OSnews

Ars has a very detailed review - more of an in-depth deconstruction, to be honest, and that's a good thing - of Android 8.0 Oreo.Take a closer look at Oreo and you really can see the focus on fundamentals. Google is revamping the notification system with a new layout, new controls, and a new color scheme. It's taking responsibility for Android security with a Google-branded security solution. App background processing has been reined in, hopefully providing better battery life and more consistent performance. There's even been some work done on Android's perpetual update problem, with Project Treble allowing for easier update development and streaming updates allowing for easier installation by users. And, as with every release, more parts of Android get more modularized, with emojis and GPU driver updates now available without an OS update.Saving this one for tomorrow.

Remember, back in December 2016, when there were rumours Oracle was killing Solaris? And how a month later, Solaris effectively switched to maintenance mode, and then to a "continuous deliver model"?The news from the ex-Sun community jungle drums is that the January rumours were true and Oracle laid off the core talent of the Solaris and SPARC teams on Friday. That surely has to mean a maintenance-only future for the product range, especially with Solaris 12 cancelled. A classic Oracle "silent EOL", no matter what they claim.With the hardware deprecated, my guess is that's the last of the Sun assets Oracle acquired written off. Just how good were Oracle's decisions on buying Sun?Sun's Solaris is dead.Bryan Cantrill on this news (this Bryan Cantrill):As had been rumored for a while, Oracle effectively killed Solaris on Friday. When I first saw this, I had assumed that this was merely a deep cut, but in talking to Solaris engineers still at Oracle, it is clearly much more than that. It is a cut so deep as to be fatal: the core Solaris engineering organization lost on the order of 90% of its people, including essentially all management. [...]Judging merely by its tombstone, the life of Solaris can be viewed as tragic: born out of wedlock between Sun and AT&T and dying at the hands of a remorseless corporate sociopath a quarter century later. And even that may be overstating its longevity: Solaris may not have been truly born until it was made open source, and - certainly to me, anyway - it died the moment it was again made proprietary. But in that shorter life, Solaris achieved the singular: immortality for its revolutionary technologies. So while we can mourn the loss of the proprietary embodiment of Solaris (and we can certainly lament the coarse way in which its technologists were treated!), we can rejoice in the eternal life of its technologies - in illumos and beyond!

We talked about postmarketOS back in late May, and this weekend the project published a summary of all the work they've done over the past 100 days.What you see here is only the tip of the iceberg. So much work has gone into fixing bugs, and little improvements, that it would be ridiculous to go through the effort and list them all. The community has grown so fast in such a short time and we have people with all kinds of skills on board, ranging from Linux experts to kernel hackers to people who reverse engineer bootloaders (hi @McBitter!). We collaborate with people from other projects as well, such as @pavelmachek, who is close to using his N900 as a daily driver with his own distribution, recently just reached out to us.So if you read through the whole post, you are probably interested in what we do. Consider contributing to the project, the entry barrier is really low. pmbootstrap automates everything for you and we are more than happy to help you through any issues you encounter in the chat. There are also a lot of opportunities to help with development, so there's plenty to do. And plenty of fun to have.That's a lot of work for just 100 days.

0.4.6 is a major step towards real hardware support. Several dual boot issues have been fixed and now partitions are managed in a safer way avoiding corruption of the partition list structures. ReactOS Loader can now load custom kernels and HALs.Printing Subsystem is still greenish in 0.4.6, however Colin Finck has implemented a huge number of new APIs and fixed some of the bugs reported and detected by the ReactOS automated tests.Regarding drivers, Pierre Schweitzer has added an NFS driver and started implementing RDBSS and RXCE, needed to enable SMB support in the future, Sylvain Petreolle has imported a Digital TV tuning device driver and the UDFS driver has been re-enabled in 0.4.6 after fixing several deadlocks and issues which was making it previously unusable. Critical bugs and leakages in CDFS, SCSI and HDAUDBUS have been also fixed.That's some solid progress.

The first ever commercial Asteroid OS smartwatch, Connect Watch, was revealed today by a French company going by the same name. A Wi-Fi only model and a 3G model were unveiled with prices 99⬠and 129⬠respectively. Sales for these watches will commence tomorrow. Connect watch aims to provide a free watch alternative to the Android Wear and Tizen watches. The watches are capable to function on their own without the need for a smartphone and the 3G model can perform calls as well. Asteroid OS, for those of you who don't know, is a Nemo Mobile based open source smartwatch OS and thus shares a lot of blood with Sailfish OS. Spearheaded by a talented young programmer Florent Revest, The project has matured a lot in 2 years since it inception and garnered lot of interest around the world. Jolla's Sailfish OS for smartwatch demo displayed in Slush 2016 and MWC 2017 was also based on Asteroid OS. No Asteroid OS sync application for Sailfish OS is yet to be in development.It's 2017, and I can post a news item about an alternative operating system shipping on a smartwatch.Today was a good day.

The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update now has a release date: October 17. Microsoft started finalizing the release last week, and we'd expect this release to follow the pattern seen in previous Windows updates: the final build will be done some time in September and roll out to members of the Windows Insider program's fast, slow, and release preview rings. Then it will hit Windows Update. From there, we'd expect a slow ramp up in availability.Not the most substantial Windows update for regular users, but I do like the faster update cycle for Windows. I'm glad the monolithic releases of yore are gone for most users, while enterprise users are still able to opt for the Long Term Servicing Branch for the more monolithic approach.

The hardening of Android's userspace has increasingly made the underlying Linux kernel a more attractive target to attackers. As a result, more than a third of Android security bugs were found in the kernel last year. In Android 8.0 (Oreo), significant effort has gone into hardening the kernel to reduce the number and impact of security bugs. Android Nougat worked to protect the kernel by isolating it from userspace processes with the addition of SELinux ioctl filtering and requiring seccomp-bpf support, which allows apps to filter access to available system calls when processing untrusted input. Android 8.0 focuses on kernel self-protection with four security-hardening features backported from upstream Linux to all Android kernels supported in devices that first ship with this release.Is it common to have to backport security features of newer Linux versions to older ones? Or is this just a peculiarity of Android's Linux kernel being so far behind the times?

