OSnews

The POSIX standard for APIs was developed over 25 years ago. We explored how applications in Android, OS X, and Ubuntu Linux use these interfaces today and found that weaknesses or deficiencies in POSIX have led to divergence in how modern applications use the POSIX APIs. In this article, we present our analysis of over a million applications and show how developers have created workarounds to shortcut POSIX and implement functionality missing from POSIX.

A neat piece of computing history - a combination of a hardware dongle and software that lets you run up to System 7 on a NeXT machine (and with some hacking, Mac OS 8).The latest addition to my NeXT/Mac collection, a Daydream ROM box made in about 1993 by Quix Computerware AG. This unit plugged into the host NeXT's DSP port and contained genuine licensed Macintosh LC ROMs. This allowed the NeXT to boot off the ROMs and thus become a Mac. It was the first time Apple licensed Mac ROMs to a 3rd party and also offered the same performance as a Quadra 950 at a much lower price point and that was including the purchase of the NeXT system. It ran up to system 7.5 officially though with a few hacks 8.1 can be made to run. It is not a Mac virtual machine; it actually boots as a Mac.The manual contains more information, and it explains that Daydream installs a secondary kernel that in turn boots the Mac ROM.This in and of itself is quite cool, but as it turns out, that's not where the story ends. People - including some of the original Daydream developers - have hacked this tool to remove the need for the hardware ROM dongle by inserting the ROM directly into the secondary kernel. This means that if you have a 68k NeXT machine, you can boot directly into System 7 or Mac OS 8. Or, more likely, if you have a NeXT emulator such as Previous, you can boot your NeXT emulated machine directly into System 7 or Mac OS 8 (video).Incredibly cool, and I had no idea this existed. While NeXT and Apple people were doing these awesome things, I was still using MS-DOS. Strange realisation.

When we consider any new features or changes for Steam, our primary goal is to make customers happy. We measure that happiness by how well we are able to connect customers with great content. We've come to realize that in order to serve this goal we needed to move away from a small group of people here at Valve trying to predict which games would appeal to vastly different groups of customers.Thus, over Steam's 13-year history, we have gradually moved from a tightly curated store to a more direct distribution model. In the coming months, we are planning to take the next step in this process by removing the largest remaining obstacle to having a direct path, Greenlight. Our goal is to provide developers and publishers with a more direct publishing path and ultimately connect gamers with even more great content.This is a big step for Steam, and will make it incredibly trivial for developers and publishers alike to publish games on Steam.

This update, 2.1.0 alias Iijoki brings major architectural changes to Sailfish OS by introducing Qt 5.6 UI framework, Bluez5 Bluetooth protocol (ready to be deployed for development purposes), basics for the 64-bit architecture and text selection in browser. Included is also a beta level implementation for Virtual Private Networks (VPN) (please read release notes) and the first version of QML live coding support. In addition, 2.1.0 adds bigger fonts to the UI, improves the use of camera and fixes a number of errors, many of which were reported by our developer community.Maybe I'll get around to updating my Jolla phone and tablet at some point, but I really don't see a reason why. Since I reviewed Sailfish OS and the Jolla phone more than three years ago, nothing has been done to address the elephant in the room. The operating system itself was quite stable, good-looking and full-featured from the beginning, and that has only improved with the constant stream of updates and refinements. However, the application situation is still incredibly dire, and we're all still using the same few applications - updated only very infrequently - that we were using three years ago. Several have even died out.Instead of investing in attracting developers to write Sailfish applications (the three year old promises of support for paid applications still hasn't been fulfilled, for instance), the company got distracted with crazy projects like the tablet, and investing heavily in making Android applications 'run' on Sailfish. While Android applications do 'run', it's still a slow, frustrating, and utterly jarring experience that's a complete and utter waste of resources. Had they spent even half the effort spent on Android application compatibility on attracting native developers, the platform would be in a far better state.Jolla proclaimed they wanted to take over the world, but in doing so, lost touch with the very people they should've continued to focus on: open source/Linux-oriented enthusiasts, former Maemo/N900 users. Not a large group of people, of course, but definitely a big enough - and, more importantly, loyal enough! - group of people to sustain a small, community-focused company.Whatever.Jolla's CEO Sami Pienimäki penned a letter to the community about upcoming developments for the company. There's some stuff in there about Russia and tablet refunds.

