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Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved. Google, widely regarded as the leader in the field, has been testing its fleet for several years, and Tesla Motors offers Autopilot, essentially a souped-up cruise control that drives the car on the highway. Earlier this week, Ford announced plans for an autonomous ride-sharing service. But none of these companies has yet brought a self-driving car-sharing service to market.Uber's Pittsburgh fleet, which will be supervised by humans in the driver's seat for the time being, consists of specially modified Volvo XC90 sport-utility vehicles outfitted with dozens of sensors that use cameras, lasers, radar, and GPS receivers. Volvo Cars has so far delivered a handful of vehicles out of a total of 100 due by the end of the year. The two companies signed a pact earlier this year to spend $300â¯million to develop a fully autonomous car that will be ready for the road by 2021.The robotisation of transportation - personal, professional, commercial, and industrial - will be one of the most far-reaching and uprooting developments in recent human history. Transportation is a relatively large part of the workforce, and over the coming decades, many of those jobs will disappear - putting a huge strain on the economy and society.On top of that, car ownership will start to slow down, and since automated cars will make more efficient use of available road surface, we'll eventually get to the point where we need to rethink our entire infrastructure and the way we design our living space - only 60-70 years after the last time we completely rethought our living space.We've talked about this before, but The Netherlands completely redesigned (at least the western half of) the country for two things: one, to maximise agricultural production, and two, to prepare the environment for mass car ownership. We succeeded at the former (The Netherlands is the second largest exporter of agricultural products, after the US, but before Germany - despite our tiny surface area), but we only partially succeeded at the latter (traffic jams are a huge problem all over the country).As an aside: when I say "redesigned the country", I literally mean that the entire map was redrawn. This map should illustrate really well what the Dutch government, the agricultural sector, and industry agreed upon to do; the 'messy' part is the swampy, irregularly shaped way it used to look, while the straight and clean part is what they turned it into. Gone are the irregularly shaped, inefficient patches of farmland only navigable on foot and in boats, and in their place we got large, patches of land, easily reachable by newly drawn roads to make way for cars and trucks (still countless waterways though; they are crucial for making sure the entire western half of the country doesn't flood).My parents and grandparents lived through this massive redesign, and according to them, it's very difficult to overstate just how massive the undertaking really was.It's unlikely said redesign will be undone on a massive, regional scale, but at the local level, I can foresee countless pro-car infrastructure and landscaping changes being undone because it's simply not needed anymore. For instance, many towns in my area - including my own - used to have a waterway (like so) running alongside their Main Street (generally 'Dorpsstraat' in Dutch), but in order for a Main Street to be ready for cars, people had to walk elsewhere; the waterways were often filled up and turned into footpaths or sidewalks, so cars could drive on Main Street.Over the coming decades, I can definitely see such changes being undone in certain places - especially more tourist-oriented towns such as my own. With fewer and fewer cars on the roads, we can start giving space back to people, and while this may not be a big deal in a spacious country like the United States, it will be a revolution here in The Netherlands, the most densely populated western country (that isn't a city state), and in classic cities like, say, Rome or Amsterdam.All I'm trying to say is that self-driving car technology will, inevitably, have side-effects that many people simply haven't even considered yet. All of us consider cars a normal aspect of our everyday lives and environment, to the point where we've forgotten just how much space we've conceded to the things. Once the dominance of cars starts to come down like a house of cards, our environment will, quite literally, change. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

I am extremely excited to share that PowerShell is open sourced and available on Linux. (For those of you who need a refresher, PowerShell is a task-based command-line shell and scripting language built on the .NET Framework to help IT professionals control and automate the administration of the Windows, and now Linux, operating systems and the applications that run on them.) Iâm going to share a bit more about our journey getting here, and will tell you how Microsoft Operations Management Suite can enhance the PowerShell experience.

In their own side event this week, AMD invited select members of the press and analysts to come and discuss the next layer of Zen details. In this piece, we're discussing the microarchitecture announcements that were made, as well as a look to see how this compares to previous generations of AMD core designs.AnandTech - so the only article you'll need to read on Zen.

Three years ago (has it really been that long?), I published a quite detailed (and at times, mildly emotional) retrospective article on the history of Palm and the Palm OS, which I still think is a pretty decent read. For a different perspective on the matter, there's now an excellent article series at LowEndMac.Palm Computing was largely the creation and vision of one man, Jeff Hawkins. Palm first brought tablet computing to consumers in the form of PDAs (but was beaten by Apple and its scions). The later - and more momentous - goal was to bring consumers to PDAs through simple and very fast user interfaces. This second goal brought us the original Pilot and an entirely new form-factor that millions embraced.It was only until the introduction of multimedia-rich smartphones that Palm stumbled, though it was one of the leading manufacturers.An excellent different and detailed perspective on the history of Palm.