With version 17.08, the Genode OS project conquers the highly complex topic of hardware-accelerated graphics. In true microkernel fashion, Genode's new Intel-GPU multiplexer provides the bare minimum of functionality to enable (potentially untrusted) components to use the GPU without interfering with each other. Further highlights of the new release are the broadened support for the seL4 microkernel on ARM and 64-bit x86, the ability to boot via UEFI, and Genode's use as Xen DomU domain.Seven years ago, the Genode developers took their first baby steps with the use of hardware-accelerated graphics. However, their original port of the Intel graphics execution manager along with Mesa/Gallium to the Genode user land never outgrew an experimental stage. One particular limitation was that the GPU could only be used by a single application exclusively. At that time, the secure sharing of GPUs among multiple - and potentially malicious - applications was an afterthought in the predominant driver architectures like Linux' DRI. A port of this driver architecture to Genode would not magically solve that.In the meanwhile, hardware features like per-process graphics translation tables (PPGTT) and hardware contexts have proliferated and are now present in all modern Intel GPUs. What MMU-based virtual memory is to a CPU, these features are to a GPU. They in principle allow the sandboxed execution of GPU commands under the regime of a potentially very small GPU driver, analogously to how a microkernel facilitates an MMU to sandbox user-level components. However, with about 100K lines of code, Intel's official i915 driver stack as used in the Linux kernel is far from being small and simple. To put the number in perspective, modern microkernels like seL4 or NOVA consist of merely 10K lines of code. Inflating Genode's trusted computing base by on order of magnitude would be a tough decision. There had to be another way. Hence, one year ago, an experiment was started to develop a clean-slate GPU multiplexer as a Genode component. In contrast to the i915 driver stack that needs to accommodate a mind boggling number of legacy hardware that is still in broad use, Genode's custom GPU multiplexer could do a clear cut by only supporting very recent GPUs. The result is quite reassuring. At far less than 10K of code, Genode's new user-land GPU multiplexer is able to accommodate trusted and untrusted OpenGL applications side by side. The current release features the first version of this component along with several examples.Besides the GPU topic, the new release comes with numerous other improvements. Most noteworthy is the ability to use Genode with the seL4 kernel on the ARM and 64-bit x86 architectures. The upgraded seL4 support also enables SMP on x86, priorities, and Genode's CPU-monitoring facilities. Following up on the big infrastructural changes of the previous releases, the current release comes with gradual refinements of the VFS infrastructure, the timing accuracy, and the package-management tools. The complete picture is presented in the official release documentation.

Apple finally has something to say about net neutrality. In its first comment to the FCC about proposed upcoming rollbacks to net neutrality rules, Apple writes:Our deep respect for our customers' security, privacy, and control over personal information extends to our customers' broadband connectivity choices. We work hard to build great products, and what consumers do with those tools is up to them - not Apple, and not broadband providers. Apple therefore believes that the Federal Communications Commission should retain strong, enforceable open internet protections that advance the following key policy principles:The comment's a good - albeit late - start, but it does leave some wiggle room, as it, for instance, doesn't advocate for keeping internet traffic under Title II. Apple is, at the very least, in good company, as a staggering 98.5% of all comments to the FCC were in favour of maintaining the United States' current strong net neutrality rules.

Mark Gurman has a major scoop about the next iPhone:Apple Inc. plans to transform the way people use its next high-end iPhone by eliminating the concept of a home button and making other adjustments to a flagship device that's becoming almost all screen, according to images of the new device viewed by Bloomberg News and people familiar with the gadget.The home button is the key to the iPhone and the design hasn't changed much since it launched in 2007. Currently, users click it to return to the starting app grid that greets them multiple times a day. They hold it down to talk to the Siri digital assistant. Double click it and you get multitasking where different apps screens can be swiped through like a carousel.Apple is preparing three new iPhones for debut next month. One of the models, a new high-end device, packs in enough changes to make it one of the biggest iPhone updates in the product's decade-long history. With a crisper screen that takes up nearly the entire front, Apple has tested the complete removal of the home button - even a digital one - in favor of new gesture controls for tasks like going to the main app grid and opening multitasking, according to the people and the images.I don't really dwell too much on iPhone rumours, but this one is an exception because one, it's about a major change to the core user interaction model of iOS and the iPhone, and two, I happen to know this rumour happens to be accurate.The removal of the home button and replacing it with what is effectively a gesture area is probably the single-biggest user interface change in iOS since the day it was released, and it also happens to be yet another step in the enduring quest Android and iOS are on to become more like webOS. Steven-Troughton-Smith (go support his work!) showed a number of mockups to give a better idea of what it's going to look like.Replacing the iconic home button with a gesture area is actually a pretty fundamental shift in the interaction model of iOS. It seems to indicate that Apple is confident enough that users are well-versed in touch interfaces enough to start "hiding" important, crucial interactions - like going back to the homescreen - behind gestures that are clearly less discoverable than that huge home button. Google did something similar - but far less consequential - by removing the "drawer" button in Android's dock with a swipe-up gesture.If this trend persists, it would seem Apple's (and to a lesser extent, Google's) engineers think that the touch paradigm is old and established enough to be more abstract, which opens up a whole slew of other possibilities. Up until now, undiscoverable gestures were generally used for more power-user oriented interactions, but with this next iPhone, they will be used for basic, cornerstone iOS interactions.

The NYPD has to scrap the 36,000 smartphones it gave cops over the past two years because they're already obsolete and can't be upgraded, The Post has learned.The city bought Microsoft-based Nokia smartphones as part of a $160 million NYPD Mobility Initiative that Mayor Bill de Blasio touted as "a huge step into the 21st century".In 2014. They bought these in 2014.In 2014.

Jämsänjoki update fixes dozens of bugs reported by our community, adds many improvements and new corporate features, like mobile device management (MDM), new Camera user interface with quick access from Lock Screen, smarter Calendar on Events, WPA2 Enterprise PEAP support, new VPN options (PPTP, L2TP), Bluez version 5 for Jolla C and much more.At some point, I need to write a retrospective of some sort about Sailfish OS. My Jolla Phone and Tablet are collecting dust in a closet somewhere, so I might as well put them to good use.In any event, Jolla also unveiled something called Sailfish X, which is a ROM image of Sailfish for the Sony Xperia X. Interestingly enough, the ROM image isn't free - it costs about â¬50 and requires a Linux PC to flash it onto the Xperia X you need to buy separately. Peculiar business model, but who knows - I've seen stranger things.