Android Wear 2.0 is also buggier than it should be, especially given the fact that it had an extended public beta period and its launch was delayed by months. Beyond them taking a long time to launch, it can be hard to tell when an app is actually launching, because the screen will flicker back to the list of apps before it will launch the one you just tapped. The Google Assistant also crashed often, forcing me to repeat my inquiry multiple times (or more likely, I just get frustrated with it and pull out my phone).The changes and improvements look decent, but if you don't first get the above things right, they're all for naught. When will software makers learn that performance - especially UI responsiveness - is the single most important part of a consumer-oriented device?Not that it matters to me - for some mysterious reason, these new watches won't be coming to The Netherlands. They're coming to the rest of Europe - just not The Netherlands. The Google Pixel is also still pretty much sold out in the two or three countries where it's supposedly available, with no indication they're ever going to be available elsewhere.Here's a tip, Google: if you want to be a successful hardware maker, maybe make sure interested consumers can actually, you know, buy your stuff?

Just as Windows' development had become complex and fragmented, so too did the company's internal systems for things like source control, issue tracking, testing, building, code analysis, and all the other tasks that fall under the application lifecycle management umbrella. And just as Windows' development was unified as OneCore, the company has embarked on an effort to unify its ALM and develop what it calls One Engineering System (1ES).The cornerstone of 1ES is TFS, but for 1ES, the company wanted to do more than just standardize on TFS; it wanted to switch to a single version control system. TFVC, Source Depot, and Git were the obvious contenders, though other options such as Mercurial were also considered. In the end, the company standardized on Git.Why reinvent the wheel all the time, when you can just use a tool everybody else is already using anyway?

Due to an SSD failure last year, I lost a bunch of my virtual machines, including my Windows 3.11 virtual machine. I don't actually use these for anything, but I like having these old operating systems at my fingertips, in case, I don't know, the world is about to end and the only way to prevent it is to run a very specific Windows 3.11-only application. So, yesterday, I recreated the virtual machine.This seems like an excellent opportunity to link to the original Windows for Workgroups (Windows 3.11) launch event, from October 1992. I'm not even going to try to characterise or summarise this event, because it's so incredibly Microsoftian and '90s, the English language simply doesn't contain enough words to paint an accurate picture.I grew up with MS-DOS and later Windows 3.x, so this is a strange, somewhat... Twisted throwback to... Let's call it 'simpler' times.

Augustin Cavalier (also known as Waddlesplash) was a guest on The Lunduke Hour, where he explains a lot about what's been going on with the Haiku project for the last couple of years, and why it's been so long from Alpha 4 to the upcoming Beta 1.Cavalier goes into Haiku's rather unique package management system, progress on the application front, and tons of other things. Definitely worth a listen.

Business owners in the town of Buea, the capital of the Southwest Region of Cameroon say they are struggling to operate following an internet shutdown that began on January 17.

What did Vizio know about what was going on in the privacy of consumers' homes? On a second-by-second basis, Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen that it matched to a database of TV, movie, and commercial content. What's more, Vizio identified viewing data from cable or broadband service providers, set-top boxes, streaming devices, DVD players, and over-the-air broadcasts. Add it all up and Vizio captured as many as 100 billion data points each day from millions of TVs.Vizio then turned that mountain of data into cash by selling consumers' viewing histories to advertisers and others. And letâs be clear: We're not talking about summary information about national viewing trends. According to the complaint, Vizio got personal. The company provided consumers' IP addresses to data aggregators, who then matched the address with an individual consumer or household. Vizio's contracts with third parties prohibited the re-identification of consumers and households by name, but allowed a host of other personal details - for example, sex, age, income, marital status, household size, education, and home ownership. And Vizio permitted these companies to track and target its consumers across devices.That's... That's a lot of very creepy spying.

Per Arca Noae's revised release schedule, and as announced at Warpstock 2016, Blue Lion (ArcaOS 5.0) moved into beta testing stage today. The first beta release has been made available to the test team, and we anticipate a rigorous round of installation, modifications, formatting, deletion, disk wiping, and all that other fun stuff which accompanies a healthy beta test.We do not anticipate a public beta cycle nor are we planning a gamma release or an untold number of release candidates. Instead, we fully expect ArcaOS 5.0 to emerge from beta testing at the end of March and to become generally available at that time.As mentioned during earlier coverage, ArcaOS is a sort-of continuation of eComStation, since it's founded by several eCS developers who felt eCS had ground to a halt.

