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We'll be restructuring our approach to Remix OS and transitioning away from the consumer space. As a result, development on all existing products such as Remix OS for PC as well as products in our pipeline such as Remix IO and IO+ will be discontinued. Full refunds will be issued to ALL BACKERS via Kickstarter for both Remix IO and Remix IO+. In addition any purchases made via our online store that has remained unfulfilled will also be fully refunded. This requires no action from you as we will begin issuing refunds starting August 15th.I'm shocked.

Dieter Bohn at The Verge:So while Microsoft didn't do itself any favors, I'd argue strongly that all these machinations and flailings weren't a response (or weren't only a response) to the iPhone. The real enemy was the company that had set its sights on Microsoft's phone ambitions since before the iPhone was released. That company was Google, of course, and it only tangentially wanted to take on the iPhone. Google's real target was always Microsoft, and it hit the bullseye.This article looks at the past, so let me take this opportunity to posit something that might come as a surprise to some.Android is a dead end.I really want to write a far more detailed and in-depth article explaining why I think Android is a dead end, but I can't yet fully articulate my thoughts or pinpoint why, exactly, I've felt like this for months now. All this doesn't mean Google is going to get out of mobile operating systems, and it doesn't even mean that the name "Android" is going away. All it means is that what we think of today as "Android" - a Linux kernel with libraries, the Android Runtime, and so on on top - has served its hackjob, we-need-to-compete purpose and is going to go away.Android in its current form suffers from several key architectural problems - it's not nearly as resource-efficient as, say, iOS, has consistent update problems, and despite hefty hardware, still suffers from the occasional performance problems, among other things - that Google clearly hasn't been able to solve. It feels like Android is in limbo, waiting for something, as if Google is working on something else that will eventually succeed Android.Is that something Fuchsia? Is Project Treble part of the plan, to make it easier for Google to eventually replace Android's Linux base with something else? If Android as it exists today was salvageable, why are some of the world's greatest operating systems engineers employed by Google not working on Android, but on Fuchsia? If Fuchsia is just a research operating system, why did its developers recently add actual wallpapers to the repository? Why does every design choice for Fuchsia seem specifically designed for and targeted at solving Android's core problems?I don't like making broad predictions based on gut feelings and spidey senses, since they can be incredibly misleading and hard to read, but I'm still pretty confident on this one: over the coming two to three years, Android will undergo a radical transformation. This transformation will be mostly transparent to users - their next Android phone won't actually be "Android" anymore, but still run the same applications, and they literally won't care - but it won't be a Linux device, and it won't suffer from Android's core problems.In a few years, Google's Pixel phone will have a fully custom, Google-designed SoC, and run an operating system that is Android in brand name only.Bookmark this. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

No. Mr Astley did not rework his song. An artist called Mario Klingemann did, using clever software. The video is a particularly obvious example of generated media, which uses quick and basic techniques. More sophisticated technology is on the verge of being able to generate credible video and audio of anyone saying anything. This is down to progress in an artificial intelligence (AI) technique called machine learning, which allows for the generation of imagery and audio. One particular set-up, known as a generative adversarial network (GAN), works by setting a piece of software (the generative network) to make repeated attempts to create images that look real, while a separate piece of software (the adversarial network) is set up in opposition. The adversary looks at the generated images and judges whether they are "real", which is measured by similarity to those in the generative software's training database. In trying to fool the adversary, the generative software learns from its errors. Generated images currently require vast computing power, and only work at low resolution. For now.People aren't even intelligent enough to spot obviously fake nonsense written stories, and those were enough to have an impact on the US elections. The current US president managed to "win" the elections by spouting an endless barrage of obvious lies, and the entire Brexit campaign was built on a web of obvious deceit and dishonesty.Now imagine adding fake video into the mix where anyone can be made to say anything.

