OSnews

Opera Neon, released in January, is an experimental browser that envisions the future of web browsers, similar to the way concept cars predict the future of automobiles. One of its novelties is the ability to seamlessly hop between discovering new content and chatting with friends, or even share online discoveries while browsing.Inspired by Neon, we decided to bring those seamless transitions between chat and discoveries to the Opera browser. The result is Opera Reborn, complete with integrated popular messengers so you can keep chatting with friends without skipping a beat.It's great to see Opera back to making interesting browsers, even if the features specified aren't exactly my thing.

Haiku has been accepted into Google Summer of Code again this year, and over the past few days the project has detailed some of the areas developers will be focusing on. For instance, Vivek will be working to bring 3D hardware acceleration to Haiku:The Mesa renderer in Haiku presently ventures into software rendering. Haiku uses software for rendering frame buffers and then writes them to the graphics hardware. The goal of my project is to port Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) Driver for i915, from the Linux kernel to Haiku with the help of DragonflyBSD's Linux Compatibility layer, so that those drivers can be later extended to add OpenGL support (Mesa3D) for hardware accelerated 3D rendering.Other projects include bringing Harfbuzz support to Haiku, building a Haiku preferences pane (blasphemy to an old BeOS user such as myself, but entirely a 100% good idea for normal people), developing a calendar application, and adding Btrfs write support.

Every year, the internet gets a little less fair. The corporations that run it get a little bigger, their power grows more concentrated, and a bit of their idealism gives way to ruthless pragmatism.And if Ajit Pai, the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, gets his way, the hegemons are likely to grow only larger and more powerful.This column is nominally about network neutrality, the often sleep-inducing debate about the rules that broadband companies like Comcast and AT&T must follow when managing their networks. But really, this is a story about ballooning corporate power.John Oliver has a great video about the fight for net neutrality in the United States, and set up a website that makes it easy to send comments to the FCC to compel them to maintain net neutrality.

Micah Singleton:The past few years haven't been great for the luxury watch market. Economic downturns, currency devaluations, and the development of the smartwatch - once poised to be the next major tech sector following the smartphone and tablet - helped usher in two years of declines in sales and profits for the Swiss watch industry. The common narrative was that the watch industry was being killed by smartwatches and was ultimately doomed. But much like the introduction of quartz watches in the '70s, which nearly decimated the luxury watch market, Switzerland rebounded and is now growing once again.It was kind of cute to see 20-something Apple bloggers predict the end of mechanical watches because of Apple's wrist calculator.

The arguments are well-worn, and we've been hearing them ever since Apple opened the App Store for the iPhone. Windows 10 S blocks the execution of any program that wasn't downloaded from the Windows Store. Arbitrary downloaded apps, or even apps with physical install media, are forbidden, a move that on the one hand prevents running malware but on the other blocks the use of most Windows software. Windows Store apps include both tightly sandboxed apps, built using the Universal Windows Platform, and lightly restricted Win32 apps that have been packaged for the Store using the Desktop App converter, formerly known as Project Centennial.This positions Microsoft as a gatekeeper - although its criteria for entry within the store is for the most part not stringent, it does reserve the right to remove software that it deems undesirable - and means that the vast majority of extant Windows software can't be used. This means that PC mainstays, from Adobe Photoshop to Valve's Steam, can't be used on Windows 10 S. It also means that Windows 10 S systems can't be used to develop new Windows software. Should you want to run this kind of software, you'll need to upgrade to the full Windows 10 Pro for $50.Aside from the obvious and entirely valid moral arguments against locked-down computers, there's also a huge psychological one specific to Windows 10 S: it's taking something away that we used to have. Comparisons to iOS or Android are, therefore, off.I'm not a fan of locked-down, application store-only devices, because the companies patrolling these stores don't just do it for security and quality reasons, but also for anti-competitive and puritan reasons. They will block perceived competitive threats, and since they're American companies, they will throw gigantic fits over nudity while allowing gratuitous violence like it's no big deal. These application and digital content stores export (to us) outdated American ideas about sex and nudity and impose them upon their users.I know why Microsoft is hiding the switch behind a $50 upgrade to Windows 10 Pro - to discourage people from actually upgrading, therefore trapping more people into the Windows Store - but like with Android, this switch should be standard and free to flick back and forth at will.

Ars Technica has an article with screenshots about a new development in Fuchsia, Google's research (maybe?) operating system. The project has a very basic and barebones graphical user interface now.The home screen is a giant vertically scrolling list. In the center you'll see a (placeholder) profile picture, the date, a city name, and a battery icon. Above the are "Story" cards - basically Recent Apps - and below it is a scrolling list of suggestions, sort of like a Google Now placeholder. Leave the main screen and you'll see a Fuchsia "home" button pop up on the bottom of the screen, which is just a single white circle.The GUI is called Armadillo, and Hotfixit.net has instructions on how to build it, and a video of it in action.Google still hasn't said anything about Fuchsia's purpose or intended goal, but Travis Geiselbrecht did state in IRC that it isn't a toy, and it isn't a 20% project. At this point, the safest bet is to just call it a research operating system, but of course, it's exciting to imagine this brand new open source operating system having a bigger role to play.