The VA2000 is a FPGA based graphics card for Amiga 2000/3000/4000 computers featuring high resolutions and color depth over DVI-D/HDMI. It has a hacker-friendly expansion header for upgrades and custom mods and features a slot for MicroSD cards that can be mounted in AmigaOS.The YouTube video provides additional insight into the open source graphics card. Interestingly enough, I've been looking into getting my hands on a classic Amiga, but the one I would want - an A3000 or A4000 - are quite hard to come by here in The Netherlands.

This is interesting: it turns out there was a NextStep release for IBM AIX workstations. From the initial, archived press release (via Steven Troughton-Smith):AIX PS/2 NextStep Environment Version 1.1 is a state-of-the-art graphical user interface and programming environment for AIX workstations, designed to be compatible with the same application programming interface (API) as the NextStep product, Software Release 1.0, provided by NeXT, Incorporated.AIX PS/2 NextStep Environment Version 1.1 provides icons and menus to facilitate access to system utilities and applications. The AIX NextStep Interface Builder is designed to provide a rich set of well-defined objects and graphical cut-and-paste capabilities for designing and implementing application user interfaces. The Objective-C (3) Compiler provides the benefits of object-oriented programming for developers who choose to design additional objects for the application development environment. AIX PS/2 NextStep Environment can help increase the productivity of programmers and end users.Steven Troughton-Smith, who has a thing for collecting NEXT/early OS X builds and versions, is now looking for this piece of software history, but not a whole lot can be found about this online. I did ran into a thread in comp.sys.next.advocacy from 1995 in which a Robin D. Wilson sheds some more light onto the fate of this product:And we ran it on an RS/6000 model 540 (with 63MB of RAM no less) -- it was pretty fast. The thing that killed it is Steve Jobs wanted IBM pay more money for 2.0. They had only _just_ finished porting 1.0 to AIX (it did run on top of AIX -- and there were several hacks made to accomodate it -- but it did run fine). When NeXT was shipping 2.0, IBM felt they wouldn't be able to sell 1.0 (there we some rather dramatic improvements between 1.0 and 2.0). They also didn't want to spend more money on it (as SJ was demanding for 2.0), and they didn't feel like porting 2.0 would take any less time (meaning they wouldn't get done until NeXT released a newer version). All that considered -- IBM abandoned NS.This wasn't a "bad decision" by SJ (per se), but I can see IBM's view on this easier than I can see NeXT's...Steven also stumbled upon a very, very long FAQ about NextStep/AIX, which contains tons of information. This will probably be very hard to find, but for the sake of digital archaeology and preservation, we really need to find it somewhere and preserve it. Absolutely fascinating.

But today's breakthroughs would be nowhere and would not have been possible without what came before them - a fact we sometimes forget. Mainframes led to personal computers, which gave way to laptops, then tablets and smartphones, and now the Internet of Things. Today much of the interoperability we enjoy between our devices and systems - whether at home, the office or across the globe - owes itself to efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to make an interoperable operating system (OS) that could be used across diverse computing environments - the UNIX operating system.[...]As part of the standardization efforts undertaken by IEEE, it developed a small set of application programming interfaces (APIs). This effort was known as POSIX, or Portable Operation System Interface. Published in 1988, the POSIX.1 standard was the first attempt outside the work at AT&T and BSD (the UNIX derivative developed at the University of California at Berkeley) to create common APIs for UNIX systems. In parallel, X/Open (an industry consortium consisting at that time of over twenty UNIX suppliers) began developing a set of standards aligned with POSIX that consisted of a superset of the POSIX APIs. The X/Open standard was known as the X/Open Portability Guide and had an emphasis on usability. ISO also got involved in the efforts, by taking the POSIX standard and internationalizing it.A short look at the history of UNIX standardisation and POSIX.