In light of our discussion a week ago about how computers have trouble with non-standard dialects and accents, it's interesting to note that according to Quartz, Google is recruiting Scottish people - through a third party company called Appen - to record their own voice.The tech giant is on the hunt for people with a Scottish accent to record a set of phrases to help improve its speech recognition software. An employee from speech technology company Appen - which has been contracted by Google - started the search by posting on Reddit, in hopes of finding Scots who will record their voices in return for £27 ($36). The task, which takes up to three hours, involves participants recording phrases such as "Indy now" or "Google, whatâs the time?"That's one way of doing it, I guess - but I just don't see how this will make any meaningful dent in broader terms. Getting relatively standard Google Now commands to better recognise people with Scottish accents is very welcome for our friends in the beautiful country of Scotland, but I don't think this will scale very well beyond a limited set of standard Google Now commands (I didn't call Siri and Google Now "slow and cumbersome command line interfaces" for nothing), let alone other English accents and dialects or those of other languages. Unless, perhaps, Google is planning on doing this for numerous dialects and languages, at which point I wish them good luck - they might be done with English by the time the sun explodes.

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update has begun rolling out for Windows 10 Mobile. The Anniversary Update includes additional features and improvements for your Windows 10 phone. To manually check for the update, on Start, swipe over to the All apps list, then select Settings > Update & security > Phone update > Check for updates. Note that availability may vary by manufacturer, model, country or region, mobile operator or service provider, hardware limitations and other factors.In other words, it'll be a crapshoot if and when Windows Phone users actually get the update. Not that it matters - most Windows Phone users have already had to move to different platforms due to Microsoft's horrid mismanagement of an otherwise incredibly promising operating system.

Intel has entered into a new licensing agreement with competitor ARM to produce ARM-based chips in Intel factories. The deal, announced today at the Intel Developer Forum, is a strategic move from the Santa Clara, CA company to offer its large-scale custom chip manufacturing facilities, which include 10-nanometer production lines, to third-parties, including those using its rival's technology.I have a ton of Intel ARM devices already. Perhaps Intel could call these new chips "XScale". Just thought that up. I'm kind of proud of it.

The Note 7 is Samsung's best device ever, and arguably the best big phone ever made. If that's all you're looking to know, then you can stop reading right now and go place your order. It will cost you $849 or more, depending on carrier, and can be preordered now. It will be available in stores starting on August 19th.But it's interesting to explore why the Note 7 is the best big phone ever. Samsung has more experience with big phones than any other company, and it is leveraging that to improve the big phone experience. It's the only company that's saying a big phone doesn't have to feel like a big phone or be saddled with compromises often associated with them. Samsung wants you to have your cake and eat it too, and that cakeâs flavor is the Note 7.I tried a big phone for the first time. I bought a Nexus 6P, set my iPhone 6S aside. While Android is without a doubt the superior platform compared to iOS, the Nexus 6P just isn't the right phone for me - it's just too big. Big phones are heavy phones, and the whole experience just left my frustrated and annoyed. So for now, I'm back to the iPhone 6S, because despite the inferior software, the smaller size is just a lot more pleasant.So, I gave the big phone so many people swear by a shot, and it didn't work out for me.

ReactOS 0.4.2 has been released, as part of the project's new, faster release cycle.Beyond the usual updates to external dependencies such as Wine and UniATA, much work has gone into refining the experience of using ReactOS, especially with respect to the graphical shell and the file explorer. Perhaps the most user visible change however is the ability now to read from and write to several Unix filesystems, namely ext family, ReiserFS, and UFS. Native built-in support for these filesystems should make for considerably easier interoperability than the current out-of-box experience provided by Windows, and there is more to come in the future.

At IDF in San Francisco today, Microsoft's Terry Myerson said that the Windows Holographic experience, including the shell used on the HoloLens hardware, will be made available as an update to the standard Windows 10 desktop operating system some time next year.Currently, the HoloLens runs a specialized variant of Windows. Desktop Windows offers many of the same APIs as the HoloLens, but the 3D user interface that mixes existing 2D apps with new 3D ones is only available on the augmented reality headset. Next year's update will make it available to all, opening it up not just to Microsoft's standalone device but also to hardware such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive that provide tethered virtual reality.Virtual reality and Microsoft's HoloLens stuff seems like great products for professional applications, but I'm still not sold on the current crop of devices having any broader appeal. Maybe five years from now.

I'm covering the topic of FreeRTOS and interrupts in my university lecture material. But I have seen so many wrong usage of interrupts with the RTOS that I think it deserves a dedicated article. The amazing thing I see many times: even if the interrupts are configured in a clearly wrong way, surprisingly the application 'seems' to work, at least most of the time. Well, I think everyone agrees that 'most of the time' is not good enough. Because problems with interrupts are typically hard to track down, they are not easy to fix.

Motorola and Element14 have launched a development kit for creating add-on modules for the new modular Moto Z smartphone, including an adapter for RPi HATs.We donât usually cover smartphones here at HackerBoards because most donât offer much opportunity for hardware hacking. Yet, Lenovoâs Motorola Mobility subsidiary has spiced up the smartphone space this week by announcing a modular, hackable âMoto Modsâ backplate expansion system for its new Android-based Moto Z smartphones.In addition, Motorola has teamed up with Element14 to offer a $125, hardware-based Moto Mods Development Kit for building custom Moto Mods. Using this, developers can build their own Moto Mods add-ons for applications such as infrared cameras, e-ink displays, game controllers and printers to metal detectors, inventory tag readers, blood pressure monitors, and air pollution sensors, says Element14.