With more than two billion active devices, Android is the largest mobile platform in the world. And for the past nine years, we've worked to create a rich set of tools, frameworks and APIs that deliver developers' creations to people everywhere. Today, we're releasing a preview of a new software development kit (SDK) called ARCore. It brings augmented reality capabilities to existing and future Android phones. Developers can start experimenting with it right now. We've been developing the fundamental technologies that power mobile AR over the last three years with Tango, and ARCore is built on that work. But, it works without any additional hardware, which means it can scale across the Android ecosystem. ARCore will run on millions of devices, starting today with the Pixel and Samsung's S8, running 7.0 Nougat and above. We're targeting 100 million devices at the end of the preview. We're working with manufacturers like Samsung, Huawei, LG, ASUS and others to make this possible with a consistent bar for quality and high performance.Essentially Google's answer to Apple's ARKit, and definitely a rebranding (at least partially) of Project Tango.

Daniel Aleksandersen writes:Jonas Ãdahl from Red Hat has been busy adding new D-Bus APIs to libmutter. Mutter is the GNOME window manager and Wayland compositor. The two new APIs, org.gnome.Mutter.RemoteDesktop and org.gnome.Mutter.ScreenCast, expose a PipeWire stream containing the contents of the system's screens. The new APIs can create full-screen streams, or streams for individual windows. Only the former has been implemented.These new APIs finally allows for services such as RDP and VNC servers and screen recording under Wayland. Once again, Mr. Ãhdahl delivers! He has also created GNOME Remote Desktop, a new user-level systemd service daemon that is built on the new RemoteDesktop API in libmutter, plus VNC support from libvncserver. The new service can be used to connect up a remote VNC client to your local screenâs session. GNOME Remote Desktop appears to be a drop-in replacement for Vino server.GNOME has been without its own Remote Desktop option since the switch to Wayland, and this work fills that gap.

So this happened, and half the internet is in a frenzy. Now, admittedly, it doesn't take much to frenzy the internet, but this is truly a doozy:The lesson here is "never go to sleep". All sorts of things happen while people sleep. Cats go on adventures, presidents threaten nuclear war and, well, ex-Valve writers post thinly-disguised plot summaries of the unreleased and, so far as best guesses go, long-cancelled Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Long time Half-Life scribe, the excellent Marc Laidlaw (who left Valve last year), casually tossed out a link to his website last night, which led to a short story about Gertie Fremont, Alex Vaunt and their climactic battle against evil alien invaders the Disparate (the site's having a wobble, but the page is archived right here).While that might sound like satirical tomfoolery, the actual story very much sounds like how the final chapter of Half-Life 3 could have played out. It involves time-travelling cruise liners, resurrected overlords, the heart of the Combine and the fate of one Doctor Gordon Freeman.This is really happening.Everything points to this being a thinly-veiled act of rebellion against Half-Life's creators never getting the chance to finish the story they were telling. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 ended on probably the biggest unfulfilled cliffhanger in gaming history, and for almost ten years now, we've been waiting for a continuation or a conclusion. This must be incredibly frustrating for the original creators of the Half-Life series, and honestly, I'm surprised it's taken them this long to start breaking rank.From everything we've heard over the years, we can conclude that there will never be a Half-Life 3 or even an Episode 3. Many - if not most - of the original creators of Half-Life 1 and 2 have left Valve, and the company has little to no incentive to create a game that, like Duke Nukem Forever, will never live up to the hype they themselves created.The established theory regarding why there's no Half-Life 3 or Episode 3 is that Valve wanted the game to be as defining and revolutionary as Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2, but I think that's the wrong mindset to have. Gaming has come a long, long way since the late 90s and early 2000s, and over roughly the past decade or so there simply haven't been any games that rebooted or revolutionised entire genres, or established new ones. The only game I can think of in the past ten years that created a new genre of games and had an everlasting impact on the industry is Minecraft, and that was a fluke.The industry is more mature, more settled now, and it's much harder to be revolutionary today than it was 20 years ago. The great games of today aren't revolutionary; they are evolutionary, perfecting and polishing established genres, taking them to new heights. Games like The Witcher 3 and Horizon: Zero Dawn aren't loved because they changed the industry; they're loved because they took existing genres and executed them in the very best ways the current generation of technologies allows us to do.I see no reason why Half-Life 3 or Episode 3 should change the world or revolutionise what we think of as games. Just let it tell a great story with the characters we love, polish its chosen genre to perfection, and people will love it just as much 20 years from now as we love Half-Life 1 and 2 today. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

Some light weekend reading: ethical guidelines for self-driving cars, as proposed by an ethics commission of the German government.The technological developments are forcing government and society to reflect on the emerging changes. The decision that has to be taken is whether the licensing of automated driving systems is ethically justifiable or possibly even imperative. If these systems are licensed - and it is already apparent that this is happening at international level - everything hinges on the conditions in which they are used and the way in which they are designed. At the fundamental level, it all comes down to the following question. How much dependence on technologically complex systems - which in the future will be based on artificial intelligence, possibly with machine learning capabilities - are we willing to accept in order to achieve, in return, more safety, mobility and convenience? What precautions need to be taken to ensure controllability, transparency and data autonomy? What technological development guidelines are required to ensure that we do not blur the contours of a human society that places individuals, their freedom of development, their physical and intellectual integrity and their entitlement to social respect at the heart of its legal regime?Cars are legalised murder weapons, and the car is probably one of the deadliest inventions of mankind. Self-driving cars, therefore, open up a whole Pandora's box oef ethical dilemmas, and it only makes sense for governments and lawmakers to start addressing these.Beyond the ethics related to life and death, though, there are also simpler, more banal ethical considerations. What if, in the hunger for more profits, a car maker makes a deal with McDonalds, and tweaks its self-driving car software just a tad bit so that it drives customers past McDonalds more often, even if it increases total travel time? What if a car maker makes similar deals with major chains like Target, Walmart, and Whole Foods, so that smaller chains or independent stores don't even show up when you say "take me to the nearest place that sells X"? Is that something we should allow?Should we even allow self-driving car software to be closed-source to begin with? Again - cars are legal murder weapons, and do we really trust car manufacturers enough not to cut corners when developing self-driving car software to meet deadlines or due to bad management or underpaid developers? Shouldn't all this development and all this code be out there for the world to see?Interesting times ahead.