Let's talk about elections! Except not the American ones, but the Dutch elections, coming up in March.Concerned about the role hackers and false news might have played in the United States election, the Dutch government announced on Wednesday that all ballots in next month's elections would be counted by hand.We haven't been using electronic voting ever since it was demonstrated the machines were quite easily hackable, but everything higher up in the stack was still electronic - such as counting the paper ballot and tallying up the results from the individual voting districts. The upcoming election will now be entirely done by hand - voting, counting, and tallying, making it that much harder for foreign powers to meddle in our elections.This switch to full manual voting is taken two days after Sijmen Ruwhof posted a detailed article explaining just how easy it would be to hack our voting process.Journalists from Dutch TV station RTL contacted me last week and wanted to know whether the Dutch elections could be hacked. They had been tipped off that the current Dutch electoral software used weak cryptography in certain parts of its system (SHA1).I was stunned and couldn't believe what I had just heard. Are we still relying on computers for our voting process?Turns out the "security" of the counting machines and software, as well as the practices of everything around it, is absolutely terrible. The article is an endless stream of facepalms - and really shines a light on just how lacklustre the whole electronic part of the process was, and hence provides an interesting look behind the scenes of an election.

In the days after Donald Trump won November's presidential election, immigration and civil liberties advocates began assessing how the new president might carry out his promises to create a registry of Muslims and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Almost immediately, it became clear the Trump administration would need data, and a lot of it, in order to not only peg people's religious affiliation and immigration status but also allow federal agents to verify their identities and track their whereabouts. Information that could be used for such purposes is collected and stored by a variety of state agencies that issue driver's licenses, dispense public assistance, and enforce laws.[...]In Washington state, The Verge has learned, Democratic governor Jay Inslee has directed members of his policy and legal staff to work with a handful of state agencies to identify data that could be utilized by Trumpâs deportation officials, and how, if possible, to shield any such information from federal authorities engaging in mass deportation. In California and New York, Democratic lawmakers have proposed legislation to block state data from federal immigration authorities. Democratic legislators have also proposed bills in Washington state, California, New York, and Massachusetts that would prevent state data from being used by federal authorities to build a registry of people belonging to a certain religion.The Republican party, Trump, and its supporters are avid advocates of states' rights, so I'm sure the Republican Trump regime will welcome these moves with open arms.

So you've installed Haiku from a recently nightly (or sometime soon, the R1 beta) and youâre launching applications from the Deskbar menu (the blue âleafâ menu). Perfect, but there are a few more options to investigate if you want to quickly launch your favourite programs.Neat little overview. For a second there I thought they were replacing Deskbar, and I nearly had a heart attack.

Apple Inc. is designing a new chip for future Mac laptops that would take on more of the functionality currently handled by Intel Corp. processors, according to people familiar with the matter.The chip, which went into development last year, is similar to one already used in the latest MacBook Pro to power the keyboard's Touch Bar feature, the people said. The updated part, internally codenamed T310, would handle some of the computer's low-power mode functionality, they said. The people asked not to be identified talking about private product development. It's built using ARM Holdings Plc. technology and will work alongside an Intel processor.And before you know it, you have a MacBook ARM.

Earlier today, The Irish Times ran an "article" titled "Brussels broke the rules in its pursuit of Apple's â¬13bn". That sounds serious, and would definitely have you click. Once you do, you read an article written by "Liza Lovdahl-Gormsen" without any sources, which is basically an almost word-for-word rehash of letters and answers from Tim Cook about the tax deal. The lack of sources and Tim Cook-ery tone of the piece should set off thousands of huge and loud alarm bells in anyone's mind, but it isn't until the very last paragraph of the "article" that the reader stumbles upon this:Liza Lovdahl-Gormsen is director of the Competition Law Forum and senior research fellow in competition law. This article was commissioned from her by Apple and supplied to The Irish TimesPathetic and disingenuous at best, intentionally misleading and ethically reprehensible at worst. The fact that the biggest, richest, and most powerful company in the world has to resort to this kind of unethical behaviour should tell you all you need to know about how certain Apple is of its own claims about the tax deal.

Ever launch an app on your iPhone and then get a pop-up warning that says the app may slow down your iPhone? (I have old versions of certain apps, so it shows up for me every once in a while.) That warning usually appears when you're using a 32-bit app. You can still run the app, and you probably donât even notice the slowdown you've been warned about (at least in my personal experience).Your ability to run that 32-bit app is coming to an end. As several other Mac sites have reported, Apple has updated the pop-up warning in the iOS 10.3 beta to say that the 32-bit app you're running "will not work with future versions of iOS." The warning goes on to say that the "developer of this app needs to update it to improve its compatibility."It'd be interesting to know if this actually affects all that many people.