The average selling price of a smartphone in India is just $132, half that of China, so the market for low-end smartphones is brisk. On top of that, there are many languages spoken in india, and support for them in Google's Android and iOS is limited. This created an opening for an Indus OS, which has its own app store with 30,000 Android apps, most available in two or more local languages. Its installed based is currently around 4 million.

A step-by-step guide on how to download, install, and start using Tails, the world's most secure platform.Tails, an encrypted and anonymous OS that bundles widely used open source privacy tools on a tiny device, is one of the most secure operating systems in the world. The Linux distribution rose to popularity when it was revealed Edward Snowden relied on Tails to secure his identity while sharing NSA secrets with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. In the past half decade, Tails has been embraced as an essential security suite by journalists, hackers, and IT workers.

A step-by-step guide on how to download, install, and start using Tails, the world's most secure platform.

On the eve of launch of the latest generation of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 we are reminded once again of Microsoft's failed Courier project, which was one of the first to propose a pen-first operating system.

On the eve of launch of the latest generation of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 we are reminded once again of Microsoftâs failed Courier project, which was one of the first to propose a pen-first operating system.

Unlike the last major update, which added support for remote streaming to Macs and PCs, the 4.00 firmware beta (codenamed Shingen) is mostly focused on tweaking the PS4âs user interface. One of the biggest changes is the ability to create folders to organize your games and apps, instead of relying purely on Sonyâs existing organizational tools. Another is that instead of taking over the whole screen, the Share and Quick menus will open as windows that donât entirely cover your current game or app, and youâll be able to add and remove items from the Quick menu to customize it.

Unlike the last major update, which added support for remote streaming to Macs and PCs, the 4.00 firmware beta (codenamed Shingen) is mostly focused on tweaking the PS4âs user interface. One of the biggest changes is the ability to create folders to organize your games and apps, instead of relying purely on Sonyâs existing organizational tools. Another is that instead of taking over the whole screen, the Share and Quick menus will open as windows that donât entirely cover your current game or app, and youâll be able to add and remove items from the Quick menu to customize it.

In the years that followed, the future seemed obvious. The number of Gopher users expanded at orders of magnitude more than the World Wide Web. Gopher developers held gatherings around the country, called GopherCons, and issued a Gopher T-shirt - worn by MTV veejay Adam Curry when he announced the network's Gopher site. The White House revealed its Gopher site on Good Morning America. In the race to rule the internet, one observer noted, "Gopher seems to have won out."Well, things turned out a little differently. Sadly, we tend to only remember the victors, not the ones lying in a ditch by the side of the road to victory.

Update: interesting summary of the repository - "So, the stack seems to be: Dart is the language for GUI apps, Flutter provides the widgets, and Escher renders the layers." Something intriguing: a new open source operating system from Google, Fuchsia, has found its way to Google's repositories. There's pretty much no information anywhere about this, and maybe I'm making way too much of this, but until we know more - anybody care to speculate?There's a Fuchsia file that just reads "Pink + Purple == Fuchsia (a new Operating System)", so that's not much help. There's documentation on the kernel, Magenta, which may be of more use - it reads, among other things, "Magenta targets modern phones and modern personal computers with fast processors, non-trivial amounts of ram with arbitrary peripherals doing open ended computation." There's probably a lot more documentation in the repository, but I don't have the proper background to infer too much from what's going on.Another very, very intriguing piece of information: it turns out several big names from the operating system industry (is that even a thing?) are involved - people who worked on NewOS, BeOS, Danger, iOS, and Palm's webOS, such as Travis Geiselbrecht and Brian Swetland.This could be "just" a research project, or something more. Very interesting.

Microsoft has inadvertently demonstrated the intrinsic security problem of including a universal backdoor in its software after it accidentally leaked its so-called "golden key" - which allows users to unlock any device that's supposedly protected by Secure Boot, such as phones and tablets.The key basically allows anyone to bypass the provisions Microsoft has put in place ostensibly to prevent malicious versions of Windows from being installed, on any device running Windows 8.1 and upwards with Secure Boot enabled.I am out of snarky remarks. Yes, it's possible.

There's a lot of words being written about the release of No Man's Sky, a long-awaited video game set in a procedurally generated universe with an effectively endless number of planets and lifeforms. The game has been in development by a relatively small team of developers for years, and the hype around the game reached epic proportions - to a point where it just became insane and crazy, with people clearly expecting way, way more of the game than it could ever deliver.Ars has taken a look at the course of the hype train, and this is the key paragraph for me:When Murray and Hello Games (as well as console publisher Sony) actually did show and talk about No Man's Sky, though, they were actually relatively restrained and realistic about what they were promising. Unlike Spore and Black and White - both of which saw saturation PR campaigns that promised revolutionary and industry-changing gameplay features that mostly didn't end up working out - it's hard to find many concrete promises made by No Man's Sky's developer and publisher that haven't ended up being true (with the possible exception of the multiplayer issue discussed above).And that's all she wrote, for me. I've been following the development for this game for years, and it's always been crystal clear for me what this game would offer: collecting resources, discovering new worlds and species, expanding the basic capabilities of your ship and tools, rinse and repeat, until eventually reaching the centre of the universe. That's what the developers promised, and that's what I'm expecting tomorrow when the PC version unlocks.All the additional hype around No Man's Sky comes from people themselves, and from stupid journalists hyping the game through the stratosphere without ever having played it. Had you stuck to what the developer and publisher have said over the course of the past number of years, instead of letting yourself get strung along the hype train by the press and Reddit, you'd know exactly what to expect tomorrow.