Two days ago, the Day of Action to defend net neutrality took place. With the new US administration came a new chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai, who is working hard to try and undo the strict net neutrality rules put in place by his predecessor Tom Wheeler. Pai and the US Congress are under pressure from and enticed by millions of dollars worth of "donations" from the telecommunications industry to gut net neutrality.The 2017 Day of Action feels a lot like a retreat of 2014, when net neutrality was at stake as well. The 2014 campaign contributed to Tom Wheeler's decision to enact strict net neutrality rules, and was supported by a large number of technology companies. This year, too, the Day of Action was supported by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter, Reddit, Snap, Facebook, and so on.One company is conspicuously absent from the net neutrality debate: Apple. The Cupertino giant is usually all too eager to ride the waves of what in American political parlance are called "liberal" causes, so its absence from the fight for net neutrality may seem surprising. In reality, though, Apple's absence makes a lot of sense: Apple does not benefit from net neutrality.Apple has never openly supported net neutrality. Back in 2014, Apple was not among the 100 companies that signed the open letter in support of net neutrality, and it's not a member of the Internet Association, the industry group behind the Day of Action which lobbies for net neutrality. In addition, in 2009, Apple was caught red-handed blocking VOIP solutions on the iPhone; the company had a secret agreement with AT&T to that effect.Tim Cook didn't so much as tweet about the Day of Action.The only instance of Apple saying anything about net neutrality was in February 2017, in response to a question during a shareholders meeting.Finally, Tim Cook responded to a question about the Trump administration's position against Net Neutrality, which seemed to catch the executive off guard.While Apple has been vocal about a number of policies from the new president's office, Cook downplayed his response here: "We stay out of politics but stay in policy. If Net Neutrality became a top thing, we would definitely engage in it."Cook also added that Apple is not a major lobbying company in comparison to others, but it believes all content should be treated the same.This is a rather weak statement, especially since unless you've been living under a rock, net neutrality has been a "top thing" for several years now. The time to "engage in it" was 2014 and this year, and on both crucial occasions, Apple's utter silence is deafening. And in what some may find surprising, net neutrality is an entirely safe bet to support - both sides of the political isle in the US overwhelmingly support net neutrality. So why is Apple silent?We can only guess, of course, but with a bit of common sense it's not hard to formulate a likely answer. While Apple's iOS and Mac businesses are doing really well, the company is also trying to break into the streaming market for both music and video. Apple's foray into streaming music has really only just begun, and with just 3% (20 million people) of Apple's installed base subscribed to Apple Music, it's clear Apple has a lot of room to grow. However, it's also facing a lot of competition: without the benefit of coming preinstalled on the most popular smartphone in the world, Spotify managed to add 20 million subscribers last year alone, now sitting at a total of 50 million subscribers. Apple's foray into streaming video, meanwhile, faces far stronger competition from the likes of Netflix and Amazon Video.With this in mind, the answer as to why Apple remains silent on net neutrality should be easy to answer: if net neutrality rules were to be gutted, Apple could leap at the opportunity to pay carriers and ISPs to favour its streaming services over the competition. Apple could easily outspend a company like Spotify, making sure Apple Music users would get preferential treatment from carriers/ISPs over Spotify users. As mentioned above - Apple did it before with VOIP, so it's not like this would be an unprecedented or uncharacteristic move for the Cupertino giant.Unless Apple breaks its silence and finally openly, unequivocally, and determinedly supports net neutrality, the safe, capitalist, and historically informed assumption is that Apple does not want net neutrality, because it would limit their ability to buy preferential treatment from carriers and ISPs.And it would be nice if the technology press stopped tip-toeing around Apple's silence on this crucially important matter - but Apple's preferential treatment in the technology press is a matter for another time. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

Last night out of the blue, we received an email from AMD, sharing some of the specifications for the forthcoming Ryzen Threadripper CPUs to be announced today. Up until this point, we knew a few things - Threadripper would consist of two Zeppelin dies featuring AMD's latest Zen core and microarchitecture, and would essentially double up on the HEDT Ryzen launch. Double dies means double pretty much everything: Threadripper would support up to 16 cores, up to 32 MB of L3 cache, quad-channel memory support, and would require a new socket/motherboard platform called X399, sporting a massive socket with 4094-pins (and also marking an LGA socket for AMD). By virtue of being sixteen cores, AMD is seemingly carving a new consumer category above HEDT/High-End Desktop, which weâve coined the 'Super High-End Desktop', or SHED for short.AMD is listing the top of the line Threadripper 1950X for 999 dollars, which gives you 16 cores and 32 threads, with a base frequency of 3.4Ghz (and a turbo frequency of 4.0Ghz) at a TDP of 180W (nothing to sneeze at). These are two quite amazing processors, and later next year, the pricing should definitely come down a bit so it's a bit more affordable for regular computer use as well.Well done, AMD. Sure, we need to await the benchmarks for more information, but this is looking real good. I'm hoping this will finally start forcing developers - specifically of games - to start making more and better use of multicore.

From version to version, I always love to play around with the kernel. And it has always been a great lack in guides and documentation on how to build Mac OSX's kernel, XNU. For those of you that already have tried compiling XNU for Mac OSX 10.12 (Sierra), you probably noticed that earlier build guides like ssen's blog - Building xnu for OS X 10.11 El Capitan don't work anymore. However, many thanks to ssen to put in time to write a guide.The problem is that Apple introduced something named Circular dependency with the libdispatch library and the kernel headers. So the order of the build process just got really important.

It's time to announce the upcoming new "Ultimate-64" board!In order to sustain the love for the Commodore 64, with failing machines, power supplies and flaky old connectors, I proudly present a new main board for your beloved C64 case:What is it?! This board is a hardware implementation (FPGA) of the entire C64, and it includes the Ultimate-II+ as well. An ALL IN ONE solution!It will be produced in small batches, and the creator hopes to be able to sell it for around 200 dollars. That's a pretty great price to give a C64 a lease on life.

FCC chairman Ajit Pai is fond of saying that "the internet was not broken in 2015" when he argues for repeal of our nation's net neutrality rules. This is particularly funny to me, because in 2014 I literally wrote an article called "The internet is fucked".Why was it fucked? Because the free and open internet was in danger of becoming tightly controlled by giant telecom corporations that were already doing things like blocking apps and services from phones and excusing their own services from data caps. Because the lack of competition in the internet access market let these companies act like predatory monopolies. And because our government lacked the will or clarity to just say what everyone already knows: internet access is a utility.Most of these things are still true, even after the Obama-era FCC under Chairman Tom Wheeler reclassified internet access as a Title II telecommunications service and imposed strict net neutrality rules on wired and wireless internet providers. And most of these things will get even worse when Pai pushes through his plan to rescind Title II and those rules, despite widespread public outcry.Hey look, another case of corporations actively working to undermine society by bribing politicians with huge amounts of money that individuals would never (or only rarely) have access to. As long as politicians' power is derived not from the people, but from money, shit like this will continue to happen. Trying to stop Pai's obviously horrible and destructive anti-consumer plans is a noble goal, but these plans are only a symptom, not a cause. We're playing whack-a-mole, while they are playing Jenga.These corporate criminals and their political lapdogs will keep throwing money at the wall until it breaks - and they have more money than we have bricks and mortar.