Historically, the code for Chrome for iOS was kept separate from the rest of the Chromium project due to the additional complexity required for the platform. After years of careful refactoring, all of this code is rejoining Chromium and being moved into the open-source repository.Due to constraints of the iOS platform, all browsers must be built on top of the WebKit rendering engine. For Chromium, this means supporting both WebKit as well as Blink, Chrome's rendering engine for other platforms. That created some extra complexities which we wanted to avoid placing in the Chromium code base.There is no Chrome for iOS. It doesn't exist. Just because it has a Chrome-like UI doesn't mean it's Chrome. Chrome is the whole package - UI and engine. Without the engine, it's not Chrome. I understand Google wants to leverage the brand recognition, and I know I'm splitting hairs, but until Apple allows competing browser engines, iOS only has one browser, with a bunch of skins.

Though we now have thousands of examples of these symbols, we have very little idea what they mean. Over a century after Cunningham's discovery, the seals remain undeciphered, their messages lost to us. Are they the letters of an ancient language? Or are they just religious, familial, or political symbols? Those hotly contested questions have sparked infighting among scholars and exacerbated cultural rivalries over who can claim the script as their heritage. But new work from researchers using sophisticated algorithms, machine learning, and even cognitive science are finally helping push us to the edge of cracking the Indus script.The Indus Valley Civilization and the mysteries that surround it are deeply fascinating. It was contemporary to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, yet we know relatively little about it. It honestly blows my mind that computers can now be used to decipher its ancient script, which may give us a lot of insight into this civilisation.Like in programming, language is key.

This is the second in my series on finding an alternative to Mac OS X. Part 1 was aboutevaluating 13 alternative operating systems and then choosing one to use fulltime. The selected OS was elementary OS. The motivation for this change is toget access to better hardware since Apple is neglecting the Maclineup.If video is more your style I gave a short (10 min) talkat work on my adventures with Linux that covers the core content of thispost.This impromptu series is a great read. It's positive, focused on solutions instead of complaints, and is an honest effort to expand horizons and try out new and different (to the author) approaches to using his computer.

After the recent removal of Solaris 12 from the Solaris road map inspired much speculation on the future of Solaris, Oracle has finally published a blog post detailing the cause of the removal, and the future of SolarisOracle Solaris is moving to a continuous delivery model using more frequent updates to deliver the latest features faster, while fully preserving customer and ISV qualification investment in the vast array of ISV applications available on Oracle Solaris 11 today. New features and functionality will be delivered in Oracle Solaris through dot releases instead of more disruptive major releases, consistent with trends seen throughout the industry.In addition, support for current versions of Solaris 11 has been extended to beyond 2030.The actual updated roadmap is light on details, though, but it does appear that Solaris at least isn't dead just yet.

AmiKit 9 Reloaded has been released for the Mac.Now it is super fast because it uses the latest WinUAE emulator running on Wine. This concept, paradoxically, is much faster and actually more stable than the previous E-UAE edition.âAmiKit 9 for Mac also includes the Rabbit Hole which allows you to launch Mac apps from AmiKit desktop! You can also open Amiga files with your favourite Mac apps!AmiKit is basically a pre-configured AmigaOS environment that runs inside *UAE, but you do have to supply your own OS and ROM files.

VMS Software, Inc. today announced the immediate availability of the production release of VSI OpenVMS Alpha V8.4-2L1 for the Alpha hardware platform, including Alphas running on x86-based emulators. This OpenVMS Alpha version is based on, and inherits the benefits of, the latest version of VSI OpenVMS Integrity V8.4-2L1, released in September 2016.

The problem with laptops has, at least in recent years, been one of expandability. Once you buy a machine, youâre generally stuck with it, unless youâre willing to take it apart with repairs that have more in common with surgery than mechanics.Part of this has to do with the complexity of our modern machines, but a bigger part is the fact that, simply, upgradability has become less of a concern for manufacturers.But there was a time when laptop upgrades were a big deal - and that time was the 90s.Here's the story of PCMCIA, an acronym only a 90s laptop owner could love.I used a PCMCIA network card on my BeOS laptop (in 2001 or so), since the on-board network chip didn't have a BeOS driver. Good times.