Purism, maker of Linux laptops with Coreboot, have started started a crowdfunding campaign for their smartphone. Now, I rarely - if ever - link to crowdfunding campaigns (for obvious reasons), but I feel this one might just be quite, quite desirable for many OSNews readers.Librem 5, the phone that focuses on security by design and privacy protection by default. Running Free/Libre and Open Source software and a GNU+Linux Operating System designed to create an open development utopia, rather than the walled gardens from all other phone providers.A fully standards-based freedom-oriented system, based on Debian and many other upstream projects, has never been done before - we will be the first to seriously attempt this.The Librem 5 phone will be the world's first ever IP-native mobile handset, using end-to-end encrypted decentralized communication.It'll have hardware killswitches for the camera, microphone, WiFi, and the baseband. I wish the team a lot of luck - they'll need it, because making a phone is hard.

This is a pretty big change, detailed only a few days ago.Eagle-eyed users of Android O will have noticed the absence of the 'Allow unknown sources' setting, which has existed since the earliest days of Android to facilitate the installation of apps from outside of Google Play and other preloaded stores. In this post we'll talk about the new Install unknown apps permission and the security benefits it brings for both Android users and developers.Google goes into more detail a few paragraphs down:In Android O, the Install unknown apps permission makes it safer to install apps from unknown sources. This permission is tied to the app that prompts the install - just like other runtime permissions - and ensures that the user grants permission to use the install source before it can prompt the user to install an app. When used on a device running Android O and higher, hostile downloaders cannot trick the user into installing an app without having first been given the go-ahead.This new permission provides users with transparency, control, and a streamlined process to enable installs from trusted sources. The Settings app shows the list of apps that the user has approved for installing unknown apps. Users can revoke the permission for a particular app at any time.Good move.

Samsung has finally unveiled the Galaxy Note8, revealing the (rather heavily-leaked) device at its Unpacked event in New York City today. You won't be surprised to know that it comes with little in the way of surprises. It's basically a bigger Galaxy S8+ with a stylus and dual cameras.The Note8 is something of a chance for Samsung to make things up to fans of the Note series, after the Note7 was forced off shelves because of defective batteries that led to the smartphone catching fire. Knowing that Note fans were deprived of a generation of hardware, Samsung is likely eager to capitalize on the eagerness of said fanatics to finally upgrade.I'm not the target market for a Note, but you have to admit - these recent Samsung flagships are a far, far cry from the ugly, plasticky crap they used to make. There's no accounting for tastes - or practicality - but this Note 8 is a beautiful piece of engineering.

David Hermann writes:Later this year, on November 21, 2017, D-Bus will see its 15th birthday. An impressive age, only shy of the KDE and GNOME projects, whose collaboration inspired the creation of this independent IPC system. While still relied upon by the most recent KDE and GNOME releases, D-Bus is not free of criticism. Despite its age and mighty advocates, it never gained traction outside of its origins. On the contrary, it has long been criticized as bloated, over-engineered, and orphaned. Though, when looking into those claims, youâre often left with unsubstantiated ranting about the environment D-Bus is used in. If you rather want a glimpse into the deeper issues, the best place to look is the D-Bus bug-tracker, including the assessments of the D-Bus developers themselves. The bugs range from uncontrolled memory usage, over silent dropping of messages, to dead-locks by design, unsolved for up to 7 years. Looking closer, most of them simply cannot be solved without breaking guarantees long given by dbus-daemon(1), the reference implementation. Hence, workarounds have been put in place to keep them under control.Nevertheless, these issues still bugged us! Which is, why we rethought some of the fundamental concepts behind the shared Message Buses defined by the D-Bus Specification. We developed a new architecture that is designed particularly for the use-cases of modern D-Bus, and it allows us to solve several long standing issues with dbus-daemon(1). With this in mind, we set out to implement an alternative D-Bus Message Bus. Half a year later, we hereby announce the dbus-broker project!

Just a scanned PDF version of the Apple IIe design guidelines.This guide is divided into two parts. Part I contains recommendations to softqare, firmware and hardware designers who want their products to work smoothly with the Apple IIe, as well as the Apple II and II Plus. These recommendations pertain to the interface between Apple II Series computers and the products that are to work with them.Part II pertains to the interface between software products and their human users. The recommendations in this section of the guide apply to designers of software for Apple IIIs as well as Apple IIs. The user interface guidelines derive from the experience of countless Apple II and III users, as observed by more than a dozen computer and teaching professionals. These guidelines should make it easier for both programmers and users to create and benefit from the tools that Apple computers put at their disposal.An awesome read.

Since we launched Chrome OS in 2009, our goal has been to build the simplest, fastest, and most secure operating system possible. And we've been inspired by all the ways we've seen businesses embrace Chrome, from Chromebooks in the office, to shared Chrome devices in the field, to signage and kiosks for customer engagement in retail. But with so many different business needs - not to mention so many different devices - companies have also told us they want a single, cost-effective solution that gives them the flexibility and control to keep their employees connected. That's why today we're announcing Chrome Enterprise.Chrome Enterprise offers a host of features, including access to enterprise app storefronts, deep security controls, 24/7 support, as well as integration with cloud and on-premise management tools, VMware Workspace ONE and Microsoft Active Directory.Chrome OS keeps marching on.

Game downloads on PS4 have a reputation of being very slow, with many people reporting downloads being an order of magnitude faster on Steam or Xbox. This had long been on my list of things to look into, but at a pretty low priority. After all, the PS4 operating system is based on a reasonably modern FreeBSD (9.0), so there should not be any crippling issues in the TCP stack. The implication is that the problem is something boring, like an inadequately dimensioned CDN.But then I heard that people were successfully using local HTTP proxies as a workaround. It should be pretty rare for that to actually help with download speeds, which made this sound like a much more interesting problem.The detailed article contains tips to address the problem somewhat.