Adobe Flash Player played a pivotal role in the adoption of video, gaming and animation on the Web. Today, sites typically use technologies like HTML5, giving you improved security, reduced power consumption and faster page load times. Going forward, Chrome will de-emphasize Flash in favor of HTML5. Here's what that means for you.Today, more than 90% of Flash on the web loads behind the scenes to support things like page analytics. This kind of Flash slows you down, and starting this September, Chrome 53 will begin to block it. HTML5 is much lighter and faster, and publishers are switching over to speed up page loading and save you more battery life. You'll see an improvement in responsiveness and efficiency for many sites.Finally.

AlphaGo's surprising success points to just how much progress has been made in artificial intelligence over the last few years, after decades of frustration and setbacks often described as an "AI winter." Deep learning means that machines can increasingly teach themselves how to perform complex tasks that only a couple of years ago were thought to require the unique intelligence of humans. Self-­driving cars are already a foreseeable possibility. In the near future, systems based on deep learning will help diagnose diseases and recommend treatments.Yet despite these impressive advances, one fundamental capability remains elusive: language. Systems like Siri and IBM's Watson can follow simple spoken or typed commands and answer basic questions, but they can't hold a conversation and have no real understanding of the words they use. If AI is to be truly transformative, this must change.Siri, Google Now, or Cortana are more like slow and cumbersome command line interfaces than actual AIs or deep learning or whatever - they're just a shell to a very limited number of commands, a number of commands they can barely process as it is due to the terrible speech recognition.Language is incredibly hard. I don't think most people fully realise just how complex language can be. Back when I still had a job in a local hardware store in my area and I spent several days a week among people who spoke the local dialect, my friends from towns only mere kilometres away couldn't understand me if I went full local on them. I didn't actually speak the full dialect - but growing up here and working with people in a store every day had a huge effect on the pronunciation of my Dutch, to the point where friends from out of town had no idea what I was talking about, even though we were speaking the same language and I wasn't using any special or strange words.That breadth of pronunciation within the same language is incredibly hard to deal with for computers. Even though my town and the next town over are only about 1-2 kilometres apart, there's a distinct pronunciation difference with some words if you listen carefully to longtime residents of either town. It's relatively elementary to program a computer to recognise Standard Dutch with perfect AN pronunciation (which I can actually do if I try; my mother, who is from the area where Standard Dutch is from, speaks it naturally), but any minor variation in pronunciation or even voice can trip them all up - let alone accents, dialects, or local proverbs or fixed expressions.The question is, then, one that we have discussed before in my article on Palm and Palm OS:There are several key takeaways from Dimond's Stylator project, the most important of which is that it touches upon a crucial aspect of the implementation of handwriting recognition: do you create a system that tries to recognise handwriting, no matter whose handwriting it is - or, alternatively, do you ask that users learn a specific handwriting that is easier for the system to recognise? This would prove to be a question critical to Palm's success (but it'll be a while before we get to that!).If speech recognition is going to keep sucking as much as it does, today's engineers either have to brute-force it - throw tons of power at the problem - or ask of their users that they speak Standard Dutch or whatever it's called for your language when talking to their computers.I'm not optimistic for the coming 10-20 years.

It's time for a new version of Android, and that means I also get to make my yearly predictions about updates. Fun times!Now, to be sure, unless a manufacturer has already committed to updating an existing phone, these are simply (mostly) educated guesses. We base them on a company's track record, the capabilities of the phone itself, and the number of phones a company makes. It's sort of like a blogger version of reading tea leaves and calling the bookmakers. And it's fun. Even when we get it wrong it's fun.Since we're here because we are interested in Android, and most of us like to have a little fun, let's jump right in and answer the million dollar question - will my phone get updated to Android 7 Nougat?These articles are depressing.

Archive.org is continuing its mission to make a whole bunch of older software available online, in your browser, through emulation, with a whole slew of Amiga software - games, mostly, but also some general software, as well as, of course, a whole bunch of demos.The emulator in question is the Scripted Amiga Emulator, an emulator written in HTML5 and JavaScript. It's based on WinUAE and makes use of AROS' Kickstart replacement.

Fast forward to July 15, 2016 (thereâs that lab journal againâ¦) when, after receiving an email from Google asking me to indicate how exactly I would like them to use my data to customise adverts around the web, and after thinking for a bit about what kind of machine learning tricks I would be able to pull on you with 12 years of your email, I decided that I really had to make alternative plans for my little email empire.Somehow FastMail came up and in one of those impulsive LET'S WASTE SOME TIME manoeuvres, I pressed the big red MIGRATE button!The rest of this post is my mini-review of the FastMail service after almost 3 weeks of intensive use.I'm pretty sure at least some of you are contemplating a similar migration, away from companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, to something else.