One of the chief annoyances of Apple's closed ecosystem is the limited ability to move files to and from your device using iTunes. Utilities that open up file management have been available for ages, but generally cost money, so stingy people like me just make do with iTunes. To commemorate the iPhone 10 year anniversary, MacX is offering OSNews readers a free license to their MediaTrans tool (in exchange for your email address). It's good for moving files of various types, backup, and removing media DRM. If any OSNews readers can recommend other options for working around Apple's restrictions and managing files on their iOS devices, I'd love to read about them in the comments.

If you're still rocking a handset running Windows Phone 8.1, it is important to note that mainstream support for the operating system is ending tomorrow, as Microsoft previously announced. Prior to the availability of Windows 10 Mobile for select handsets, the last major update to Windows Phone 8.1 was Lumia Denim, which started rolling out way back in December 2014.A select number of handsets can get Windows 10 Mobile, but the vast majority of users (about 80%) are running Windows Phone 8.1.So, headlines that state Windows Phone died yesterday are clickbait - but only because Windows Phone died years ago.

Now this is a real treat - over the past few years, Christopher Masto has been building (and where possible, selling) a PDP-8 replica called the PiDP-8/I. As you may have guessed from the name, the core of the PiDP-8/I is a Raspberry Pi, complemented by a replica PDP-8 front panel and case.From a hardware perspective, the PiDP is just a frontpanel for a Raspberry PI. In the hardware section below, the technical details of the front panel are explained. In fact, the front panel could just as easily be driven by any microcontroller, it only lights the leds and scans the switch positions.From a software perspective, the PiDP is just a Raspberry Pi, running Raspbian, which automatically logs in to the SimH emulator. SimH is modified to drive the front panel - meaning it has instructions added to reflect the state of the PDP-8 CPU registers through the leds, and responds to the switch settings.The PiDP is fully open source, so you can download the schematics, design files, and software and build it yourself from scratch. You can also order a kit from Christopher Masto for $145, or pay an additional $170 for an assembled version (but isn't building half the fun?).He has a few great videos of the PiDP up on his YouTube channel, including a 90 minute build video and a tour and demo video.

The Multics CPU simulator created by Harry Reed and Charles Anthony is available for public download. A complete QuickStart installation package is available that provides software, compilers, system source, install scripts, and several initial projects (SysDaemon, SysAdmin, Daemon, etc.) and users.This is Multics, the complete multi-user operating system, running on a simulated Honeywell DPS8M processor. The simulator is available for Mac OS X, Linux, or Windows, both 32bit and 64bit versions, and also supports the Raspberry Pi.

Today, we're excited to announce that Canonical's Ubuntu Linux Distro is now available in the Windows Store and can be downloaded and installed on any Windows Insider build >= #16215!Eventually this will be available to all regular Windows 10 users.

Google operates a little-known program to harness the brain power of university researchers to help sway opinion and public policy, cultivating financial relationships with professors at campuses from Harvard University to the University of California, Berkeley.Over the past decade, Google has helped finance hundreds of research papers to defend against regulatory challenges of its market dominance, paying $5,000 to $400,000 for the work, The Wall Street Journal found.This is some next-level manipulation. I wasn't kidding when I said we, as a society, need to look at the amount of power we have let corporations gather up. This kind of influence isn't healthy for society.

This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48 hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM and that was less than half used. It has a fast SSD that was mostly idle. And yet, as I moved the mouse around it kept hitching - sometimes locking up for seconds at a time.So I did what I always do - I grabbed an ETW trace and analyzed it. The result was the discovery of a serious process-destruction performance bug in Windows 10.Great story.

A new SUNXI evbarm kernel has appeared recently in NetBSD -current with support for boards based on the Allwinner H3 system on a chip (SoC). The H3 SoC is a quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC designed primarily for set-top boxes, but has managed to find its way into many single-board computers (SBC). This is one of the first evbarm ports built from the ground up with device tree support, which helps us to use a single kernel config to support many different boards.

Valve's Alden Kroll was at Indigo 2017 to talk about Steam and the changes they're working on. The talk covered the business side of Steam as well as some specific features available for game makers. The company wanted to meet developers face to face, answer questions, and hear feedback and suggestions as well.The slides of the talk are available at the link (thanks to Valvetime.net), and interestingly enough, the slides states Valve is working on a "overall UI refresh & update" of the Steam client - which I applaud greatly. I hope it's more than just a new skin, and that they are actively going to address the performance issues and UI complexity - preferably by making the clients on the various platforms (Windows, Linux, macOS) feel like proper, native applications. In addition, one of the slides also shows that Steam is still growing, with 33 million daily users, 67 million monthly users, and 26 million new purchases since January 2016 (so 1.5 million per month). Those are healthy statistics.