Back when this machine was just a crowdfunding project, we got a few submissions about it. Since we generally do not link to crowdfunding projects before they're, you know, actually available products (for obvious reasons), I never did anything with them. Now, though, the GPD Pocket is out and about, and it seems to be a pretty amazing tiny laptop we really have to talk about, because it's adorable and remarkably capable.It's an all-aluminium Windows 10/Linux laptop with a 7" 1920x1200 IPS display with 323 ppi, the top-of-the-line Intel Atom x7-Z8750 1.6Ghz quad-core processor, 8GB RAM, Intel HD Graphics 405, and a 128GB SSD. It has a chicklet-style keyboard, a little nub mouse pointer, and can be ordered with either Linux or Windows. It has decent battery life too - they claim 12 hours. According to reviews, it seems to be ticking all the right boxes, making it an actually decent product to buy. IT's $469 on IndieGoGo right now, and the retail price will be $599.I've always wanted such a tiny laptop, but most of the time they were ugly plastic pieces of garbage that barely got by. This seems to be the first one that isn't actually a bad product (save for the terrible product descriptions on their website), and I'm definitely intrigued. Is there a market for machines like this?

Ars Technica's Kyle Orland:In the nearly 18 months since a CD-ROM-based "Nintendo PlayStation" prototype was first found in an estate sale, emulator makers and homebrew programmers have created a facsimile of what CD-based games would look like on an SNES. Efforts by hacker Ben Heck to get that kind of software actually working on the one-of-a-kind hardware, though, had been stymied by problems getting the CD-ROM drive to talk to the system.Those problems are now a thing of the past.In a newly posted video, Heck lays out how the system's CD-ROM drive suddenly started sending valid data to the system literally overnight. "I was working on this yesterday and the CD-ROM wasn't even detecting the disc," Heck says in the video. "I came in this morning and jiggled the cables around and got ready to work on it some more, and all of a sudden it works... did a magic elf come in overnight?"I'm a sucker for exotic game hardware.

Long before the iPhone or even the Mac, Apple was a handful of people working in an industry that was only just beginning to take the idea of personal computing seriously. In the earliest days of those early days, Steves Wozniak and Jobs made their first device together: the Apple I. Few of these were sold, and fewer still survive - but the Living Computers museum in Seattle managed to get three. And one of them was Jobs' personal machine.If I ever go to the US again, visiting some of the great computer museums is definitely high on the list. I'd love to actually see an Apple I - especially Steve Jobs' - in real life.

Last month, Intel's new naming scheme for its Xeon processors leaked. Instead of E3, E5, and E7 branding, the chips would be given metallic names, from Bronze at the bottom-end through Silver and Gold to Platinum at the top. Today, the company made this new branding official as part of a larger shake-up of its Xeon platform.The next generation of Xeons, due to arrive this summer, will make up what Intel calls the "Xeon Scalable Processor Family." This explains the change in core naming that is accompanying the new branding; the SP suffix is replacing the E, EP, and EX suffixes used in previous-generation Xeons.

No company has done as much damage to the perceived value of software, and the sustainability of being an independent developer, as Apple.Not that other companies wouldn't have done the same thing - they would have. It's just that Apple was the successful one.It's resolutely the fault of us as consumers, and it's actively encouraged by the App Store.

From Microsoft's FAQ about Windows 10 S:Yes, Microsoft Edge is the default web browser on Microsoft 10 S. You are able to download another browser that might be available from the Windows Store, but Microsoft Edge will remain the default if, for example, you open an .htm file. Additionally, the default search provider in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer cannot be changed.Braindead. Edge is buggy and messy, Bing is garbage. Not being able to change default applications is one of the many reasons using iOS is so grating and cumbersome, and Microsoft copying that behaviour is really, really dumb.

Microsoft's education press event just wrapped up, and two announcements stood out. First and foremost, the company unveiled Windows 10 S. Windows 10 S is exactly the same as regular Windows 10, except in that it's locked to applications available in the Windows Store. Note that this doesn't mean it can't run Win32 applications; it runs Win32 applications, but only those available in the Windows Store. Users can upgrade Windows 10 S to Windows 10 Pro for 50 dollars to allow the use of non-Windows Store applications.The second announcement that stood out was a new hardware device: the Surface Laptop. Aimed straight at college/university students currently probably buying MacBooks, the Surface Laptop is a downright beautiful machine with all the current specifications we've come to expect from a modern laptop, such as Core i5 and i7 processors, SSD storage, a 2250x1500 13.5" display, and a battery life of 14.5 hours. Starting price will be $999. Americans can order today, and it will ship 15 June.It's available in four colours, and one of those colours is burgundy, so everything else is invalid and a waste of time, because the burgundy model is the only model that counts. I really don't want to go back to a laptop with a fixed keyboard, but at the same time, burgundy. All your arguments and facts and reasoning and fake news are irrelevant now.In all seriousness, this looks like a great laptop, aimed directly at Apple's popularity among college students. As usual, there's no word on when this thing comes to The Netherlands (nobody cares about us), but once it does, I'm going to have a seriously hard time not buying a specced-out burgundy model.