So, is Apple doomed? Of course not. As John Gruber says, "Any conversation that uses that word is in silly la-la land." With Macs, iPads, and software applications and services, Apple isnât a one-trick pony like BlackBerry, to use an example cited by those most freaked out about the recent iPhone slowdown. It recorded $50.6 billion in sales during that "disappointing" quarter, more than the combined revenue of Google parent Alphabet ($20.3 billion) and Amazon ($29.1 billion) over the same period. Its $10.5 billion in profits outpaced not just the combination of Alphabet ($4.2 billion) and Amazon ($513 million) but also Facebook ($1.5 billion) and Microsoft ($3.8 billion)."I don't read all the coverage on Apple that there is," Cook tells me a few days after my lunch with Cue and Federighi. "The way that I look at that is, I really know the truth." And he's ready to talk about it.

Can you spot the differences with the messages above? The left side has a few more capital letters than the right side. Big O, little o. Who cares, right?Well, if you write for an app or website, you should care. A little thing like capitalization can actually be a big deal. Capitalization affects readability, comprehension, and usability. It even impacts how people view your brand.While there are some more objective arguments to be made, most arguments for and against either title case or sentence case mostly come down to whatever you're used to - what you grew up with. Title case looks entirely ridiculous and confusing to me, and makes dialog boxes, text, and other things much harder to read than when it's in sentence case.The reason? We don't use title case in Dutch. Everything is sentence case. In English, it's mostly a case of preference, and either case type is fine as long as you're consistent.Interestingly enough, Apple - generally considered the poster child for title case - actually localises its choice for case type. When you run Apple software in, say, Dutch - it doesn't use title case at all, opting for sentence case instead, because that's the norm in Dutch.Title case also appears to be on its way out - generally, while pre-internet publications use title case, publications originating from the internet generally use sentence case. I wouldn't be surprised to see title case fall into disuse almost entirely over the coming decades in English - including at Apple. There's going to be an inflection point where title case will simply look incredibly out of place in English, as younger generations grow up on new publications that do not use it.Title case is old - very old - probably because lowercase evolved out of uppercase, and over the centuries, we've been slowly pushing uppercase letters to perform very specific functions in text. Capitals have become an integral and core part of punctuation rules in every (?) language using on the Latin, Greek (?), and Cyrillic (?) scripts, and while there is some variation here and there - e.g. German holding on to capitalising every single noun, not just proper nouns - there's a remarkable consistency between them.I'm fairly certain English' title case is the odd-one out, and as the internet continues to break down barriers between cultures and languages, title case will eventually disappear from English, too.

DragonFly version 4.6 brings more updates to accelerated video for both i915 and radeon users, home-grown support for NVMe controllers, preliminary EFI support, improvements in SMP and networking performance under heavy load, and a full range of binary packages.

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update was released earlier this evening, and I dutifully installed it so that I could write about any oddities that might pop up. Well, a number of oddities have popped up, and they're bad - really bad. The Anniversary Update does some really shady stuff during installation that it doesn't inform you of at all until after the fact.First, the Anniversary Update reinstalls Skype "for you", even if you had it uninstalled earlier, which in and of itself is a blatant disregard for users - I uninstalled it for a reason, and I'd like Microsoft to respect that. That in and of itself is bad enough, but here's the kicker: during installation, Microsoft also automatically logs you into Skype, so that possible Skype contacts can just start calling or messaging you - again, without ever asking for the user's consent.Imagine my surprise when I open that useless Metro notification center thing - whose button now sits in the bottom right of the task bar, right of the clock, even, and is unremovable - and see that Skype is now installed, and that I'm logged in. This is a blatant disregard for users, and I'm sure tons of users will be unpleasantly surprised to see Microsoft forcing Skype down their throats.There was an even bigger surprise, though: during installation of the Anniversary Update, Microsoft apparently flags Classic Shell - a popular Start menu replacement that gives Windows 10 a customisable Start menu that doesn't suck - as incompatible with the Anniversary Update, and just straight-up deletes hides it from your computer - again, without ever notifying you beforehand or asking you for your permission.Update: actually, the application isn't removed entirely - it's still there in the Program Files folder, but it's entirely scrapped from search results and the Start menu. Effectively, for most users, that's identical to removing it. What an incredibly odd and user-hostile way of dealing with this. You can see how the wording in the screenshot below is confusing regarding the removing vs. hiding issue. Classic Shell released an update to fix the compatibility issue detected, so I hope my settings are still there somewhere, because it'd suck having to redo all of them because Microsoft just randomly deleted a program from my computer hid a program, without informing me or asking me for my permission. It could've just disabled the program, prevented it from running - why delete hide it entirely? Are they that desperate to try and get me to use their terrible excuse for a Start menu?So, just in case you're about to install this update - Microsoft will force Skype down your throat, and may randomly delete hide programs from your computer without asking for your permission.Have fun. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update was released earlier this evening, and I dutifully installed it so that I could write about any oddities that might pop up. Well, a number of oddities have popped up, and they're bad - really bad. The Anniversary Update does some really shady stuff during installation that it doesn't inform you of at all until after the fact.First, the Anniversary Update reinstalls Skype "for you", even if you had it uninstalled earlier, which in and of itself is a blatant disregard for users - I uninstalled it for a reason, and I'd like Microsoft to respect that. That in and of itself is bad enough, but here's the kicker: during installation, Microsoft also automatically logs you into Skype, so that possible Skype contacts can just start calling or messaging you - again, without ever asking for the user's consent.Imagine my surprise when I open that useless Metro notification center thing - whose button now sits in the bottom right of the task bar, right of the clock, even, and is unremovable - and see that Skype is now installed, and that I'm logged in. This is a blatant disregard for users, and I'm sure tons of users will be unpleasantly surprised to see Microsoft forcing Skype down their throats.There was an even bigger surprise, though: during installation of the Anniversary Update, Microsoft apparently flags Classic Shell - a popular Start menu replacement that gives Windows 10 a customisable Start menu that doesn't suck - as incompatible with the Anniversary Update, and just straight-up deletes it from your computer - again, without ever notifying you beforehand or asking you for your permission.Classic Shell released an update to fix the compatibility issue detected, so I hope my settings are still there somewhere, because it'd suck having to redo all of them because Microsoft just randomly deleted a program from my computer, without informing me or asking me for my permission. It could've just disabled the program, prevented it from running - why delete it entirely? Are they that desperate to try and get me to use their terrible excuse for a Start menu?So, just in case you're about to install this update - Microsoft will force Skype down your throat, and may randomly delete programs from your computer without asking for your permission.Have fun. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

