quite a while. Even though the world had long ago moved on to MP3 players and then smartphones, I was still using MD.I've long wondered why, and this video finally made it dawn on me: rituals. Since prerecorded MiniDiscs were rare and incredibly expensive, you copied CDs onto MiniDiscs instead. Especially before the advent of NetMD and later HiMD, you did this without the help of a computer. You'd get a new album, listen to it, enjoy it - and then, to make sure you could listen to it on the go, you plugged one end of an optical cable into your CD player, the other end into your portable MD recorder, and copy the CD in real time. Once it was done, neat freaks like me would even enter all the track information using the little dial on the recorder, track by track, letter by letter. Painstaking doesn't even begin to describe it.Even listening to your MiniDiscs - they were satisfying to hold, the loading and unloading was deeply mechanical, the spring-loading trays were a delight. It was just an endless array of rituals that, while pointless and cumbersome to others, were deeply enriching and soothing to me. I guess it must be similar to people still using vinyl today.To me, MiniDisc was one of the greatest formats - not because it was better or more advanced (even though during the 90s and early 2000s, it actually was), but because it was full of little delights and rituals. Just one of those irrational things that only few of us will ever fully understand.

I decided I wanted to hack Final Fantasy 1, one of my favorite games growing up, that I put in more than 100 hours playing. I used fceux as my NES emulator, same as in the video and followed mostly the same patterns.I kept some notes on how I did it and thought others might find the process as interesting and fun as I did. I ended up losing most of the notes from a few years ago, so I went back and rediscovered the different memory locations and values to use again.

Now refrigerators last 8-10 years, if you are fortunate. How in the world have our appliances regressed so much in the past few decades? I've bought and sold refrigerators and freezers from the 1950s that still work perfectly fine. I've come across washers and dryers from the 1960s and 1970s that were still working like the day they were made. Now, many appliances break and need servicing within 2-3 years and, overall, new appliances last 1/3 to 1/4 as long as appliances built decades ago. They break more frequently, and sooner, than ever before. They rust and deteriorate much quicker than in the past. Why is this happening, and what's really going on? I've been wrestling over these questions for years while selling thousands of appliances, and more recently, working with used appliance sellers and repair techs all across the country. The following is what I've discovered.This is something we've all instinctively known, but Ryan Finlay goes into detail as to what, exactly, are the causes. The article's from 2015, but I stumbled on it today on Twitter, and I thought it was a great, informative read.

Swatch Group AG said it's developing an alternative to the iOS and Android operating systems for smartwatches as Switzerland's largest maker of timepieces vies with Silicon Valley for control of consumers' wrists.The company's Tissot brand will introduce a model around the end of 2018 that uses the Swiss-made system, which will also be able to connect small objects and wearables, Swatch Chief Executive Officer Nick Hayek said in an interview Thursday. The technology will need less battery power and it will protect data better, he said later at a press conference.It makes sense. Unlike as on smartphones or PCs, I don't think people really want applications on smartwatches. Notifications and fitness - that's what seems to define the (admittedly, limited) appeal of smartwatches. There's no reason why a traditional watchmaker wouldn't be able to provide such limited functionality in a robust way, possibly providing anything from watches that are all-screen to mechanical watches with more limited 'smart' additions.With Wear 2.0 effectively being fake news at this point, where else is Swatch going to turn to?

Realistically, nobody should have expected Ryzen to be king of the hill when it comes to gaming. We know that Broadwell isn't, after all; Intel's Skylake and Kaby Lake parts both beat Broadwell in a wide range of games. This is the case even though Skylake and Kaby Lake are limited to four cores and eight threads; for many or most games, high IPC and high clock speeds are the key to top performance, and that's precisely what Kaby Lake delivers.In spite of this, reading the various reviews around the Web - and comment threads, tweets, and reddit posts - one gets the feeling that many were hoping or expecting Ryzen to somehow beat Intel across the board, and there's a prevailing narrative that Ryzen is in some sense a bad gaming chip. But this argument is often paired with the claim that some kind of non-specific "optimization" is going to salvage the processor's performance, that AMD fans just need to keep the faith for a few months, and that soon Ryzen's full power will be revealed.Both parts of this reaction are more than a little flawed.I'm just glad there's finally competition in the desktop processor space again. Intel started to charge some outrageous prices these past few years, but if you wanted the best performance, you really didn't have much of a choice.With Ryzen, AMD is showing the world it's back on track. It might not be there yet in every aspect, but it's an amazingly promising start.