However, the Z4 will also run Tizen 3.0, and as the developer's notes for the latest version of the OS show, the software is getting some pretty interesting new features. It now supports Khronosâ new graphics API Vulkan, which should provide a boost to mobile gaming; and the open-source web runtime Crosswalk, which should make for a smoother internet-browsing experience. Version 3.0 also adds support for 64-bit Intel and ARM CPUs; multiple users on a single device (take that iOS); and voice control via S Voice. Of course, not all of these features will be available on the Z4, but the handset will be the first to feel at least some of these benefits (Vulkan being the big one).I want one of these Z phones, but they are pretty much impossible to come by.

One of those fans, a programmer from Kansas with an offbeat sense of humor and an unmissable skillset, released a PC emulator for the NES - a reverse-engineered software version of the hardware platform. Called "NESticle", its Windows icon was, quite literally and indelicately, a pair of testicles.NESticle, nonetheless, did something amazing: It allowed people to play old Nintendo games on cheap computers made by Packard Bell and other firms, and did so while introducing a number of fundamental new ways to appreciate those games. Divorced from Nintendo's famously draconian licensing strategy, it introduced new ways of thinking about well-tread video games.Would we have the retro-friendly gaming culture that we do today without its existence? Maybe, but it's possible it might not be quite so vibrant.This is the story of how NESticle helped turn retro gaming into a modern cultural force. I have a retroarch setup on my PC with support for various systems from my childhood, stocked with the games I played as a kid. Other than such personal use, emulators for classic systems serve a vital function in our culture: they make sure old titles will still be playable long after the last hardware to play them on has perished.

Apple is working on new desktop Macs, including a ground-up redesign of the tiny-but-controversial 2013 Mac Pro. We're also due for some new iMacs, which Apple says will include some features that will make less-demanding pro users happy.But we don't know when they're coming, and the Mac Pro in particular is going to take at least a year to get here. Apple's reassurances are nice, but it's a small comfort to anyone who wants high-end processing power in a Mac right now. Apple hasn't put out a new desktop since it refreshed the iMacs in October of 2015, and the older, slower components in these computers keeps Apple out of new high-end fields like VR.This is a problem for people who prefer or need macOS, since Apple's operating system is only really designed to work on Appleâs hardware. But for the truly adventurous and desperate, there's another place to turn: fake Macs built with standard PC components, popularly known as "Hackintoshes". They've been around for a long time, but the state of Apple's desktop lineup is making them feel newly relevant these days. So we spoke with people who currently rely on Hackintoshes to see how the computers are being used - and what they'd like to see from Apple.My 2009 article on building a hackintosh is still one of the most popular articles on OSNews. This movement is anything but new, and has always been far more popular than people seem to think - it's only been brought to the forefront again lately due to Apple's abysmal Mac product line-up.

Apple Inc. is expected to report Tuesday that its stockpile of cash has topped a quarter of a trillion dollars [actual source is the WSJ, but it's paywalled there], an unrivaled corporate hoard that is greater than the market value of both Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co. and exceeds the combined foreign-currency reserves held by the U.K. and Canada combined.The goal of a capitalist, free market-based society is that as companies get more successful, they invest their winnings back into the company, increasing productivity, hiring more people, and thus improving the overall state of the economy. While inherently flawed, this system has brought us a lot of good, and has lifted quite a number of people out of abject poverty.However, one has to ask what individuals and corporations hoarding this much money as Apple is doing are contributing to society. Apple's 250 billion dollars are locked away, and aren't used for anything. Every day, Apple is extracting vast sums of wealth from society - as they should in a capitalist society - but they are no longer investing it back into society. And Apple isn't alone in this, of course - a rich few are extracting immense amounts of wealth from society without giving back.This breaks the traditional capitalist model.Things like increased automation and robotisation are only going to accelerate this process. At some point, we're going to have to stop and ask ourselves if this is tenable, and if not, what we are going to do about it. It goes against the core 'values' of die-hard capitalists, but we might reach a point where we have to forcibly - through law - take it from companies like Apple.