Alphabet Inc.'s Google delivered a sharp message to staff travelling overseas who may be impacted by a new executive order on immigration from President Donald Trump: Get back to the U.S. now.Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai slammed Trump's move in a note to employees Friday, telling them that more than 100 company staff are affected by the order.The Trump regime's measures also impact the visa program for, among other long-time US allies, The Netherlands. Did anyone tell the Trump regime that it's a very bad idea to make it harder for your third largest investor to, uh, actually invest? Are these men really that dumb?Interesting to note, though, that Google had to be actually impacted by the Trump regime before it spoke up (only in an internal memo, but still). Meanwhile, Elon Musk is kissing the ground Trump walks on, and Tim Cook, CEO of the most arrogantly and smugly (supposedly) liberal tech company is meeting with Trump, Trump's daughter (...?) and other Republican leaders. From other tech giants who always touted the liberal horn of equality and progressiveness - a deafening, but quite revealing, silence.So far, it seems like the tech industry leaders are opting for appeasement instead of resistance to the Trump regime's corruption, conflicts of interest, racism, war on science, and Christian extremism. I would be disappointed if it wasn't so utterly predictable to anyone who wasn't blinded by the fake smiles, hollow promises, and empty praise of equality, science, and progressive ideals.They still have time to be remembered as people who stood up for those that need it the most. I'm afraid, though, we will remember them as spineless cowards, hiding behind shareholders while the free world crumbles to dust.I hope it'll be worth it.

I was just reading some Tweets and an associated Hackernews thread and it reminded me that, now that I've left Mozilla for a while, it's safe for me to say: antivirus software vendors are terrible; don't buy antivirus software, and uininstall it if you already have it (except, on Windows, for Microsoft's).I've been saying the same thing here on OSNews for a decade now: antivirus software makers are terrible companies. Don't buy their crappy software only to let it infect your machine like a virus that slowly hollows out and kills your computer.Stick to Windows' built-in Microsoft tool.

We were not content with the quality of laptops available on the market. The majority shipped with proprietary and locked-in software solutions, filled with not-uninstallable bloat where the user was left at the mercy of whatever the company selling them a laptop saw fit for them to work with. As creators and makers we knew what it meant to be locked into a set of solutions defined by others. Many alternatives took whatever hardware they could find when they wanted to provide more free options and the end result was often lackluster and as such, lowering the enjoyment in using the computer, our main tool in creating, and shipping with underwhelming specs.We saw a problem, and we solved it: The KDE Slimbook.Basically a MacBook Air-like laptop, preconfigured with KDE Neon, at a relatively reasonable price. This is a very attractive laptop, and I would love to own one. Very nice work.

As the 1990s began, Commodore should have been flying high. The long-awaited new Amiga models with better graphics, the A1200 and A4000, were finally released in 1992. Sales responded by increasing 17 percent over the previous year. The Video Toaster had established a niche in desktop video editing that no other computer platform could match, and the new Toaster 4000 promised to be even better than before. After a rocky start, the Amiga seemed to be hitting its stride.Unfortunately, this success wouldn't last. In 1993, sales fell by 20 percent, and Commodore lost $366 million. In the first quarter of 1994, the company announced a loss of $8.2 million - much better than the previous four quarters, but still not enough to turn a profit. Commodore had run into financial difficulties before, particularly in the mid-'80s, but this time the wounds were too deep. Sales of the venerable Commodore 64 had finally collapsed, and the Amiga wasn't able to fill the gap quickly enough. The company issued a statement warning investors of its problems, and the stock plunged. On April 29, 1994, Commodore International Limited announced that it was starting the initial phase of voluntary liquidation of all of its assets and filing for bankruptcy protection. Commodore, once the savior of the Amiga, had failed to save itself.

Last week, details emerged of Microsoft's plans to develop a single, unified, 'adaptive shell' for Windows 10. Known as the 'Composable Shell', or CSHELL, the company's efforts were said to be focused on establishing a universal Windows 10 version with a standardized framework to scale and adapt the OS to any type of device, display size or user experience, including smartphones, PCs, tablets, consoles, large touchscreens, and more.Today,

Last year, we set out to make Windows 10 the best Windows ever for gaming. With Game Mode, it's our goal to now take things a step further to make the gaming experience on Windows even better. Our vision is that Game Mode optimizes your Windows 10 PC for an improvement in overall game performance. This week's Windows Insider build represents the first step on our journey with Game Mode.Basically, it prioritises CPU and GPU resources for your game, so you can eek out a bit more performance. I'm not quite sure if there'll be a benefit for people at the higher end (I don't think my GTX1070 running at 2560x1440 will benefit much), but for slightly lower specifications it might just give that extra little bit for a more consistent experience.All in all, I'm happy with these gaming-oriented features in Windows, but I really hate how Microsoft is slapping 'Xbox' on everything and tries to take me out of my beloved and trusted Steam environment. It reeks of utter garbageware like Uplay.