Ars' take on the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, due out today.For now, the Anniversary Update is an incremental update that makes Windows 10 incrementally better. For Windows 10, the decision to upgrade is obvious, and in many cases, there's no decision to be made. In fact, home users will be getting it whether they like it or not. They shouldn't fear this; if nothing else the revised Start menu layout makes the upgrade worthwhile.But the decision for Windows 7 and 8.1 users is rather different now than it was a year ago. A year ago, upgrading to Windows 10 was an easy decision to make, because the upgrade was zero cost. Unless upgrading was absolutely impossible (due to an incompatibility or being particularly wedded to Media Center), then upgrading was the obvious thing to do. Windows 10 is a better operating system than those two, especially for $0.I'm pretty sure there's loads of people who'd much rather hold on to Windows 7, for a multitude of reasons, but that's just me.Honestly, I've been out of the loop on this whole Anniversary Update, mostly because Windows (and OS X and desktop Linux for that matter) just isn't very exciting. Windows got exciting with 8, which, while deeply flawed and inherently broken, at least represented some form of progress from what had come before to something new, but in Windows 8, that "something new" - Metro - was incomplete, buggy, slow, broken, and effectively useless.We're Fiona knows how many years down the line now, and it's still an incomplete, buggy, slow, broken, and effectively useless mess. There's not a single Metro application that's worthy of anyone's time, and there's a better - albeit less attractive-looking, at times - Win32 alternative in virtually every instance. This leaves Windows 10 as a Windows 7 where you need to turn a whole bunch of useless crap off or hide it to make it work properly.It's far from ideal, and the idea many bloggers are peddling - that Windows 10 is a must-have upgrade over Windows 7 - seems rooted more in a sense of "the shiny" than actual merit.

Last year, we announced that beginning with the release of Windows 10, all new Windows 10 kernel mode drivers must be submitted to the Windows Hardware Developer Center Dashboard portal (Dev Portal) to be digitally signed by Microsoft. However, due to technical and ecosystem readiness issues, this was not enforced by Windows Code Integrity and remained only a policy statement.Starting with new installations of Windows 10, version 1607, the previously defined driver signing rules will be enforced by the Operating System, and Windows 10, version 1607 will not load any new kernel mode drivers which are not signed by the Dev Portal. OS signing enforcement is only for new OS installations; systems upgraded from an earlier OS to Windows 10, version 1607 will not be affected by this change.

Tomorrow [ed. note: today] Samsung will announce the Galaxy Note 7, actually the sixth main entry in its popular series of gigantic, stylus-equipped phones. The Note line usually builds on the Galaxy S series, applying Samsung's latest technologies to a larger canvas; with the S7 and S7 Edge setting an impressive precedent, expectations for this year's model will be high.How will Samsung match them? Kim Gae-youn might have an idea. He's the man who heads up smartphone planning at Samsung, making the calls about what goes into each model and how they're positioned in the market. I spoke with him at Samsung's headquarters in Suwon, South Korea just after the release of the S7, and he had a lot to say about exactly how the company goes about making its decisions - from screen size, to software customization, to the amount of bloatware.

Canonical has been talking about making Ubuntu on tablets and phones a reality now for several years, and in recent months we have finally seen a few devices come on the market. A review of the Meizu Pro 5, a Ubuntu-powered smart phone that is compatible with North American 4G networks, appeared on DistroWatch.The article covers how Ubuntu compares to Android and explores the differences between traditional apps vs Ubuntu scopes:Scopes are a slightly unusual concept in the smart phone market, but I grew to appreciate the idea. What eventually gave me the "a-ha" moment when it came to scopes was when I realised scopes are for looking at information and apps for doing things. Scopes are always on, always waiting in the background to provide us with small bits of data. Applications are for performing tasks. A scope will tell me what is on my calendar for the day, an application will create new appointments. A scope will tell me who called me recently while an app will place a new call.

