OSnews

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.

In a fascinating example of poor timing, disk images of OS/2 2.0 pre-release level 6.605 from July/September 1991 were missing for over 25 years, only to show up literally one day after the 25th anniversary of the OS/2 2.0 release (big thanks to a very helpful reader!).This is a pretty unique pre-release of OS/2 2.0, and as such, it's great it's been saved like this.

Ikea recently launched their Trådfri smart lighting platform in the US. The idea of Ikea plus internet security together at last seems like a pretty terrible one, but having taken a look it's surprisingly competent. Hardware-wise, the device is pretty minimal - it seems to be based on the Cypress WICED IoT platform, with 100MBit ethernet and a Silicon Labs Zigbee chipset. It's running the Express Logic ThreadX RTOS, has no running services on any TCP ports and appears to listen on two single UDP ports. As IoT devices go, it's pleasingly minimal.It's always nice to be pleasantly surprised when it comes to non-IT companies and IT security.

As we learned this week, the 2013 trash can Mac Pro is going to... Well... The trash can. Apple has promised a new "modular" Mac Pro for sometime after 2017.In the light of this news, I thought it would be interesting to look back a model, to the "cheese grater" Mac Pros Apple sold from 2006 until 2013.The cheesegrater is a truly iconic Mac. I love it.On a related note, here's some interesting tidbits and nuggets I've picked up regarding the new Mac Pro from people and sources who know their stuff. The Mac Pro was in limbo inside Apple. The decision to go ahead and develop a modular Mac Pro replacement seems to have been made only in recent months, with development starting only a few weeks ago, which makes it clear why Apple said it won't ship this year. I have no idea how long it takes to develop a new computer like a Mac Pro, but I think we can expect the new Mac Pro late 2018 at the earliest, but most likely it won't be until early 2019 before it ships.What made Apple do a 180? Well, after the announcement of the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, orders for refurbished "old" MacBook Pros supposedly went through the roof, and after the initial batch of reviews came out, they shot up even higher. This response to the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar took Apple completely by surprise. Combined with the problems surrounding the LG UltraFine 5K display and the constant negativity from professional Apple users, the company decided to double down on professional users.As Apple announced, we'll be getting a new Mac Pro and an iMac Pro as a result. In addition, Apple is said to be exploring additional Retina MacBook Pro models without the Touch Bar, and other pro-oriented features, such as hooking an iPad Pro up to a Mac to use it as a Cintiq-like device.All in all, there is definitely excitement in the air regarding professional Mac use, and to be honest - that's been a while. Personally, I'm still very cautious, because in the end, all we got yesterday was a more official version of Tim Cook's endless "we've got great stuff in the pipeline, trust us!" meme that's been going on for a few years now.Until we get it - and that may still be 2 years away - the new Mac Pro is vapourware. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

The Basic level gathers a limited set of information that is critical for understanding the device and its configuration including: basic device information, quality-related information, app compatibility, and Windows Store. When the level is set to Basic, it also includes the Security level information.The Basic level helps to identify problems that can occur on a particular device hardware or software configuration. For example, it can help determine if crashes are more frequent on devices with a specific amount of memory or that are running a particular driver version. This helps Microsoft fix operating system or app problems.Use this article to learn about diagnostic events, grouped by event area, and the fields within each event. A brief description is provided for each field. Every event generated includes common data, which collects device data.The long, long, long list of data Microsoft gathers when Windows 10's data collection is set to 'basic'. Some... Light reading as the Windows 10 Creator's Update, which is now available, installs (you can also wait until 11 April to get it through Windows Update).

Mark Shuttleworth, dropping a bombshell on a boring Wednesday:We are wrapping up an excellent quarter and an excellent year for the company, with performance in many teams and products that we can be proud of. As we head into the new fiscal year, it's appropriate to reassess each of our initiatives. I'm writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.[...]I took the view that, if convergence was the future and we could deliver it as free software, that would be widely appreciated both in the free software community and in the technology industry, where there is substantial frustration with the existing, closed, alternatives available to manufacturers. I was wrong on both counts. In the community, our efforts were seen fragmentation not innovation. And industry has not rallied to the possibility, instead taking a 'better the devil you know' approach to those form factors, or investing in home-grown platforms. What the Unity8 team has delivered so far is beautiful, usable and solid, but I respect that markets, and community, ultimately decide which products grow and which disappear.That just happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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