Linux 4.11 has been released. This release adds support for pluggable IO schedulers framework in the multiqueue block layer, journalling support in the MD RAID5 implementation that closes the write hole, a more scalable swapping implementation for swap placed in SSDs, a new statx() system call that solves the deficiencies of the existing stat(), a new perf ftrace tool that acts as a frontend for the ftrace interface, support for drives that implement the OPAL Storage Specification, support for the Shared Memory Communications-RDMA protocol as defined in RFC7609, persistent scrollback buffers for all VGA consoles, and many other improvements and new drivers. Here is the full list of changes.

Computer security researchers analyzing a North Korean tablet computer have discovered a level of surveillance and control not previously seen inside electronics from the DPRK. If used across all tablets and smartphones, the system could significantly impact the ability of activists to send digital information into North Korea that can be viewed and shared by citizens.With the war propaganda machine in full swing, it's easy to forget that while the North-Korean regime is obviously deeply abhorrent, North-Koreans are just people like you and I, who just want to live a normal life. And yes, they also want cool gadgets.

BlackBerry QNX is an embedded operating system targeting applications in the automotive, general embedded, and medical markets. However, it is not your garden-variety embedded OS: QNX is a full-blown, UNIX-like, POSIX-compliant operating system with all of the features you would expect of a desktop or server-class OS. Compatibility with other systems means that, at least in theory, porting various open source projects to SDP 7 should be a relatively easy task. And so, while there is no official support in this release for a desktop environment, there is nothing precluding someone from building such a system. With that in mind, I set myself the task of building a BlackBerry QNX 7 desktop.Written by QNX kernel developer Elad Lahav, so you know the information in this article is solid.

If Microsoft wants to make PC hardware, it needs to do so properly and commit to the same kinds of updates as other PC OEMs.Almost every other PC OEM has refreshed its systems for Kaby Lake. Almost every other PC OEM has adopted, at least for machines in the premium space that Surface occupies, USB Type-C and Thunderbolt 3. Surface Pro - a machine which, in its early generations, arguably defined that particular style of two-in-one systems - is no longer unique. HP, Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, and others all have solid two-in-one offerings. These machines are modeled after the Surface Pro concept, but they now embody that concept better than Microsoft's own system. The Surface has been out-Surfaced.The failure to do anything with Surface for so long makes us wonder just what Microsoft is up to. If the company is serious about its hardware ambitions - and officially, at least, it still says that its intent is to produce market-leading systems under the Surface brand - then it has to take its hardware seriously. That means refreshing it to keep pace with the competition.He's exactly right. I love my surface Pro 4 - no way I'm ever going back to cumbersome laptops with fixed, stand-in-the-way keyboards - but it definitely leaves a few things to be desired hardware-wise. Although not a huge problem for me since I don't use it, the pen tracking is pretty terrible, the display has some light bleeding issues here and there, the processor is nice but definitely a generation behind, and battery life is decent, but not exceptional. Except for the pen, these are all things that could be addressed by refreshing the device with Intel's latest.So, Microsoft - what will it be?

With the release of Windows 10, we simplified the servicing process by moving to cumulative updates, where each update released contains all the new fixes for that month, as well as all the older fixes from previous months. Today, most organizations deploy these cumulative updates when they are released on the second Tuesday of every month, also called "Update Tuesday." Because these updates contain new security fixes, they are considered "Security Updates" in Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) and System Center Configuration Manager.Based on feedback from customers, we are making some adjustments to the updates that we are releasing for Windows 10, version 1703 (also known as the "Creators Update"). With these changes, we will routinely offer one (or sometimes more than one) additional update each month. These additional cumulative updates will contain only new non-security updates, so they will be considered "Updates" in WSUS and Configuration Manager.

After almost a decade of research, Google's autonomous car project is close to becoming a real service.Now known as Waymo, the Alphabet Inc. self-driving car unit is letting residents of Phoenix sign up to use its vehicles, a major step toward commercializing a technology that could one day upend transportation.This is going to change our society a lot quicker than people seem to think.

Google isn't planning to rid fake news from its search results - but it's trying to purge it from the top.The Alphabet Inc. company is making a rare, sweeping change to the algorithm behind its powerful search engine to demote misleading, false and offensive articles online. Google is also setting new rules encouraging its "raters" - the 10,000-plus staff that assess search results - to flag web pages that host hoaxes, conspiracy theories and what the company calls "low-quality" content.Good - but also possibly incredibly dangerous.