Today, we are officially introducing Android 8.0 Oreo, the latest release of the platform - and it's smarter, faster and more powerful than ever. It comes with new features like picture-in-picture and Autofill to help you navigate tasks seamlessly. Plus, it's got stronger security protections and speed improvements that keep you safe and moving at lightspeed. When you're on your next adventure, Android Oreo is the superhero to have by your side (or in your pocket!).Coming to a device near you. Eventually. Maybe. But probably not.

On August 21st, a solar eclipse will sweep across the entire United States for the first time since 1918. Android is helping you experience this historic natural phenomenon so you can learn more about the eclipse and count down to the big day - when youâll meet the next release of Android and all of its super (sweet) new powers, revealed via livestream from New York City at 2:40PM ET.If a new operating system version is released, but nobody's able to use it, has it really been released?

Amiga Love has had a few articles on getting various Commodore machines back online and into the BBS world. From C64s to Amiga 500s (et al) as well as the terminal programs we use; PETSCII capable (i, ii) in case you're trying to hit an C64 BBS from your Amiga or ANSI capable, like A-Talk III, for most other boards. There are a lot of options out there, and the BBS scene is vastly smaller than back in the day, but it's not dead by any stretch. Oh no, dear reader, it is not dead. (I see four lights!) If anything, the interest in this form of socializing and connecting seems to be growing lately as hardware options become easier to build and less expensive to source.Tonight, I finally got my Amiga 1000 online for the first time ever and connected to some of my favorite BBSes. And oh my god, have you ever seen a more beautiful sight? I doubt it. Well, at least not for about 30 years, give or take.About 2000 years from now, Amiga will be the object of a world religion. It just cannot die.

In this mini-test, we compared AMD's Game Mode as originally envisioned by AMD. Game Mode sits as an extra option in the AMD Ryzen Master software, compared to Creator Mode which is enabled by default. Game Mode does two things: firstly, it adjusts the memory configuration. Rather than seeing the DRAM as one uniform block of memory with an âaverageâ latency, the system splits the memory into near memory closest to the active CPU, and far memory for DRAM connected via the other silicon die. The second thing that Game Mode does is disable the cores on one of the silicon dies, but retains the PCIe lanes, IO, and DRAM support. This disables cross-die thread migration, offers faster memory for applications that need it, and aims to lower the latency of the cores used for gaming by simplifying the layout. The downside of Game Mode is raw performance when peak CPU is needed: by disabling half the cores, any throughput limited task is going to be cut by losing half of the throughput resources. The argument here is that Game mode is designed for games, which rarely use above 8 cores, while optimizing the memory latency and PCIe connectivity.I like how AnandTech calls this a "mini" test.In any event - even though Threadripper is probably way out of the league of us regular people, I'm really loving how AMD's recent products have lit a fire under the processor market specifically and the self-built desktop market in general. Ever since Ryzen hit the market, now joined by Vega and Threadripper, we're back to comparing numbers and arguing over which numbers are better. We're back to the early 2000s, and it feels comforting and innocent - because everyone is right and everyone is wrong, all at the same time, because everything 100% depends on your personal budget and your personal use cases and no amount of benchmarks or number crunching is going to change your budget or personal use case.I'm loving every second of this.

Apple is adding an easy way to quickly disable Touch ID in iOS 11. A new setting, designed to automate emergency services calls, lets iPhone users tap the power button quickly five times to call 911. This doesn't automatically dial the emergency services by default, but it brings up the option to and also temporarily disables Touch ID until you enter a passcode. Twitter users discovered the new option in the iOS 11 public beta, and The Verge has verified it works as intended.It's sad that we live in a world where our devices need features like this, but I commend Apple for doing so.

This course walks through the creation of a 64-bit system based on the Linux kernel. Our goal is to produce a small, sleek system well-suited for hosting containers or being employed as a virtual machine.Because we don't need every piece of functionality under the sun, we're not going to include every piece of software you might find in a typical distro. This distribution is intended to be minimal.Building my own Linux installation from scratch has always been one of those things I've wanted to do, but never got around to. Is this still something many people do? If so, why?

On August 11, 1987, Bill Atkinson announced a new product from Apple for the Macintosh; a multimedia, easily programmed system called HyperCard. HyperCard brought into one sharp package the ability for a Macintosh to do interactive documents with calculation, sound, music and graphics. It was a popular package, and thousands of HyperCard âstacksâ were created using the software.Additionally, commercial products with HyperCard at their heart came to great prominence, including the original Myst program.Flourishing for the next roughly ten years, HyperCard slowly fell by the wayside to the growing World Wide Web, and was officially discontinued as a product by Apple in 2004. It left behind a massive but quickly disappearing legacy of creative works that became harder and harder to experience.To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Hypercard, weâre bringing it back.HyperCard is a lot of fun to play around with - I have an iBook G3 with OS9 and HyperCard installed, to play with - and this makes it far more accessible. Good work!

Ars Technica:The Galago Pro was my daily machine for about a month. While I had some issues as noted above (I don't like the trackpad or the keyboard), by and large it's the best stock Linux machine. The only place where the Dell XPS 13 blows it out of the water is in battery life. As someone who lives full time in an RV and relies on a very limited amount of solar power (300w) for all my energy needs, that battery life is a deal breaker. But in nearly every other regard, this is by far my favorite laptop, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.There is something that comes up in the comments of nearly every review of System76 hardware, and that's how the company doesn't build its own hardware. System76 orders everything from upstream hardware vendors, and, in the case of the Galago Pro, that would be the Clevo N130BU (or N131BU). I've never quite understood what the issue is, but it certainly seems to rub some people the wrong way. Could you save a couple bucks by ordering the Clevo directly? Sure, but you'd have no support, no custom PPA to fix hardware issues, and no community to get involved in. If you just want a dirt-cheap Linux rig, try eBay. What System76 offers is great Linux experience with a piece of hardware that's maybe not the absolute cheapest hardware.However, that is going to change. In addition to launching its own don't-call-it-a-distro OS, the company has announced that will soon begin what it calls "phase three" - moving its product design and manufacturing in-house. There, it hopes to "build the Model S of computers." It's a bold move, starting up hardware manufacturing and an operating system at the same time. It's the kind of plan that might well lead to overextending oneself (after all, even Canonical has backed away from making its own desktop OS).I'm genuinely curious what System76's in-house Linux laptop will be like.