According to multiple reliable sources, we believe that Google plans to debut a brand-new launcher for Nexus devices some time in the near future, likely on its 2016 Nexus (if they are Nexuses) smartphones Marlin and Sailfish.That unremovable date widget is an absolutely dreadful idea. Luckily though, this is Android, so you can replace it with whatever launcher you want.

If you're going to tell me "normal people" don't do those tasks, please don't. Quilters run blogs. Salespeople create presentations. And non-techie writers send revisions to editors. It's us nerds who insist that iOS solves the "problem" of normal people who don't understand the file system putting all their files on the desktop. But the desktop acts as shared document storage, which is something it turns out normal people sometimes need, and iOS does not solve that problem. Lecture me about the virtues of containers all you want, but there is no world in which having to use Dropbox as a temporary storage medium is a step forward.This is a great article, and it hits the nail on the head so hard, the nail's probably in Fiji by now. The only people going iPad-only are bloggers writing "I went iPad-only"-posts, and people who are trying to prove a point. Neither of them constitute a market.

Android relies heavily on the Linux kernel for enforcement of its security model. To better protect the kernel, we've enabled a number of mechanisms within Android. At a high level these protections are grouped into two categories - memory protections and attack surface reduction.

The goal was to publish source code to a GPU that is register compatible with the late 90's era Number Nine "Ticket To Ride IV" GPU. Although the project didn't meet its funding goal, the person behind it later published the code on github.Despite the fact that this is an older design, it has lots of stuff that is worth studying. It's interesting to compare this design to the VideoCore GPU that I walked through in a previous post. While there are some fundamental differences, there are surprising number of functions that are similar, which shows how modern GPUs evolved from earlier ones.A walkthrough of the GPLGPU as well as some history and backstory of the Number Nine "Ticket To Ride IV" GPU.

Dan Dodge, the founder and former chief executive officer of QNX, the operating system developer that BlackBerry acquired in 2010, joined Apple earlier this year, the people said. He is part of a team headed by Bob Mansfield, who, since taking over leadership of the cars initiative - dubbed Project Titan - has heralded a shift in strategy, according to a person familiar with the plan.The initiative is now prioritizing the development of an autonomous driving system, though it's not abandoning efforts to design its own vehicle. That leaves options open should the company eventually decide to partner with or acquire an established car maker, rather than build a car itself. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.This whole thing of Apple designing, building, and selling a car still seems so extreme to me - it feels like jumping the shark, really - but at the same time, it could just as well be the genius move that prolongs Apple's winning streak for decades to come. I have far too little insight into the car industry to say anything meaningful here, but it does fascinate me that a technology company like Apple is presumably entering the car market.

In the months leading up to the announcement of the new Apple TV box last year, there were multiple reports that said the company was also working on a streaming TV service as a way to entice cord-cutters and "cord-nevers" into its ecosystem. Those reports suggested that the service would include some 25 channels and cost $30 or $40 a month, and it would stream live content as well as offer a Netflix-esque back catalog of shows on demand.But it never came to pass. When the new Apple TV launched, Apple pushed apps as the future of TV rather than an all-in-one service. A new report from the Wall Street Journal today says that Apple's negotiating tactics were to blame and that the service didn't come to pass in part because Apple was offering too little money and making too many demands.The source article is behind a paywall, so hence the link to the Ars story instead. You can try and use this link through Google to get the source article.

Ars Technica talks about dark patterns:Everyone has been there. So in 2010, London-based UX designer Harry Brignull decided he'd document it. Brignullâs website, darkpatterns.org, offers plenty of examples of deliberately confusing or deceptive user interfaces. These dark patterns trick unsuspecting users into a gamut of actions: setting up recurring payments, purchasing items surreptitiously added to a shopping cart, or spamming all contacts through prechecked forms on Facebook games.I can't recall ever falling for a dark pattern, but I see these things everywhere - a sure sign that whatever company, website, or whatever, you're dealing with is not worthy of your time.

"iPhone has become one of the most important, world-changing and successful products in history. It's become more than a constant companion. iPhone is truly an essential part of our daily life and enables much of what we do throughout the day," said Cook. "Last week we passed another major milestone when we sold the billionth iPhone. We never set out to make the most, but we've always set out to make the best products that make a difference. Thank you to everyone at Apple for helping change the world every day."There's a lot you can say about Apple and the iPhone - but you can't say the device didn't cause a revolution in computing. This is a major milestone, and I'd like to congratulate all the men and women involved in the iPhone's inception and further development. Apple is more than just the corporate facade and Tim Cook and Steve Jobs. There's thousands of men and women working there, and this is a major achievement for them.