Now Microsoft is planning to preload another app in Windows 10: Sling TV. While only US Windows 10 users will get Sling TV preloaded without the necessary subscription, it will sit alongside Candy Crush and Solitaire as other examples of what will soon be described as bloatware. Thankfully, itâs easy to uninstall these unnecessary apps, but that doesnât mean Microsoft wonât add more to the mix in the future. Microsoft used to blame its OEM partners for bundling lots of useless apps on Windows PCs, but now it has itself to blame for doing the same to Windows 10.More and more ads are coming to products you actually already pay for.

NetBSD 7.1 has been released.Some highlights of the 7.1 release are:Support for Raspberry Pi Zero.Initial DRM/KMS support for NVIDIA graphics cards via nouveau (Disabled by default. Uncomment nouveau and nouveaufb in your kernel config to test).The addition of vioscsi, a driver for the Google Compute Engine disk.Linux compatibility improvements, allowing, e.g., the use of Adobe Flash Player 24.wm(4):C2000 KX and 2.5G support.Wake On Lan support.82575 and newer SERDES based systems now work. ODROID-C1 Ethernet now works.Numerous bug fixes and stability improvements.

Ars Technica reports:A recently published Knowledge Base article suggests that Microsoft is going to block Windows Updates for owners of the latest Intel and AMD processors if they try to run Windows 7 or 8.1.Last year, Microsoft announced a shift in the way it would support Windows. Going forward, new processors, including Intel's Kaby Lake and AMD's recently-released Ryzen, would require the newest version of Windows. Users of Windows 7 and 8.1 would be out of luck, with Microsoft having no plans to support the new chips on the old operating systems.Take note.

Today some Google Home owners reported hearing something extra when they asked for a summary of the day ahead from the smart speaker: an advertisement for the opening of Beauty and the Beast. Several users on Reddit have noticed the audio ad and Bryson Meunier posted a clip to Twitter. Some Android users also reported hearing the ad through Google Assistant on mobile.And from the Total Bullshit Dpt., also known as Google PR:This wasnât intended to be an ad. Whatâs circulating online was a part of our My Day feature, where after providing helpful information about your day, we sometimes call out timely content. Weâre continuing to experiment with new ways to surface unique content for users and we could have done better in this case.It was an ad, plain and simple. A corporate statement like this, which is clearly, utterly, 100% a lie, should be illegal, and punishable by massive fines. This kind of callous behaviour is a disgrace.

Many science fiction writers - including myself, Roger MacBride Allen, Gerald Brandt, Jeffrey A. Carver, Arthur C. Clarke, David Gerrold, Terence M. Green, James Gunn, Matthew Hughes, Donald Kingsbury, Eric Kotani, Paul Levinson, George R. R. Martin, Vonda McIntyre, Kit Reed, Jennifer Roberson, and Edo van Belkom - continue to use WordStar for DOS as our writing tool of choice.Still, most of us have endured years of mindless criticism of our decision, usually from WordPerfect users, and especially from WordPerfect users who have never tried anything but that program. I've used WordStar, WordPerfect, Word, MultiMate, Sprint, XyWrite, and just about every other MS-DOS and Windows word-processing package, and WordStar is by far my favorite choice for creative composition at the keyboard.That's the key point: aiding creative composition. To understand how WordStar does that better than other programs, let me start with a little history.An old article from 1990 and updated in 1996, reprinted, but still a good read.