This paper is a gentle but rigorous introduction to quantum computing intended for computer scientists. Starting from a small set of assumptions on the behavior of quantum computing devices, we analyze their main characteristics, stressing the differences with classical computers, and finally describe two well-known algorithms (Simon's algorithm and Grover's algorithm) using the formalism developed in previous sections. This paper does not touch on the physics of the devices, and therefore does not require any notion of quantum mechanics.Some light reading before bedtime.

A perk of connected devices, or at least what gadget manufacturers will tell you, is they can receive over-the-air updates to keep your device current. Those updates don't always go as planned, however. In fact, they can go horribly wrong. Take a company called Lockstate, for example, which attempted to issue new software to its LS6i smart locks last week and ended up bricking devices. That isn't great.I don't know what these people were expecting.

For years, the website Daily Stormer has promoted hatred against Jews, black people, LGBT people, and other minorities, making it one of the Internet's most infamous destinations. But on Sunday, editor Andrew Anglin outdid himself by publishing a vulgar, slut-shaming article about Heather Heyer, a woman who was killed when someone rammed a car into a crowd of anti-racism protestors in Charlottesville.The article prompted a response from the site's domain registrar, GoDaddy. "We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service," GoDaddy wrote in a tweet late Sunday night.On Monday, the Daily Stormer switched its registration to Google's domain service. Within hours, Google announced a cancellation of its own. "We are cancelling Daily Stormerâs registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service," the company wrote in an statement emailed to Ars.No company should do business with nazis and white supremacists - ever. Still waiting on the darling of the podcasting industry, SquareSpace, to stop doing business with nazis. We can't remove these sites - and its creators and their philosophy - from existence, but at least we can make life as difficult as possible for them.And, since far too many people in the west do not understand free speech - kicking nazis out of your (virtual) store or house is free speech.

Multiple senior Microsoft officials told me at the time that the issues were all Intel's fault, and that the microprocessor giant had delivered its buggiest-ever product in the "Skylake" generation chipsets. Microsoft, first out of the gate with Skylake chips, thus got caught up by this unreliability, leading to a falling out with Intel. Microsoftâs recent ARM push with Windows 10 is a result of that falling out; the software giant believes that Intel needs a counter to its dominance and that, as of late 2016, AMD simply wasn't up to the task.Since then, however, another trusted source at Microsoft has provided with a different take on this story. Microsoft, I'm told, fabricated the story about Intel being at fault. The real problem was Surface-specific custom drivers and settings that the Microsoft hardware team cooked up.What a train wreck for Microsoft. Incredible.

AMD isn't only getting back in the game on processors - they also just finally truly unveiled Vega, the new line of Radeon graphics cards. AnandTech benchmarked the two cards, and concludes:Unfortunately for AMD, their GTX 1080-like performance doesn't come cheap from a power perspective. The Vega 64 has a board power rating of 295W, and it lives up to that rating. Relative to the GeForce GTX 1080, we've seen power measurements at the wall anywhere between 110W and 150W higher than the GeForce GTX 1080, all for the same performance. Thankfully for AMD, buyers are focused on price and performance first and foremost (and in that order), so if all youâre looking for is a fast AMD card at a reasonable price, the Vega 64 delivers where it needs to: it is a solid AMD counterpart to the GeForce GTX 1080. However if you care about the power consumption and the heat generated by your GPU, the Vega 64 is in a very rough spot.On the other hand, the Radeon RX Vega 56 looks better for AMD, so it's easy to see why in recent days they have shifted their promotional efforts to the cheaper member of the RX Vega family. Though a step down from the RX Vega 64, the Vega 56 delivers around 90% of Vega 64âs performance for 80% of the price. Furthermore, when compared head-to-head with the GeForce GTX 1070, its closest competition, the Vega 56 enjoys a small but none the less significant 8% performance advantage over its NVIDIA counterpart. Whereas the Vega 64 could only draw to a tie, the Vega 56 can win in its market segment.Vega 56's power consumption also looks better than Vega 64's, thanks to binning and its lower clockspeeds. Its power consumption is still notably worse than the GTX 1070's by anywhere between 45W and 75W at the wall, but on both a relative basis and an absolute basis, it's at least closer. Consequently, just how well the Vega 56 fares depends on your views on power consumption. It's faster than the GTX 1070, and even if retail prices are just similar to the GTX 1070 rather than cheaper, then for some buyers looking to maximize performance for their dollar, that will be enough. But it's certainly not a very well rounded card if power consumption and noise are factored in.So, equal performance to Nvidia's competing cards at slightly lower prices (we hope), but at a big cost: far higher power consumption (and thus, I assume, heat?). For gaming, Nvidia is probably still the best choice on virtually every metric, but the interesting thing about Vega is that there's every indication it will do better on other, non-gaming tasks.It's still early days for Vega.

We take you through a demo of our restored Xerox Alto. We go through the Neptune file browser, the Bravo text editor, the Draw and SIL programs, network booting, ftp, telnet, Smalltalk, some games and new programs we have made for the Alto.A great video showing off how the Alto - the precursor to the Star, the mother of all graphical user interfaces we still use today on our desktops and phones - works.

I spend an inordinate amount of time searching for information about macOS. Whether I am researching the answers for my section in MacFormat magazine, or trying to solve my own problems here, I am also daily reminded of Apple's wholesale failure to provide consistent and complete documentation of its flagship product.The idea you would donate an inordinate amount of time and effort for free to the richest company in the world to perform work they ought to be doing is wholly and completely baffling to me.

Windows 10 Pro for Workstations is a high-end edition of Windows 10 Pro, comes with unique support for server grade PC hardware and is designed to meet demanding needs of mission critical and compute intensive workloads.Windows 10 Pro for Workstations - a glorious throwback to classic Microsoft naming schemes - provides users with ReFS, persistent memory, and more, and allows up to four processors (instead of two) and a maximum of 6 TB of memory (currently 2 TB).