It was strange to me, the idea that somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25-million books and nobody is allowed to read them. It's like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they put the Ark of the Covenant back on a shelf somewhere, lost in the chaos of a vast warehouse. It's there. The books are there. People have been trying to build a library like this for ages - to do so, they've said, would be to erect one of the great humanitarian artifacts of all time - and here we've done the work to make it real and we were about to give it to the world and now, instead, it's 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because theyâre the ones responsible for locking it up.I asked someone who used to have that job, what would it take to make the books viewable in full to everybody? I wanted to know how hard it would have been to unlock them. What's standing between us and a digital public library of 25 million volumes?You'd get in a lot of trouble, they said, but all you'd have to do, more or less, is write a single database query. You'd flip some access control bits from off to on. It might take a few minutes for the command to propagate.You know those moments, when reading about history, where you think "how could these people have been so stupid? Why didn't drinking from, defecating in and washing in the same body of water raise a red flag? Why did people think slavery was an a-ok thing to do? Why did they sacrifice children to make sure the sun would rise in the morning? Were these people really that stupid?"A hundred years from now, people are going to look back upon the greatest library of mankind, filled with countless priceless works that nobody has access to, fully indexed, ready to go at a push of a button - this invaluable, irreplaceable treasure trove of human culture, and think, "how could these people have been so stupid?"

Apple released its Environmental Responsibility Report Wednesday, an annual grandstanding effort that the company uses to position itself as a progressive, environmentally friendly company. Behind the scenes, though, the company undermines attempts to prolong the lifespan of its products.Apple's new moonshot plan is to make iPhones and computers entirely out of recycled materials by putting pressure on the recycling industry to innovate. But documents obtained by Motherboard using Freedom of Information requests show that Apple's current practices prevent recyclers from doing the most environmentally friendly thing they could do: Salvage phones and computers from the scrap heap.Having "old" but perfectly usable products in the marketplace is a terrible place for a company like Apple to be in. Most computers, smartphones, and tablets from, say, the past 4-5 years are still perfectly fine and usable today, and a lot of people would be smart to buy one of these "old" devices instead of new ones. Except, of course, that Apple doesn't get a dime when people do that. So, they have "recycling" companies destroy them instead.Remember: profit always comes before customer. Apple is executing an environment and sustainability PR campaign right now through its usual PR outlets - don't be fooled.

So the recently recovered source code to Darwin 0.1 corresponds with the release of the PowerPC only OS X Server 1.0. However as we all found out, Darwin will still built and maintained on Intel, as it was a very secretive plan B, in case something went wrong with the PowerPC platform. Being portable had saved NeXT before, and now it would save Apple.So with this little background, and a lot of stumbling around in the dark, I came up with some steps, that have permitted me to build the Darwin 0.1 kernel under DR2.This is beyond awesome.

The original headline (I changed it) is clickbaity, but the article raises good points.In just 10 years, the world's five largest companies by market capitalization have all changed, save for one: Microsoft. Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Citigroup and Shell Oil are out and Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon and Facebook have taken their place.They're all tech companies, and each dominates its corner of the industry: Google has an 88 percent market share in search advertising, Facebook (and its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) owns 77 percent of mobile social traffic and Amazon has a 74 percent share in the e-book market. In classic economic terms, all three are monopolies.We have been transported back to the early 20th century, when arguments about "the curse of bigness" were advanced by President Woodrow Wilson's counselor, Louis Brandeis, before Wilson appointed him to the Supreme Court. Brandeis wanted to eliminate monopolies, because (in the words of his biographer Melvin Urofsky) "in a democratic society the existence of large centers of private power is dangerous to the continuing vitality of a free people." We need look no further than the conduct of the largest banks in the 2008 financial crisis or the role that Facebook and Google play in the "fake news" business to know that Brandeis was right.Any entity which becomes a threat to the well-being of our society, our planet, or the people on it must be dealt with. I'm not quite sure if e.g. Google or Apple qualify for that, and if they do, how to deal with that, but I sure as hell do not wish to live in a society where any one corporation is more powerful than the people.

John Deere has turned itself into the poster-child for the DMCA, fighting farmers who say they want to fix their own tractors and access their data by saying that doing so violates the 1998 law's prohibition on bypassing copyright locks.Deere's just reiterated that position to a US Copyright Office inquiry on the future of the law, joined by auto manufacturers (but not Tesla) and many other giant corporations, all of them arguing that since the gadgets you buy have software, and since that software is licensed, not sold, you don't really own any of that stuff. You are a licensee, and you have to use the gadget according to the license terms, which spell out where you have to buy your service, parts, consumables, apps, and so on.This is finally a moment where without a doubt I can be all smug and entirely unhelpful by saying I do not use any stuff made by John Deere.

This is a post describing my involvement with the Debian GNU/Linux port for RISC-V (unofficial and not endorsed by Debian at the moment) and announcing the availability of the repository (still very much WIP) with packages built for this architecture.

I started to reverse engineer APFS and want to share what I found out so far.Notice: I created a test image with macOS Sierra 10.12.3 (16D32). All results are guesses and the reverse engineering is work in progress. Also newer versions of APFS might change structures. The information below is neither complete nor proven to be correct.