Some interesting figures from LinkedIn, who benchmark the compiling times of their Swift-based iOS application. You'd think the Mac Pro would deliver the fastest compiles, but as it turns out - that's not quite true.As you can see, 12-core MacPro is indeed the slowest machine to build our code with Swift, and going from the default 24 jobs setting down to only 5 threads improves compilation time by 23%. Due to this, even a 2-core Mac Mini ($1,399.00) builds faster than the 12-cores Mac Pro ($6,999.00).As Steven Troughton-Smith notes on Twitter - "People suggested that the Mac Pro is necessary because devs need more cores; maybe we just need better compilers? There's no point even theorizing about a 24-core iMac Pro if a 4-core MBP or mini will beat it at compiling."

In this paper we are going to introduce the evolution of DragonFlyBSD's network stack in the past 10 years: what's the current state of its network stack, the important changes we did to it, why the important changes, and the lessons we learned. Finally, I'd like to list the areas that DragonFlyBSD's network stack can enjoy help hands.A detailed look at DragonFlyBSD's network stack.

Window Maker 0.95.8 has been released. It contains a number of changes related to window snapping and quite a number of other changes for what is supposedly a point release.

This release is the result of the community's work over the past six months, including: use of profile data in ThinLTO, more aggressive dead code elimination, experimental support for coroutines, experimental AVR target, better GNU ld compatibility and significant performance improvements in LLD, as well as improved optimizations, many bug fixes and more.The release notes have all the details.

A few years ago, backstage at a conference, I spotted a blind woman using her phone. The phone was speaking everything her finger touched on the screen, allowing her to tear through her apps. My jaw hit the floor. After years of practice, she had cranked the voice's speed so high, I couldn't understand a word it was saying.And here's the kicker: She could do all of this with the screen turned off. Her phone's battery lasted forever.Ever since that day, I've been like a kid at a magic show. I've wanted to know how it's done. I've wanted an inside look at how the blind could navigate a phone that's basically a slab of featureless glass.This week, I got my chance. Joseph Danowsky offered to spend a morning with me, showing me the ropes.There's a ton to dislike about iOS, but its assistive technologies for people with disabilities are absolutely spectacular. Nothing even comes close to it.

Of the many, many, many bad things about passwords, you know what the worst is? Password rules.Read this.

I've led the charge against Microsoft's advertising efforts in Windows, noting back in 2012 that the software giant cheapened Windows 8 with ads. Despite my warnings about a slippery slope - Microsoft would only escalate its in-box advertising down the road, I cautioned - Windows 10, sadly, was even worse. And now the Creators Update is coming, bringing with it yet another escalation of in-product advertising. Most notably, and most disturbingly, in File Explorer.iOS and Android do the same thing, where they pester you left and right with ads for nonsense like music services or cloud storage. It's user-hostile and infuriating.

In Kingsway, Andrew Morrish's upcoming PC role-playing game, monsters are pop-ups, quests are emails and your backpack is a cluttered file folder. That's right, it's an OSRPG. Coming to PC later this year via Adult Swim games, Kingsway is a role-playing adventure that takes the form of the Kingsway Operating System, which is basically a primitive Windows/MacOS for the monster-slaying set. Travel the King's land via World Navigator window, slaying monsters as they pop up on your desktop. Drag-and-drop windows to your heart's content.Incredibly creative, and I can't wait to play this when it comes out. And honestly - the 'operating system' looks better than most of the actual operating systems we have today.

Times Insider shares historic insights from The New York Times. In this article, John Markoff, who covered technology for The Times for 28 years before retiring last month, continues to rue the paper's 1995 choice of nytimes.com over his own nyt.com: "Do you have any idea what a three-letter domain is worth these days?"I love stories like this.

The fundamental components of computers are becoming small enough that they are pressing against the boundaries of the familiar world of Newtonian physics. And nowhere is the scale and precision of operation on better display than in hard disk drives, where a trillion bits may fit in a square inch. But IBM has outdone them all by reading and writing data to a single atom.