In this review we've covered several important topics surrounding CPUs with large numbers of cores: power, frequency, and the need to feed the beast. Running a CPU is like the inverse of a diet - you need to put all the data in to get any data out. The more pi that can be fed in, the better the utilization of what you have under the hood.AMD and Intel take different approaches to this. We have a multi-die solution compared to a monolithic solution. We have core complexes and Infinity Fabric compared to a MoDe-X based mesh. We have unified memory access compared to non-uniform memory access. Both are going hard against frequency and both are battling against power consumption. AMD supports ECC and more PCIe lanes, while Intel provides a more complete chipset and specialist AVX-512 instructions. Both are competing in the high-end prosumer and workstation markets, promoting high-throughput multi-tasking scenarios as the key to unlocking the potential of their processors.As always, AnandTech's the only review you'll need, but there's also the Ars review and the Tom's Hardware review.I really want to build a Threadripper machine, even though I just built a very expensive (custom watercooling is pricey) new machine a few months ago, and honestly, I have no need for a processor like this - but the little kid in me loves the idea of two dies molten together, providing all this power. Let's hope this renewed emphasis on high core and thread counts pushes operating system engineers and application developers to make more and better use of all the threads they're given.

In what's never going to be a regular occurance, I'm linking to a Twitter thread. Chris Espinosa tweets:Just as I was wrapping up an email and getting ready to leave work, a co-worker rolled his chair over to show me an "interesting" thing.Go ahead, read it.UNIX, man. Not even once.

It's being reported by the Wall Street Journal that Amazon is among the companies which contributed to Essentials $300 million coffers. They also reveal that Best Buy and Amazon will be retail partners for the upcoming phone launch. The best bit of news, though, comes in the form of a set of dates. Although we still have no idea when the phone will launch (Essential has now very much overshot its 'end of the month' June prediction), Essential president Niccolo de Masi says, "I will give you an exact date in a week."Those are some serious investors for Andy Rubin's new devices company.

The Verge does this thing where they list what they consider to be the best laptop or phone or whatever, and they state the Samsung Galaxy S8 is the best phone for most people.Samsung's Galaxy S8/S8 Plus is the best phone for most people. It's available across all four US carriers and unlocked. It has the best display on any smartphone right now, a head-turning, premium design, a top-of-the-line camera, reliable battery life, and fast performance. Thanks to Samsung's popularity and the support of all four carriers, the S8 also has plenty of accessories, from cases to battery packs to wireless chargers, available to it.You can definitely make a case for the S8 being the best phone for most people, but personally, I still consider the iPhone to be the best, safest choice for most non-geeky people. Personally, I prefer Android, and for my personal use, iOS on the iPhone is an exercise in frustration - but iOS provides a more consistent, all-around phone experience that remains fairly static from phone to phone, it's a little simpler to grasp than Android, and Apple has an excellent support system in many countries that's far better than Samsung's hands-off let-the-reseller-handle-it approach.I wonder - what do any of you consider the best phone for most people? If one of your non-geeky family members seeks your advice, which phone do you suggest they get?The Verge named the Surface Laptop the best laptop, which I find a baffling choice. It's new and unproven, so we have no idea how it'll hold up over the next few years. An odd choice for sure.

When you get that "out of space" error message during an update, you're only "out of space" on the user storage partition, which is just being used as a temporary download spot before the update is applied to the system partition. Starting with Android 8.0, the A/B system partition setup is being upgraded with a "streaming updates" feature. Update data will arrive from the Internet directly to the offline system partition, written block by block, in a ready-to-boot state. Instead of needing ~1GB of free space, Google will be bypassing user storage almost entirely, needing only ~100KB worth of free space for some metadata.I promise not to make some snide remark about Android's update mess.

Several years ago, we published a round-up of thermal pastes that started with Thermal Paste Comparison, Part One: Applying Grease And More and concluded with Thermal Paste Comparison, Part Two: 39 Products Get Tested. Since it's so hot outside (at least in our U.S. labs), we're trying to cool so many new CPUs and GPUs, and readers keep asking for it, we decided to combine and update those stories, adding a range of new thermal pastes and pads.Thermal paste and how to apply it are probably more divisive than anything else in technology. So many different methods, old wives' tales, folklore, and god knows what else.

Before I link you to the story this item is actually about, I want to tell you about one of my biggest frustrations with computer hardware and software. It's something that I have to work around every single day, and its consequences bother me almost every few minutes.Hardware and software have no idea how to handle people who lead multilingual lives.Like hundreds of millions of people, I speak and understand several languages, but on top of that, I use two languages every single day: Dutch and English. I switch between these two all the time, often even multiple times a minute when juggling multiple friends, clients, work-related material, entertainment, and so on. I might be writing an e-mail to a client in English, work on a translation in Dutch, WhatsApp with a friend in English, and write a Facebook post in Dutch - switching between all of these.Software has no idea what to do with this. The most operating systems like Windows and OS X can do is offer a small icon somewhere tucked away to manually switch input languages, which is incredibly cumbersome and just wholly impractical to perform every time you have to switch languages. It gets even worse on mobile operating systems, which are heavy on the autocorrect (I cannot type on a touchscreen), so if my input method is still set to English while I'm typing something in Dutch, it gets autocorrected into meaningless garbage (it's only recently that both Android and iOS at least offer some form of true multilingual input).It's even worse when it comes to these voice assistants the entire technology industry is trying to ram down our throats, like Google Assistant or Apple's Siri. Do you know what you need to do to switch voice assistant input language on an Apple Watch or Android Wear device? Are you ready for it?You need to perform a full wipe and set up the device as new.Since my use of Dutch and English is split about 50/50 - or maybe 60/40 - the end result is that for about 50% of the time, I cannot use any of these devices to reply to an e-mail or write a text message. While Android Wear 2.0 has a keyboard and handwriting recognition, I have no idea how to change the input language for those input methods. Even if I could by tapping around - the point of these things is that you can use them without having to look away from whatever you're doing (e.g. cycling).And just in case you think this kind of multilingual use is rare or an edge case: just in the United States alone, dozens of millions of people speak both Spanish and English every single day. This is not an edge case. This is not a peculiarity. This is daily reality for possibly hundreds of millions of people all over the world.There's countless other daily irritations that arise from this inability of software to deal with multilingual use (Win32 vs. Metro vs. Chrome vs. Office vs. etc., which all have their own input language switching mechanisms I manually have to keep track of), but the point I want to make is the following.Because software has no idea how to deal with multilingual use, I know for a fact that very few of the engineers working on Windows or Office or iOS or WatchOS or Android or whatever lead multilingual lives, because any person who uses multiple languages every single day would be able to spot these problems within 15 minutes of use. If the manager responsible for WatchOS led a multilingual life, or had a bunch of people on his team that led multilingual lives, WatchOS would've never been released without the ability to easily switch Siri input language.Despite what some low-level Googler claims in his rambling manifesto of idiocy, diversity matters. Or, as ex-Googler Yonatan Zunger puts it way more eloquently:Engineering is not the art of building devices; it's the art of fixing problems. Devices are a means, not an end. Fixing problems means first of all understanding themâ-âand since the whole purpose of the things we do is to fix problems in the outside world, problems involving people, that means that understanding people, and the ways in which they will interact with your system, is fundamental to every step of building a system.If, at this point in time, you still don't understand the importance of diversity when developing products, you are beyond help, and have no place on any product development team. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