This release represents over a year of development effort and around6,600 individual changes. The main highlights are the support for Microsoft Office 2013, and the 64-bit support on macOS.It also contains a lot of improvements across the board, as well as support for many new applications and games. See the release notes below for a summary of the major changes.As awesome of a project Wine is, I wonder how many people actually use it on a daily basis. Maybe I'm wildly off base here (honestly, I probably am), but it seems like if you're running Linux, there's really nothing Windows applications offer that Linux can't.

Apple iOS point release betas usually aren't all that interesting, but the first iOS 10.3 beta contains a big change that, while probably being mostly transparent to the average user, is actually quite interesting.When you update to iOS 10.3, your iOS device will update its file system to Apple File System (APFS). This conversion preserves existing data on your device. However, as with any software update, it is recommended that you create a backup of your device before updating.Apple's developer documentation contains more information about APFS.

Trump and his murder of Republican Christian extremists have declared war on science.The US Department of Agriculture has banned scientists and other employees in its main research division from publicly sharing everything from the summaries of scientific papers to USDA-branded tweets as it starts to adjust to life under the Trump administration, BuzzFeed News has learned.According to an email sent Monday morning and obtained by BuzzFeed News, the department told staff - including some 2,000 scientists - at the agency's main in-house research arm, the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), to stop communicating with the public about taxpayer-funded work.And:The Trump administration has instituted a media blackout at the Environmental Protection Agency and barred staff from awarding any new contracts or grants.Emails sent to EPA staff since President Donald Trump's inauguration on Friday and reviewed by The Associated Press detailed the specific prohibitions banning press releases, blog updates or posts to the agency's social media accounts.Don't tell me I didn't warn you.

You might have used Google's new AMP project without even knowing.It's a technology that makes mobile page results load very quickly on Google, it displays the content in a more uniform fashion. But there's a problem.The content loads off of Google's own server, not from the website itself.Everybody is complaining about AMP, and I'm just sitting here wondering if I ever even get to see an AMP page. Are they blocked by things like Ghostery and ad blockers?

Last year marked the fifth year of Tim Cookâs reign, and year 3 of "Tim Cook's Apple". With recent technological shifts, Apple is at a crossroads of sorts; therefore, I believe a pre-mortem is expedient.This is a great article.I, too, wonder if Apple is so stuck on "let's just slap apps on it" that it serves to detriment their efforts. Virtually all their product introductions lately centred around slapping apps on existing, boring hardware and hope for the best. I'm not sure if the linked article's suggestions are the right way to go, but I do know that Apple places more faith in apps than is really warranted.A cold and harsh truth Apple doesn't seem to grasp: nobody cares about apps. Apps are done. People have a small set of apps they use every day, usually the big name apps such as Facebook and Twitter, and really - that's it. Aside from us nerdier people, nobody browses through the App Store or Google Play, filled with anticipation for what they might find. If you really break it down, I'm pretty sure most people use maybe 2-3 apps daily, and any others maybe once per month.That's really not something you want to bank your product strategy on.

So if you've been wondering where all the Android tablets have gone - here's a guess. They've been held back because it seems like something better is coming: Chrome OS tablets with a real desktop browser and real Android apps. That kind of system probably has a better chance of success competing with the iPad - but let's not set Android's sights quite that high yet. A more reasonable target: undercutting the Surface and all its clones on the low end of the market.At this point I have absolutely no clue anymore what Google wants to do with Chrome OS and Android.And sometimes I think - neither does Google.

To find the cause of the Galaxy Note7 incidents, Samsung examined every aspect of the Galaxy Note7, including hardware, software and related processes over the past several months. Samsung's investigation, as well as the investigations completed by three independent industry organizations, concluded that the batteries were the cause of the Galaxy Note7 incidents. The causative factors are further explained in the infographic below.The presentation last night was quite informative, and both Samsung and the three independent organisation got time to explain their findings in quite some detail. Sadly, they removed the VOD of the livestream from YouTube, so there's no way to rewatch it (edit: someone uploaded the VOD), but some of the slides can be found at the bottom of the linked article.