PC Gamer has an article up about the failure of SteamOS, and it serves as a good anchor to talk about Valve in general."The fundamental reasons that Valve cares about SteamOS haven't gone away, and we continue our work to expand it," Valve said in a statement to PC Gamer. I had asked if SteamOS was still a priority, how many people were working on it, and if Windows 10 changed Valve's approach. "The launch of Steam Machines taught us a lot about what Steam customers value in hardware. Right now we're continuing to work on SteamOS as a product, with over 96 updates and 3,525 games released. We have many incentives for those making SteamOS titles and we see a bright future for SteamOS, especially in VR."The comment about VR is interesting, as the new tech is clearly Valve's present focus. If SteamOS can provide a better VR experience than Windows, and VR technology proves itself more popular in the future, perhaps the OS has a shot of resurging with a new round of 'SteamVR Machines'. But the success of SteamVR isn't a sure thing, either.The problem with Valve is that they are the technology company equivalent of a toddler - kind of cute and adorable (if they're not yours), but easily distracted, unfocused, and kind of living in their own fantasy world. Valve wanders from left to right, never committing to anything, just doing whatever it fancies. That would be completely fine if it wasn't for the fact that it strings partners and consumers along for the ride - only to jump off midway, leaving the ride to slowly come to a grinding halt in the middle of nowhere.While the company devoted time and money to SteamOS and SteamVR, it let its most important piece of software - the Steam client - languish, to the point where it's now probably the most unusable piece of software on any Windows PC. It's slow, ugly, bloated, confusing, overly complex verging on the unusable, and in general just frustrating and cumbersome to use. In fact - and some people might balk at this - but EA's Origin client has improved so much over the years, that it's much nicer, cleaner, and easier to use now than the Steam client ever was. I will fight you on this.And, of course, they left us at one of the biggest cliffhangers in gaming, and we have no Half-life 3. No Portal 3. No Left 4 Dead 3. No new IP. Nothing. We cry foul at EA, Ubisoft, and Bethesda for being unoriginal, but meanwhile, continue to treat Valve like the greatest gaming company in history, even though they haven't released a new game and haven't introduced a new IP in a long, long time.It's high time Valve demonstrates that it actually cares about its customers, by improving Steam or releasing games we actually want - or in general just by showing some damn follow-through for once, or at least being open about plans for the future so we know what we can expect before we plonk down a bunch of cash for the next shiny they're peddling.As it stands now, Valve isn't showing any signs that it cares about the fans of its games, and as the competition catches up to and races past Steam in user experience, the resentment grows ever deeper. Yes, the headline is harsh, but I can't find any sign that it's not true.Sure, Steam is the giant of PC gaming today - but no giant remains standing forever. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

time_t now uses 64-bit on 64-bit systems. This fixes the year 2038 bug for 64-bit Haiku, so we can continue to run it after 2038. This breaks the ABI, so all the 64bit packages were rebuilt.As Michel points out in the comments, this means Haiku'll be good until 4 December 292277026596, about in time for the beta release.

Since launching the Virtual Console in 2006, Nintendo has officially re-released dozens of Super NES games for play on modern consoles. As that emulated library has grown, though, many have noted an important gap: Nintendo hasn't re-released any SNES games that made use of the 3D-focused Super FX chip (or the improved Super FX2 follow-up).[...]That streak of Super FX disrespect will finally end in September when Yoshi's Island and Star Fox will show up on the Super NES Classic Edition. They'll be joined by the previously unreleased, Super FX2-powered Star Fox 2, which was completed in the mid-'90s but cancelled to avoid the shadow of more powerful 3D games on the likes of PlayStation and Nintendo 64.While it's nice to see the Super FX getting some official attention, the question remains: what took so long? Why has Nintendo ignored the Super FX corner of its history all these years?It turns out that this story is a lot more intricate - and mysterious - than I thought. Since I've been using snes9x for ages to play SNES games, it never dawned on me that Nintendo's own later consoles did not get any SuperFX-powered games.

The people who make enhanced editions of old role-playing games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment want to do the same thing for Icewind Dale II. There's just one problem: nobody knows where to find the code.It's hard to believe that things like this happen - Icewind Dale II was released about 15 years ago, developed and published by big, popular companies. You'd think the source code would be properly protected and stored.

OneDrive users around the world have been upset to discover that with its latest update, Microsoft's cloud file syncing and storage system no longer works with anything other than disks formatted with the NTFS file system. Both older file systems, such as FAT32 and exFAT, and newer ones, such as ReFS, will now provoke an error message when OneDrive starts up.While it's understandable that FAT-based filesystems are left behind - FAT needs to die a quick but horrible death - it seems weird that Microsoft's new ReFS isn't supported.

Back before MiNT became officially supported by Atari Corp, there were a few attempts at adding multitasking on the Atari ST. One of them was Geneva, a multitasking environment that was very light on resources and worked on a standard ST.NeoDesk is a desktop replacement that works well with Geneva.Quite a long time ago there were some questions posed to the writer of these great software packages, Dan Wilga, in an attempt to see if the source could be opened. After a successful petition caught the attention of Wilga, he explained he still had his Atari TT030 sitting around, with the source code for a version that was never released.Sadly, one of the hard drives with some of the required code to build everything was damaged, and it was too expensive to have the drive fixed. Thanks to a member of the Atari community, the drive has been fixed, and this should mean we're going to see open source releases of Geneva and NeoDesk soon. New builds are being tested, and they will be released soon - followed by the source code.This is amazing news, and a fantastic example of software conservation. Thanks to OSNews reader Leech for pointing this story out and writing the first two paragraphs of this story so I had an idea of what was going on!

Fedora Workstation comes with two package managers by default: DNF and PackageKit. DNF has all the latest features and the best support, but PackageKit is put front and center in GNOME Software, KDE Plasma Discover, and as of Fedora 26 also in Cockpitâs new Software Update panel.You may be better off sticking with the DNF package manager in the command line; even though PackageKit is the choice of all the graphical package managers. Here is some of the advantages DNF still gives you over PackageKit based applications.