Many were waiting for the day when new and strong Amiga(One) will appear. That happened now. Currently, the X5000 can be purchased with the dual-core processor. In the future, a more powerful machine will be available. Is it worth buying the current model or wait for a four-core version?A look at the new X5000. Note that the author is Polish (I think), and English isn't her or his first language.

Alphabet Inc.'s Google is planning to introduce an ad-blocking feature in the mobile and desktop versions of its popular Chrome web browser, according to people familiar with the company's plans.The ad-blocking feature, which could be switched on by default within Chrome, would filter out certain online ad types deemed to provide bad experiences for users as they move around the web.Google could announce the feature within weeks, but it is still ironing out specific details and still could decide not to move ahead with the plan, the people said.An ad-blocker from Google? Something tells me this won't go down well with antitrust regulators.

Apple has one of the most aggressive sustainability and recycling programs in tech, but it still pulls plenty of metals and toxic rare-earth materials out of the ground to make iPhones, iPads, Macbooks and other products.That's about to change. The company is set to announce a new, unprecedented goal for the tech industry, "to stop mining the earth altogether".Apple plans to stop mining for rare-earth materials, and exclusively use recycled materials (from iPhones and other Apple products, presumably). Incredibly ambitious goal - one among many environmental goals the company revealed yesterday - and quite laudable. They have the money to blaze these trails, and I'm glad they're using it for this.

I challenge anyone to receive a notification on Samsung s Galaxy S8 and not be charmed by the elegant blue pulse of light that traces the contours of the phone's gorgeous screen. This sort of subtlety, this sort of organic, emotive, instant appeal is not something I ever expected Samsung would be capable of. But the company once judged to have cynically copied Apple's iPhone design has exceeded all expectations this year: the 2017 version of Samsung's TouchWiz brings its software design right up to the high standard of its hardware.I have always hated TouchWiz. It was ugly, overbearing, complex, and annoying.Keyword here is was. As per my philosophy to never rot stuck in a single brand or platform, I replaced my Nexus 6P with a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge a few weeks ago. I was assuming I'd have to root it and install a custom ROM on it within days, so I had the proper files and reading material ready to go the day the phone arrived.But as I was using the phone for a few days, it dawned on my that TouchWiz on the S7 Edge was... Not that bad. I buy off-contract, so I didn't get any carrier crapware (as far as I know, Dutch carriers don't really do crapware to begin with), and even Samsung's own stuff was remarkably sparse, and you could hide most of Samsung's stuff anyway. I was pleasantly surprised.I was even more pleasantly surprised when it dawned on me that several parts of TouchWiz were superior to Google's stock Android versions. The stock Android alarm/clock application is a UI disaster, but the TouchWiz version is clean, simple, and much easier to use. TouchWiz' contacts application, too, sports a cleaner look and I find it easier to use than the stock version. Most of all, though, Samsung's settings application is so much better than the stock Android one in terms of looks, organisation, search capabilities, and so on, that I'm surprised Google hasn't copied it outright.Within just a few days, I thought to myself "...okay right so that's why Samsung dominates Android and has 80% smartphone market share in The Netherlands". Samsung has truly cleaned up TouchWiz, and I'm curious to see if I hit that thing everybody is talking about where Samsung phones get slower over time, something that didn't happen to my Nexus devices.CGP Grey once said, in one of his videos:The trick is to keep your identity separate from your opinions. They're objects in a box you carry with you, and should be easily replaceable if it turns out they're no good. If you think that the opinions in the box are "who you are", then you'll cling to them despite any evidence to the contrary.Bottom line: if you always want to be right, you need to always be prepared to change your mind.I try to apply this as much as possible, including here on OSNews. Any longterm reader of this site knows I haven't been kind to TouchWiz over the years. A few weeks with a modern Samsung phone has completely changed my mind.

In the latest Windows Insider build, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) now allows you to manually mount Windows drives using the DrvFs file system. Previously, WSL would automatically mount all fixed NTFS drives when you launch Bash, but there was no support for mounting additional storage like removable drives or network locations.Now, not only can you manually mount any drives on your system, we've also added support for other file systems such as FAT, as well as mounting network locations. This enables you to access any drive, including removable USB sticks or CDs, and any network location you can reach in Windows all from within WSL.There's a lot of work being done on WSL.

Most people running Windows like having multiple apps running at the same time - and often, what's running in the background can drain your battery. In this latest Insider Preview build (Build 16176), we leveraged modern silicon capabilities to run background work in a power-efficient manner, thereby enhancing battery life significantly while still giving users access to powerful multitasking capabilities of Windows. With "Power Throttling", when background work is running, Windows places the CPU in its most energy efficient operating modes - work gets done, but the minimal possible battery is spent on that work.My biggest worry with technology like this is that it affects unsaved work. Luckily, you're supposed to be able to turn it on and off.