Nicholas W. Howard:Wander into almost any online forum or article comment section about a controversial announcement from Apple Inc. and you will almost certainly hear a variation of this sentence: "Apple has gone downhill since Steve Jobs died." The sentence slithers around vaguely; it never seems to specify how, or in what ways, Apple has gone downhill. I agree, nonetheless, that it has. Whether or not Steve Jobs's absence caused the decline (though I suspect it did), I grow frustrated as I watch each software update further erode one pillar of Apple's formerly astronomical greatness.No: I am not referring to their software's stability, important and perhaps worsening with time as it may be. I walk a different tightrope. The design-community-approved articles pertaining to an "Apple software decline" focus on bugs (see Marco Arment, Glenn Fleishman, Russell Ivanovic) or even lunge for their shields to claim that Apple has no such software problems (see Jim Lynch), with the glaring exception of this thoughtful and much-needed lament by Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini. The article you are about to read will address the same unsung subject as Norman and Tognazzini's article: the design, not the engineering, of Apple's graphical user interfaces. But where their article is general, I have harvested specific example after specific example of the user interface decline of (the now-former) OS X.A great article with which I wholeheartedly agree - but my agreement comes with a twist.Where Howard seems to regard the purest form of the Aqua graphical user interface as the bar for the decline, I consider the bar to be what is now referred to as the Classic graphical user interface, but which is actually named Platinum, which reached its zenith in Mac OS 9.Platinum in Mac OS 9 was elegant, clear, memorable, focused, and pleasant. Forget OS 9's multitude of structural problems - it was a terribly designed house of cards that would crumble if you looked at it funny - and just focus on the UI, in which elements are clearly marked, there's tons of useful but not annoying visual feedback, and a rare sense of spatiality to it all.Aqua has always been too candy cane for me, and it's only gone downhill from there for Apple - iOS and Mac OS today are dreadfully bland and void of character, and this article does a decent job illustrating it.

Apple sold 40.4 million iPhones during the quarter, down from 47.5 million a year earlier, while Mac sales were 4.25 million units, down from from 4.8 million units in the year-ago quarter. iPad sales were also down once again, falling to 9.95 million from 10.9 million.If the rumours are right and the next iPhone is indeed another minor spec bump, Apple is in for a rough year. With "rough" meaning "making incredible amounts of money, just a little less than they'd hoped, but still more than can be comprehended on a day-to-day basis".I wish I had Apple's rough quarters.

Steve Kondik, founder of CyanogenMod (the community ROM) and Cyanogen Inc. (the company):CyanogenMod is something that works. Perhaps it doesn't need to "go big" to work. I'm still wildly inspired by the idea of a platform which forces participation. Whether it's the choice to hack your phone to bits and figure out how to install the damn thing to begin with, learning what's possible afterwards, or just having the confidence of being in control, it still serves an important role which hasn't been filled outside of the custom ROM community. Cyanogen Inc (including myself) will still be sponsoring the project and will continue to have an active role in it's development. Contrary to popular belief, we are not "pivoting to apps" nor are we shelving CM. We'll have additional information on the Inc site soon.Good news for CyanogenMod (the ROM), but communications in the vein of "the company is not going down, honest!" usually precede the company going down.

The final build of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update is build 14393. The update, which provides a range of new features and improvements, represents Microsoft's last big push to get Windows 7 and 8.1 users to upgrade to Windows 10.The update is available right now to those who have opted in to the Windows Insider program, and it will be pushed out to Windows 10 users on the current branch on August 2. The free upgrade offer from Windows 7 and 8.1 to Windows 10, however, ends on July 29, leaving Microsoft hoping that the promise of the new update will be enough to get people to make the switch.Correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt many Windows 7/8 users here who haven't upgraded yet will be wooed by this new update.If you're still running Windows XP, you're irresponsible and you should update to 7/8/10 or Linux immediately.

As another installment in a somewhat ongoing series on obscure console history, let's talk about the expansion port on the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES. In case you've never turned over your NES: there's a little door underneath your NES, which covers up a small raised piece of plastic that's (relatively) easily removable. Underneath the raised piece of plastic sits an expansion port on the NES' motherboard. That's my NES, and since I've already taken it apart to look at what's under the raised cover, I had no need to remove it.Common wisdom is that the NES expansion port was never actually used for anything, but that's not actually true. Modeled after the Family Computer Network System for the Japanese version of the NES (the Famicom), through which the NES could display weather, stock information, partake in gambling, and so on, the Minnesota State Lottery and Nintendo tried to bring a similar device to the United States:The three parties planned to sign up 10,000 homes for the trial, and while Nintendo handed out free modems, in an even sweeter deal, Minnesota also handed out free NES consoles to those involved who didn't already have one.For a monthly subscription fee of $10 (remember, that's 1991 money), users would also get a special cartridge for the NES that let them access the lottery, after which they could play every game that month, right up to and including the big jackpots.The program ultimately flopped and never made it to the official production or availability stages, and since Nintendo never tried to do anything with the expansion port after this initial test, it would remain unused for the entirety of the NES' lifespan. Today, though, you can buy a homebrew expansion board that taps into the port.I've been reading up a lot on these kinds of stories, so if you have anything interesting - feel free to submit it. Since I grew up with Nintendo (and PC), that's where the focus has been so far, so I'd be quite interested in stories about competing companies such as Sega or Atari.