"We must reinstate the reparability of all products put on the market," said Parliament's rapporteur Pascal Durand MEP: "We have to make sure that batteries are no longer glued into a product, but are screwed in so that we do not have to throw away a phone when the battery breaks down. We need to make sure that consumers are aware of how long the products last and how they can be repaired".Parliament wants to promote a longer product lifespan, in particular by tackling programmed obsolescence for tangible goods and for software.This is a very noble goal, but I am afraid that in many product segments, this ship has sailed. Does anybody honestly expect, for instance, smartphone makers to go back to screwed cases and removable batteries? I would love if they did, but I just don't see it happening.

Intel's latest 10-core, high-end desktop (HEDT) chip - the Core i9-7900X - costs £900/$1000. That's £500/$500 less than its predecessor, the i7-6950X. In previous years, such cost-cutting would have been regarded as generous. You might, at a stretch, even call it good value. But that was at a time when Intel's monopoly on the CPU market was as its strongest, before a resurgent AMD lay waste to the idea that a chip with more than four cores be reserved for those with the fattest wallets.[...]AMD's Ryzen is far from perfect. But when you can buy eight cores that serve even the heaviest of multitaskers and content creators for well under half the price of an Intel HEDT chip, i9 and X299 are a hard sell (except, perhaps, to fussy gamers that demand a no-compromises system).The question is: Are you willing to pay a premium for the best performing silicon on the market? Or is Ryzen, gaming foibles and all, good enough?I've said this countless times, but I want to keep bringing this one home: this is what competition does. It lowers prices, improves performance, and makes Intel looks like a stumbling fool. And what better day to celebrate the benefits of competition than today?Cheers, America. Party safe!

Home of the world's biggest collection of classic text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from DOS-era IBM PCs and compatibles A great collection of classic DOS fonts.

Home of the world's biggest collection of classic text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from DOS-era IBM PCs and compatibles A great collection of classic DOS fonts.

AMD has reportedly gained 10.4 percentage points of CPU market share in the second quarter of 2017. This makes it the largest x86 CPU market share gain in the history of the Sunnyvale, California based chip maker against its much larger rival Intel.The data is courtesy of PassMark's quarterly market share report, which is based on the thousands of submissions that go through the database in any given quarter. It's important to note that because PassMark's market share data is based on benchmark submissions it counts actual systems in use, rather than systems sold. It also does not include consoles or any computer systems running operating systems other than Windows.With AMD's Ryzen processors being the new hotness right now, I'd indeed expect benchmarking sites to get more Ryzen submissions, even if it's not a 10% market share swing in favour of AMD. That being said, it's clear that AMD is having an impact right now, and as consumers, we should welcome this.I do dislike the fact that the chart only has two lines to show. We'd be better off with more than just two x86 chip makers, but alas.

In light of yesterday's post, here's a short look at the early days of Ethernet.Nowadays, we take Ethernet for granted. We plug a cable jack into the wall or a switch and we get the network. What's to think about?It didn't start that way. In the 1960s and 1970s, networks were ad hoc hodgepodges of technologies with little rhyme and less reason. But then Robert "Bob" Metcalfe was asked to create a local-area network (LAN) for Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). His creation, Ethernet, changed everything.On a related note, in one of the recent Xerox Alto restoration videos, two of the people who worked on the invention of Ethernet, Dave Boggs and Ron Crane, helped out fixing the Alto Ethernet card - carrying some very old-fashioned Ethernet equipment and telling some great stories from the early '70s.Sadly, Ron Crane passed away 19 June.

Ars has started a series on the advent of the IBM PC, and today they published part one.The machine that would become known as the real IBM PC begins, of all places, at Atari. Apparently feeling their oats in the wake of the Atari VCS' sudden Space Invaders-driven explosion in popularity and the release of its own first PCs, the Atari 400 and 800, they made a proposal to IBM's chairman Frank Cary in July of 1980: if IBM wished to have a PC of its own, Atari would deign to build it for them.Fascinating history of the most influential computing platform in history, a statement that will surely ruffle a lot of feathers. The IBM PC compatible put a computer on every desk and in every home, and managed to convince hundreds of millions of people of the need of a computer - no small feat in a world where a computer was anything but a normal household item. In turn, this widespread adoption of the IBM PC compatible platform paved the way for the internet to become a success.With yesterday's ten year anniversary of the original iPhone going on sale, a number of people understandably went for the hyperbole, such as proclaiming the iPhone the most important computer in history, or, and I wish I was making this up, claiming the development of the iPhone was more important to the world than the work at Xerox PARC - and since this was apparently a competition, John Gruber decided to exaggerate the claim even more.There's no denying the iPhone has had a huge impact on the world, and that the engineers at Apple deserve all the credit and praise they're getting for delivering an amazing product that created a whole new category overnight. However, there is a distinct difference between what the iPhone achieved, and what the people at Xerox PARC did, or what IBM and Microsoft did.The men and women at PARC literally invented and implemented the graphical user interface, bitmap graphics, Ethernet, laser printing, object-oriented programming, the concept of MVC, the personal computer (networked together!), and so much more - and all this in an era when computers were gigantic mainframes and home computing didn't exist.As for the IBM PC compatible and Wintel - while nowhere near the level of PARC, it did have a profound and huge impact on the world that in my view is far greater than that of the iPhone. People always scoff at IBM and Microsoft when it comes to PCs and DOS/Windows, but they did put a computer on every desk and in every home, at affordable prices, on a relatively open and compatible platform (especially compared to what came before). From the most overpaid CEO down to the most underpaid dock worker - everybody could eventually afford a PC, paving the way for the internet to become as popular and ubiquitous as it is.The iPhone is a hugely important milestone and did indeed have a huge impact on the world - but developing and marketing an amazing and one-of-a-kind smartphone in a world where computing was ubiquitous, where everybody had a mobile phone, and where PDAs existed, is nowhere near the level of extraordinary vision and starting-with-literally-nothing that the people at PARC had, and certainly not as impactful as the rise of the IBM PC compatible and Wintel.It's fine to be celebratory on the iPhone's birthday - Apple and its engineers deserve it - but let's keep at least one foot planted in reality. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