The review embargo for the Samsung Galaxy S8 was lifted today, so there's reviews all over the place - and they're all pretty much universally positive, so also kind of uninteresting.An article in The New York Times stood out, though.When a splashy new smartphone hits the market, consumers often weigh whether to place an order right away or to wait and see how others react to the device.But with the Galaxy S8, Samsung's first major smartphone release since the spontaneously combusting Galaxy Note 7 was discontinued last year, there isn't much of a debate. Your best bet is to wait to buy the roughly $750 device - not just for safety reasons, but also because other uncertainties surround it.Since I think you should never rush out and buy a complex and expensive device like a smartphone on release day anyway, this is sage advice. However, it is quite unusual for a major publication to just flat-out tell consumers to wait and not buy the latest and greatest new smartphone from Samsung (or Apple, for that matter) in such an overt, put-it-in-the-headline kind of way.The next paragraph in the NYT article makes me suspicious.Samsung declined to provide an early review unit of the Galaxy S8 to The New York Times, but several consumer electronics experts who tried the device ahead of its release this Friday were cautiously optimistic about the product. Even so, they said the phone had some radical design changes that might make people uncomfortable, a few key features were unfinished and Samsungâs recent safety record remained a concern.I'm going to go out on a limb here and say the above article would not have been written had the NYT been given a review unit of the Samsung Galaxy S8. The tone of the entire article is mildly vindictive, like it was written by someone scorned. It feels a little unprofessional for a publication like the NYT to do this.That being said - the advice still stands: don't rush out on release day for expensive and complex equipment like a smartphone. Wait a few weeks to see if there's any teething problems before plonking down hundreds of euros.

On Tuesday, Mr. Ballmer plans to make public a database and a report that he and a small army of economists, professors and other professionals have been assembling as part of a stealth start-up over the last three years called USAFacts. The database is perhaps the first nonpartisan effort to create a fully integrated look at revenue and spending across federal, state and local governments.Want to know how many police officers are employed in various parts of the country and compare that against crime rates? Want to know how much revenue is brought in from parking tickets and the cost to collect? Want to know what percentage of Americans suffer from diagnosed depression and how much the government spends on it? Thatâs in there. You can slice the numbers in all sorts of ways.This is exactly the kind of thing technology should be used for in a democracy: to provide (relatively) easy insight into otherwise incredibly obtuse and splintered government data. Well done.

Sorry for the delay on this one - it's been a... Busy weekend for me personally, so I'm only just now catching up with most of the news from the past few days. Codenamed "Zesty Zapus", Ubuntu 17.04 continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 4.10-based kernel, and much more.Ubuntu Desktop has seen incremental improvements, with newer versions of GTK and Qt, updates to major packages like Firefox and LibreOffice, and stability improvements to Unity.This is possibly the last release to feature Unity, which makes it oddly notable. Interesting, too, how that lines up with the Z name.

After offering in-browser emulation of console games, arcade machines, and a range of other home computers, the Internet Archive can now emulate the early models of the Apple Macintosh, the black-and-white, mouse driven computer that radically shifted the future of home computing in 1984.I'm not entirely sure on the legalities of what the Internet Archive is doing - since I don't see any confirmation Apple is participating in this - but I'm obviously very happy they're doing this.

This post is about experimenting with imitating and extending the window management concepts from the venerable Plan9, Rio. The backstory and motivation is simply that I've had the need for a smaller and more 'hackable' base than the feature-heavy Durden environment for a while, and this seemed like a very nice fit.

Welcome to this massive PowerPC goodness crammed series. During these videos, we'll be packing the absolute best technology that this machine can support into this gorgeous Blue & White G3 minitower, creating what I believe will be the fastest B&W G3 on the planet. This is the most involved Power Mac upgrade series I've ever produced, changing every single major component in this box and adding as much as I can to make this machine fly. Sit back, relax and enjoy some mighty fine PowerPC geeky goodness.This is a series of very long videos detailing the entire process. Not the flashiest production values - but honestly, that's a good thing. The creator's excitement is contagious, and it makes me want to undertake a similar project. Just tons of fun to watch, sit back, and relax.

I've been fascinated by the cell phone parts markets in Shenzhen, China for a while. I'd walked through them a bunch of times, but I still didn't understand basic things, like how they were organized or who was buying all these parts and what they were doing with them.So when someone mentioned they wondered if you could build a working smartphone from parts in the markets, I jumped at the chance to really dive in and understand how everything works. Well, I sat on it for nine months, and then I dove in.I never stopped to think you could do this - but it makes sense. Very cool.