But the mood is different in South Korea these days. There's always been public opposition to corruption and nepotism in the country's chaebol conglomerates, but the country has never seen anything like the massive protests that swept the streets last year and helped drive President Park's approval rating down to four percent. In a climate like this, where widespread outrage can lead to the impeachment of a president, even a Samsung chairman might have reason to worry.When a Korean, Chinese, African, or South-American man gives money to politicians in exchange for favours, we call it corruption. When a western man gives money to politicians in exchange for favours, we call it lobbying.Language shapes perception.

Fantastic article by Stephanie M. Lee:Welcome to the vast universe of self-built social media empires devoted to spreading false, misleading, and polarizing science and health news - sometimes further and wider than the real information. Here, climate change is a government-sponsored hoax, fluoridated water is poisonous, cannabis can cure cancer, and airplanes are constantly spraying pesticides and biological waste into the air. Genetically modified food is destroying humanity and the planet. Vaccines are experimental, autism-causing injections forced on innocent babies. We can't trust anything that we eat, drink, breathe, or medicate with, nor rely on physicians and public health agencies to act in our best interests. Between the organic recipes and menacing stock images of syringes and pills, a clear theme emerges: Everything is rigged - by doctors, Big Pharma, Monsanto, the FDA - and the mainstream media isnât telling us. (Also, there's usually a link to buy vitamins.) This messaging reflects a new, uniquely conspiratorial strain of libertarianism that hijacks deeply intimate issues - your body, your health, your children's health. It shares magnificently.Indeed, gone are the days when these types of stories would struggle for traction in a media landscape dominated by a few television networks, newspapers, and radio stations. Now anyone on Facebook can take their snake oil straight to the masses - and their message is reverberating in the highest levels of government. Vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who says he's in touch with Trump about a "vaccine safety commission" recently announced a $100,000 "challenge" to prove their safety. Andrew Wakefield, who helped start the anti-vaccine movement with a fraudulent 1998 study that linked vaccines to autism, showed up at an inaugural ball. The president has called climate change a "hoax" and appointed a skeptic to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Pseudoscience is closer than ever to the mainstream.Clearly, not vaccinating your children is child abuse and should be treated as such; not only does it endanger the lives of your own children, but also the lives of other children who may rely on herd immunity because they can't take vaccinations for proper medical reasons. The fact that these child abusers are this close to the president of the United States and the US government should send chills down the spine of every responsible parent.The war on science is in full swing, and they've already won the White House and US Congress. The amount of damage that can be - and is being - done is staggering.

As we can read in recent news, VMware has become a gold member of the Linux foundation. That causes - to say the least - very mixed feelings to me.One thing to keep in mind: The Linux Foundation is an industry association, it exists to act in the joint interest of it's paying members. It is not a charity, and it does not act for the public good. I know and respect that, while some people sometimes appear to be confused about its function.However, allowing an entity like VMware to join, despite their many years long disrespect for the most basic principles of the FOSS Community (such as: Following the GPL and its copyleft principle), really is hard to understand and accept.

At the Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, California, today, Microsoft showed off the latest iterations of Project Olympus, its open source data center server design. Until now, the servers in Microsoft's data centers have all used Intel x86 processors, but now both of those elements - "Intel" and "x86" - have new competition.In news that's both surprising and unsurprising, Microsoft demonstrated Windows Server running on ARM processors. Qualcomm and Cavium have both designed motherboards for the Project Olympus form factor that use ARM chips: Qualcomm's Centriq 2400 processor, a 10nm 48 core part, and Cavium's ThunderX2 ARMv8-A, with up to 54 cores. In addition to offering lots of cores, both are highly integrated systems-on-chips with PCIe, SATA, and tens of gigabits of Ethernet all integrated.Intel missed the boat on mobile, and is now feeling pressure from both AMD on desktops and ARM in servers. Great for competition.