This morning AMD is introducing their Ryzen PRO processors for business and commercial desktop PCs. The new lineup of CPUs includes the Ryzen 3 PRO, Ryzen 5 PRO and Ryzen 7 PRO families with four, six, or eight cores running at various frequencies. A superset to the standard Ryzen chips, the PRO chips have the same feature set as other Ryzen devices, but also offer enhanced security, 24 months availability, a longer warranty and promise to feature better chip quality.I guess it makes sense from a marketing perspective, but I'm not a fan of segmentation like this - it just makes an already complicated market even more complicated.

Matt Gemmell, iPad-only user:I occasionally see the phrase "laptop replacement" regarding the iPad, despite the bizarreness of both the concept and the generalisation. Intelligent people like journalists and tech pundits use it, seemingly without humorous intent, and it puzzles me.There's no such thing as a laptop replacement, and if there were, the iPad isn't meant to be one.Once you let go of the trope about an iPad replacing a laptop, take a step back, and see it as a device that is great for some but not for all, this whole discussion becomes irrelevant in a heartbeat. Just because iOS isn't the same as macOS or just because iOS is not a good fit for your general purpose computing needs does not mean that applies to everyone.While you might say iOS can't do overlapping windows and window management!, somebody who prefers the iPad for their computer needs would say why would I want to manually fiddle with all these annoying overlapping windows?For me personally, I feel like the ideal mobile general purpose computer lies somewhere halfway between the Surface Pro and the iPad Pro - which is exactly why I ordered a brand new iPad Pro 12.9" today, so that I can compare it to my Surface Pro 4 and see where, exactly, that halfway point lies and which of these two major platforms is closest to it.These are, actually, quite exciting - although not necessarily positive, see e.g. the lack of control we have over these devices - times in the world of general purpose computing.

Last week I wrote a Mandelbrot set program for the Xerox Alto, which took an hour to generate the fractal. The point of this project was to learn how to use the Alto's bitmapped display, not make the fastest Mandelbrot set, so I wasn't concerned that this 1970s computer took so long to run. Even so, readers had detailed suggestions form performance improvements, so I figured I should test out these ideas. The results were much better than I expected, dropping the execution time from 1 hour to 9 minutes.Articles like this are very satisfying to post, because we can all agree this is just plain awesome, no ifs or buts.

There is something horrible about this little video. Why do the inhabitants of this suburban home require a recipe for pasta from a jar? Why can't they turn the lights down using their hands? If the ad were an episode of "Black Mirror", they would be clones living in a laboratory, attempting to follow the patterns of an outside world they've never seen. And yet the ad is not fantastical but descriptive. It's unsettling because it's an accurate portrayal of our new mail-order way of life, which Amazon has spent the past twenty-two years creating.Eventually, governments all over the world will have to ask themselves the question: how big and powerful will we let corporations become? The more powerful they get, and the bigger and bigger the role of money in Washington DC and Brussels, the more I believe we have already reached the point where it's time to start breaking up some of the most powerful corporations - like the oil giants, like Apple, like Google, like Amazon, and so on.These companies play such a huge role in the core foundations and functioning of our societies, that we have to start taking steps to break them up. We've done it before, and we need to start thinking about doing it again.Corporations exist to serve society - not the other way around. If, due to their sheer size and power, they become a liability, they have outlived their usefulness.

The European Commission has fined Google â¬2.42 billion for breaching EU antitrust rules. Google has abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison shopping service.The company must now end the conduct within 90 days or face penalty payments of up to 5% of the average daily worldwide turnover of Alphabet, Google's parent company.The two core offences as noted by the European Comission are as follows:From 2008, Google began to implement in European markets a fundamental change in strategy to push its comparison shopping service. This strategy relied on Google's dominance in general internet search, instead of competition on the merits in comparison shopping markets:Google has systematically given prominent placement to its own comparison shopping service: when a consumer enters a query into the Google search engine in relation to which Google's comparison shopping service wants to show results, these are displayed at or near the top of the search results.Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google's search results on the basis of Google's generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions.As a result, Google's comparison shopping service is much more visible to consumers in Google's search results, whilst rival comparison shopping services are much less visible.Much like Apple's and Ireland's illegal tax deal, fines like this can be easily avoided: respect the laws regarding doing business in the EU. I don't expect the current (or the previous, for that matter) US administration to keep these incredibly powerful tech giants in check, so I guess it's up to the EU.