A new Apollo accelerator board has been released. What are these?â¨Apollo Accelerators is an Amiga Classic accelerator board product line. It uses the Apollo core which is a code compatible Motorola M68K and ColdFire processor but is 3 to 4 time faster than the fastest 68060 at time. It also brings Amiga Classic near to Amiga NG by bringing digital video with millions of colours.The Vampire V4 improves upon its predecessors in numerous ways. As always, the Amiga community always manages to keep their own computers relevant and up-to-date, if even for just a small group of users. Amazing.

Today, it hit me that iOS is already ten years old. I consider iOS a relatively new and fresh operating system, but can we really say that at ten years old? In order to figure that out, I quickly threw together a little graph to visualise the age of both current and deprecated operating systems to get a better look at the age of operating systems.It counts operating system age in terms of years from initial public release (excluding beta or preview releases) to the last release (in case of deprecated operating systems) or until today (in case of operating systems still in active development). I've included mainly popular, successful, consumer-oriented operating systems, leaving out more server or embedded oriented operating systems (such as UNIX and QNX), which tend to have vastly different needs and development cycles.As far as the nomenclature goes, Windows 9x includes everything from Windows 1.0 to Windows ME, and Mac OS covers System 1 through Mac OS 9.2.2. Windows CE is currently called Windows Embedded Compact, but its line also includes Windows Phone 7, Windows Mobile, and Windows PocketPC.Red indicates the operating system is no longer being developed, whereas green means it's still under active development. The only question mark in this regard is Windows CE; its latest release is Embedded Compact 2013 in 2013, and while I think it's still in development, I'm not entirely sure.This graph isn't a scientifically accurate, well-researched, quotable piece of information - it takes many shortcuts and brushes several questions aside for brevity's sake. For instance, looking at the last official release doesn't always make sense, such as with Windows Service Packs or Mac OS X point releases, and I haven't even been entirely consistent with these anyway.On top of that, the graph doesn't take months or weeks into account, and just counts everything in terms of years. Linux shouldn't technically be included at all (since it's just a kernel), and you can conceivably argue that, for instance, Mac OS X is older than its initial release in the form of 10.0 since it's so heavily based on NEXTSTEP. Amiga OS is also a bit of a stretch, since its development pace is slow and has even died down completely on several occasions. You could maybe possibly argue that BeOS is still in active development in the form of Haiku, but I consider Haiku a reimplementation, and not a continuation.In any event, I originally wasn't planning on doing anything with this, but I figured I might as well publish it here since it's an interesting overview.

Farhad Manjoo, in The New York Times:â¨A year ago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation made an extraordinary demand of Apple. To get inside a dead terrorist's iPhone, law enforcement officials wanted the company to create a hackable version of the software that runs all iPhones.To many legal experts, it wasn't obvious that Apple had a winning case against the request. But facing great legal and political opposition, Apple took a stand anyway. Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, argued that the company had a financial and moral duty to protect its users' privacy and security. He made clear that Apple would obey American law - but only after trying to shape the law.The fight paid off. On the eve of a courtroom showdown, the F.B.I. rescinded its request. It is worth underlining this point: When Apple took a public stand for its users' liberty and privacy, the American government blinked.Yet in China over the weekend, when faced with a broad demand by the Chinese internet authority, it was Apple that blinked.Apple openly and publicly buts heads with the US government but not with the Chinese government because of one very simple reason: Apple is more dependent on, and beholden to, China than on and to the US. Virtually everything Apple sells is made in China, and Apple has nowhere else to go.For a company that always tries to strive for control, it really low-waged itself into a corner.

Earlier today, John Gruber linked to this piece, and I couldn't help but roll my eyes at the superior orders defense. Gruber later followed up with a more detailed article, and wondered what I think Apple should do.Too many people reacting to this story think that it's about Apple deciding to acquiesce to this particular demand regarding VPN apps. It's not. The real issues are two-fold:Should Apple being doing business in China at all?Should the App Store remain the only way to install apps on iOS devices?Neither of these are simple topics, and I would (and am about to) argue that neither question has a clear-cut "this is the right thing to do" answer.Nonsense. In both of these cases, it's very "clear-cut" what "the right thing to do" is.No.No.Since the App Store question is obvious - my computer, my rules, my software, get out - let's move on to the China question. The only reason this issue is supposedly not "clear-cut" is because we live in a society that values money over people. People like John Gruber argue that Google's advertising practices and data collection are bad and evil, but in one breath argue that it's okay for Apple to buddy up to totalitarian regimes like the ones in China or Saudi-Arabia that have complete and utter disregard for human rights because it's good for Apple.You can certainly make that argument - and each and every one of us uses products that either depend on or are made in totalitarian regimes - but don't try to justify it or claim there's no clear right and wrong here. Collaborating with such regimes is clearly wrong, period. No ifs, buts, or maybes, and by buying products made in China or by putting Saudi-Arabian oil in our cars we are all complicit, whether we like it or not.We like to make it seem as if right and wrong are cloudy, nebulous concepts, but in reality, they rarely are. The only thing that's cloudy and nebulous is our own cognitive dissonance and the twisting, contorting, and justifying we - as a society - do to solve it. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...