Released to manufacturing on November 8, 2006 and shipping to consumers on January 30, 2007, Windows Vista had a troubled development and a troubled life once it shipped. But it was an essential Windows release, laying the groundwork for Windows 7 and beyond. For all the criticism that Vista and Microsoft received, the company never really backtracked on the contentious aspects of the release. After a while, those aspects just stopped being contentious.I reviewed Windows Vista way back in 2006 for OSNews, in two parts, followed by another look at the operating system five months later (my fascination with post-XP Windows started all the way back in 2003, when I wrote a Longhorn review for OSNews - three years before I actually joined the OSNews team).The importance of Windows Vista cannot be overstated. In hindsight, it was probably the most important Windows release since Windows 95, as it was a massive overhaul of countless crucial aspects of Windows NT that we still use and rely on today. A new graphics stack, a new audio stack, a new networking stack, a complete overhaul and cleaning of the lowest-level parts of the kernel, and so much more.Windows Vista ended many terrible design decisions from the XP and earlier days. No more kernel access for developers, a new driver model, no more programs running as administrator, and so on. Microsoft forced Windows users to bite the bullet and endure endless UAC dialogs, but it all paid off in the end.And on a personal note, Windows Vista came after Windows XP, and Windows XP was one of the worst operating systems I have ever used. I despise Windows XP, and would rather use a $200 2005 Acer laptop with Vista than a fancy 2009 Sony VAIO or whatever running XP. Windows Vista set the scene for Windows 7 to murder Windows XP for good, and for that reason alone, Vista gets 56 thumbs up from me.Vista was part of a very large undertaking inside Microsoft to completely overhaul the low-level parts of Windows, to prepare the platform for the next decade and beyond. It led to Windows 7, Windows Phone, Windows on the Xbox One, and countless other variants. Not all of those are or were successful, but each of them are still fruits of the incredible engineering work Microsoft's women and men undertook to salvage the architectural trainwreck that was Windows XP and earlier.They did an absolutely amazing job, and on this day, I commend them for it.

We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 6.1. This is our 42nd release. We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of more than twenty years with only two remote holes in the default install.As in our previous releases, 6.1 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system.

The right to repair movement is spreading. In recent weeks legislators in Iowa, Missouri, and North Carolina have introduced bills that would make it easier for you to fix your electronics, joining eight other states that introduced right-to-repair legislation earlier this year.The bills would require manufacturers to sell replacement parts to consumers and independent repair companies and would also require them to open source diagnostic manuals. It would also give independent repair professionals the ability to bypass software locks that prevent repairs, allowing them to return a gadget back to its factory settings.No-brainer laws in any functioning democracy. I hope these US states show the way, so other states - and hopefully, other countries - will follow.

Late last year, I upgraded my old MBP to the 2016 model with a Skylake processor. As I was debugging a kernel exploit, it turned out that SMAP was enabled inside my VMWare Fusion VM. I wanted to avoid dealing with SMAP, but couldn't figure out how to disable it in Fusion. Luckily, VirtualBox VMs do not support SMAP (yet?).This post will be a step-by-step guide on how to setup macOS kernel source-level debugging using VirtualBox. Though all the step examples are geared toward VirtualBox, this guide can also be used to setup kernel debugging on VMWare Fusion since it's even more straightforward in Fusion.

The DPT-RP1 offers a similar 13.3-inch display as its predecessor, but dramatically improves the resolution from 1200 x 1600 dots to 1650 x 2200 dots. The screen is a "non-slip" panel, which the company says will improve the experience of annotating documents with the included digital pen. The new design is also thinner, lighter, and faster than the previous version; Sony notes that the entire device is roughly as thick as a stack of 30 pages of paper.I love e-paper and e-ink displays, but other than serving their purpose on e-reader devices, it seems the technology hasn't progressed towards more generic use cases such as smartphones and tablets.

Today, many can be forgiven for thinking that the digital communications revolution kicked off during the mid-1990s, when there was simply an explosion of media and consumer interest in the World Wide Web. Just a decade earlier, however, the future was now for the hundreds of thousands of users already using home computers to communicate with others over the telephone network. The online culture of the 1980s was defined by the pervasiveness of bulletin board systems (BBS), expensive telephone bills, and the dulcet tones of a 1200 baud connection (or 2400, if you were very lucky). While many Ars readers certainly recall bulletin board systems with pixelated reverence, just as many are likely left scratching their heads in confusion ("what exactly is a BBS, anyway?"). It's a good thing, then, that a dedicated number of vintage computing hobbyists are resurrecting these digital communities that were once thought lost to time. With some bulletin board systems being rebooted from long-forgotten floppy disks and with some still running on original 8-bit hardware, the current efforts of these seasoned sysops (that is, system administrators) provide a very literal glimpse into the state of online affairs from more than three decades ago. And while services such as the Internet Archive are an excellent resource for studying the growth of the World Wide Web as it's frozen in time, these hobbyists are opening portals today for modern users to go places that have been long forgotten.I was too young to experience the BBS age - I'm from 1984 - so I always like to read up about it whenever I get the chance. This is an excellent article on the topic.