Cyrus Farivar, for Ars:An architecture blogger has temporarily disabled her website, McMansionHell.com, after receiving a demand letter from Zillow and posting it on Twitter.On Monday, Zillow threatened to sue Kate Wagner, saying that that she was violating its terms of use, copyright law, and possibly the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act because she took images from the company's website without permission. However, on each of her posts, she acknowledged that the images came from Zillow and were posted under the fair use doctrine, as she was providing (often humorous) commentary on various architectural styles. Her website was featured on the design podcast 99% Invisible in October 2016.Confusingly, Zillow does not even own the images in question. Instead, Zillow licenses them from the rights holders. As such, it remains unclear why the company would have standing to bring a lawsuit against Wagner.Her website is incredibly entertaining, and you'd think such use of photos falls squarely under fair use. It sucks that she had to shutdown her website, and I'm hoping Zillow loses this case hard.

Apple today released the first public beta of iOS 11 to its public beta testing group, allowing non-developers to download and test the update ahead of its fall release. iOS 11 has been available for developers since June 5, and the first public beta corresponds with the second developer beta.iOS 11 is a huge step forward for iPads as a general purpose computing device, but there are still steps to be taken - changing default applications is a big one, as is mouse support so you don't have to touch the screen for every little thing you need to do. And, of course: Xcode for iOS, which seems like an inevitability at this point.Somewhere halfway between the Surface Pro and the iPad Pro lies the ideal mobile computer. Apple made a huge stride towards that perfect middle ground with iOS 11.Update: The Verge has a good overview of what's new in iOS .

Nintendo has revealed details for the SNES Classic. The standalone mini console will feature 21 games, including Super Mario World, Earthbound, Super Mario Kart, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. But the most surprising inclusion is Star Fox 2, the unreleased sequel to the original Star Fox for SNES.No Chrono Trigger.Why would I buy a SNES if I can't play the best game ever made on it? This is a baffling, dealbreaking omission.

Seeing "Windows 10 source code leaked!" headlines or tweets? Not so fast - while there was a leak, it wasn't anything particularly interesting. The only truly interesting bit is this, as explained by Ars' Peter Bright:The leak is also described as containing a source code package named the "Shared Source Kit." This is a package of source code for things like the USB, storage, and Wi-Fi stacks, and the Plug-and-Play system. It isn't the core operating system code (part of which leaked in 2004) but rather contains those parts of the driver stack that third parties have to interact most intimately with.Microsoft routinely gives access to the source code of a wide variety of parts of Windows to academic institutions, certain enterprise customers, and, of course, hardware makers - which is what the above mentioned source code package refers to. While interesting, it seems unlikely this leak is of any significance to anyone.

Google is stopping one of the most controversial advertising formats: ads inside Gmail that scan users' email contents. The decision didn't come from Google's ad team, but from its cloud unit, which is angling to sign up more corporate customers.Alphabet Inc.'s Google Cloud sells a package of office software, called G Suite, that competes with market leader Microsoft Corp. Paying Gmail users never received the email-scanning ads like the free version of the program, but some business customers were confused by the distinction and its privacy implications, said Diane Greene, Google's senior vice president of cloud. "What we're going to do is make it unambiguous," she said.Good move, and in the current climate, Google really couldn't continue this practice - automated algorithms or no.

Jolla's CEO Sami Pienimäki:We have positive progress and major future business potential with Sailfish openings e.g. in China and Russia. While these projects are big and take time, they're developing steadily and we expect them to grow into sizable businesses for us overtime. These two are now our key customers but the projects are in early phase and our revenues are tight. At the same time realizing this opportunity requires significant R&D investments from our licensing customers and Jolla.Meanwhile, as Russia and China are progressing, we also have good traction with other new potential licensing customers in different regions. Good discussions are ongoing, and weâre waiting eagerly to get to share those with you.And yes, they're still going to at some point maybe possibly start the refunding process for the tablet. My Jolla Tablet spent about 5 minutes outside of the box, since there's not much you can actually do with it.

The Computer History Museum organised an interview with Scott Forstall, led by John Markoff. Forstall led the iPhone operating system (now iOS) team for the iPhone and the iPad from their inception, and was a close friend and confidant of Steve Jobs. He was ousted by Tim Cook, supposedly because Forstall was a challenger to Cook's position and power inside the company. On top of that, much like Steve Jobs, Forstall supposedly wasn't the easiest person to get along with, and Cook wanted a more harmonious Apple.Ever since his departure from Apple, Forstall has been silent. This interview is the first time he's opened up about his long, long tenure at first NeXT (where he was hired on the spot by Steve Jobs himself) and then Apple, and quite honestly, I didn't really know what to expect.It turns out that if you close your eyes while listening to Forstall speak, it's almost like you're hearing Steve Jobs. The man is charming, well-spoken, has a thoughtful or funny reply to every question, sprinkles it with a touching or heartwarming story or anecdote - all the while showing a deep understanding of what made Apple's products great without having to resort to technical details or PR-approved talking points.As the interview ended and I pondered the whole thing, it just became so very clear why Cook would want to get rid of Forstall as quickly as he could. Can you imagine a boring bean counter like Cook sharing the stage with a man who so closely resembles and feels like Steve Jobs?It might very well be the case that a Jobs-like figure like Forstall would not have yielded the kinds of immense financial success Apple has enjoyed under Cook, but I can't help but shake the feeling that an Apple with Forstall at the helm - or even just an Apple with Forstall, period - would be a more exciting, a more innovative, a more boundary-pushing Apple. We'll most likely never know.Then again... It wouldn't be the first time someone gets ousted from Apple, only to return when the time is right. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

The Trump administration has rolled out a new questionnaire for U.S. visa applicants worldwide that asks for social media handles for the last five years and biographical information going back 15 years.[...]Under the new procedures, consular officials can request all prior passport numbers, five years' worth of social media handles, email addresses and phone numbers and 15 years of biographical information including addresses, employment and travel history.[...]While the new questions are voluntary, the form says failure to provide the information may delay or prevent the processing of an individual visa application.This surely won't affect the countless incredibly smart scientists and engineers wanting to work in the US and contribute to the US economy.

Atari CEO Fred Chesnais told GamesBeat in an exclusive interview that his fabled video game company is working on a new game console.In doing so, the New York company might be cashing in on the popularity of retro games and Nintendoâs NES Classic Edition, which turned out to be surprisingly popular for providing a method to easily play old games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda in HD on a TV.[...]Chesnais declined to describe a lot of details about the console. But he said it is based on PC technology. He said Atari is still working on the design and will reveal it at a later date.It seems extremely unlikely that this will be a console in the Xbox, Playstation, or Switch sense, but if it's based on PC technology, it won't be some rebranded Android tablet either. I wasn't an Atari kid when I was young - PC and Nintendo all the way - so I have no sense of nostalgia for the company, but I'm still intrigued.

Now that Ubuntu phones and tablets are gone, I would like to offer my thoughts on why I personally think the project failed and what one may learn from it.To recapitulate my involvement in the project: I had been using Ubuntu Touch on a Nexus 7 on an on-and-off-basis between its announcement in 2013 and December 2014, started working on Click apps in December 2014, started writing the 15-part âHacking Ubuntu Touchâ blog post series about system internals in January 2015, became an Ubuntu Phone Insider, got a Meizu MX4 from Canonical, organized and sponsored the UbuContest app development contest, worked on bug reports and apps until about April 2016, and then sold off/converted all my remaining devices in mid-2016. So I think I can offer some thoughts about the project, its challenges and where we could have done better.Excellent and detailed explanation of why Ubuntu Phone failed.

In what is surely the greatest bit of irony in the tech industry this week, a recording of an internal Apple briefing on countering leaking has leaked. Tons of interesting insight in the article covering the recording, but this bit jumped out at me, because I never put two and two together in this regard:Apple's Chinese workers have plenty of incentive to leak or smuggle parts. "A lot, like 99.9 percent, of these folks are good people who are coming to a place that has a job, they're gonna make money, and they're gonna go back and start a business in their province or they're gonna do something else with it, support their family," Rice says. "But there's a whole slew of folks that can be tempted because what happens if I offer you, say, three months' salary?' In some cases we've seen up to a year's worth of salary being rewarded for stealing product out of the factory." Apple workers on the production line make approximately $350 a month, not including overtime, according to a 2016 report from China Labor Watch.It never dawned on me that leaks could be the result of underpaid factory workers.

The big news out of AMD was the launch of Zen, the new high-performance core that is designed to underpin the product roadmap for the next few generations of products. To much fanfare, AMD launched consumer level parts based on Zen, called Ryzen, earlier this year. There was a lot of discussion in the consumer space about these parts and the competitiveness, and despite the column inches dedicated to it, Ryzen wasn't designed to be the big story this year. That was left to their server generation of products, which are designed to take a sizeable market share and reinvigorate AMD's bottom line on the finance sheet. A few weeks ago AMD announced the naming of the new line of enterprise-class processors, called EPYC, and today marks the official launch with configurations up to 32 cores and 64 threads per processor. We also got an insight into several features of the design, including the AMD Infinity Fabric.For the past few years, the processor market was boring and dominated by Intel.This is the year everything changes.

The European parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) has put forward a proposal that would amend the EU's charter of fundamental rights to extend privacy rights to the digital realm and prevent governments of EU Member States from backdooring end-to-end encrypted services."This Regulation aims at ensuring an effective and equal protection of end-users when using functionally equivalent services, so as to ensure the protection of confidentiality, irrespective of the technological medium chosen," they write in the draft eprivacy proposal."The protection of confidentiality of communications is also an essential condition for the respect of other related fundamental rights and freedoms, such as the protection of freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and freedom of expression and information."On encryption the committee amends an earlier text, proposed by the EU's executive body, the European Commission, to state: "[W]hen encryption of electronic communications data is used, decryption, reverse engineering or monitoring of such communications shall be prohibited. Member States shall not impose any obligations on electronic communications service providers that would result in the weakening of the security and encryption of their networks and services."It's only a committee proposal for now that will need approval from the European Parliament, but at least it's something. It also happens to fly in the face of European leaders, who are talking of weakening encryption or banning it outright.This proposal would obviously be the right thing to do, but with so many leaders around the world exploiting the wholly irrational fear of terrorism (you're much more likely to die sitting on the couch than at the hands of terrorists here in Europe) among the media-primed public and people falling for that nonsense hook, line, and sinker (see Brexit, Trump, and extreme right parties in The Netherlands and France), this proposal will most likely not make it.

In Stretch, the default MySQL variant is now MariaDB. The replacement of packages for MySQL 5.5 or 5.6 by the MariaDB 10.1 variant will happen automatically upon upgrade.Firefox and Thunderbird return to Debian with the release of Stretch, and replace their debranded versions Iceweasel and Icedove, which were present in the archive for more than 10 years.In addition, Debian GNU/Hurd also has a new release.