The Z88 Development Team has released a new version of the system ROM for the Cambridge Z88 portable.It's the result of more than a years work, with many improvements and new features: ISO character set support in filenames and international dates, faster serial I/O, improved RAM applications, better responsiveness. Rock-stable software that enables to run your Z88 for many months with re-booting.The team also outlines its plans for the future:The next step for the coming years is to re-implement the Z88 on low-power FPGA, minimum 10 X faster CPU, 800x600 screen resolution, up to 1Gb of RAM, SD-card filing system, VGA/HDMI output, improved operating system with new Unix-like command line Shell, ELF for Z80 executables + shared libraries, and integrated Zip arching in filing system. Emulators and developer tools will also be freely available.

While common magnetic tape uses very thin, plastic-coated iron oxide, "talking rubber" uses rubber impregnated with iron oxide. Iron oxide (a form of rust) is ferromagnetic, which means in the presence of a magnetic field, the electrons in the iron oxide magnetically line up and stay that way even after the magnetic field is turned off. This allows cassette tapes to create a âtrackâ of magnetically aligned iron oxide when the electromagnet in a cassette recorder creates a magnetic field.But with magnetic rubber, the iron oxide is actually mixed into the rubber material; the whole band becomes ferromagnetic, instead of just the coating. According to that Bell System Journal article, this âtalking rubberâ could be around 1/16 or 1/8 of an inch think, whereas magnetic tape was (even in the '50s) already much thinner at 1/1000 of an inch thick.More obscure audio formats!

Over the past few weeks, we've gotten notes from Verge Science readers wondering why news from the incoming Trump administration has seeped into our science coverage. I wasn't surprised: it's tempting to believe that science is apolitical. But science and politics are plainly related: science is the pursuit of knowledge, knowledge is power, and power is politics.The scientific method consists of generating a hypothesis, attempting to disprove the hypothesis through testing, and accumulating those tests to come up with shared knowledge. And that method also contains ideology: our observed, shared world is the real world. This ideology even has a name: empiricism. An incoming president who clearly picks and chooses facts to suit his own version of the world changes the relationship between science and culture, in potentially destructive ways."To be taught to read - what is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak - but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think - nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true."Tomorrow, in a mirror, darkly.

The administration's analysis of Autosteer was more positive about its capabilities. After analyzing mileage and airbag deployment data for Model S and Model X cars equipped with Autopilot, the NHTSA concluded that "the Tesla vehicles' crash rate dropped by almost 40 percent after Autosteer installation."Wait, you mean to tell me a computer who doesn't get sleepy or distracted and doesn't need to pee is better at keeping an eye on the road than a human?Say it isn't so.

The administration's analysis of Autosteer was more positive about its capabilities. After analyzing mileage and airbag deployment data for Model S and Model X cars equipped with Autopilot, the NHTSA concluded that "the Tesla vehicles' crash rate dropped by almost 40 percent after Autosteer installation."Wait, you mean to tell me a computer who doesn't get sleepy or distracted and doesn't need to pee is better at keeping an eye on the road than a human?Say it isn't so.

FAP80 is a Z80-based retro computer with a sprinkling of modern twists to make the experience of designing, programming, and debugging this computer as painless and straightforward as possible.A lot of retro computer projects today are rooted on nostalgia, they tend to use "period correct" components to get the "feelings" right, and the result often ends up on perfboard or self-etched circuit boards, rudimentary video capacity if at all, few I/O ports, and a symphony of 74 series chips.While there is nothing wrong with that, I wasn't around during the 80s home computer era, so I didn't have the same attachment to how things was done back then. So instead of trying to recreate the "good old days", I made the decision to liberally use modern parts to simplify the design process, as well as making this computer highly flexible and easy to program and use with very little overheads.The creator's blog has more detailed information about the project.

With those out of the way, TASBot moved on to a similar total control run of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. After a few minutes of setup, the Zelda screen faded out, then faded back in on a bordered window with an ersatz logo for the "Super N64." Without any forthcoming explanation from the runners on stage, TASBot started apparently playing through a glitch-filled speedrun of Super Mario 64 on the Super NES, following it up with a similar glitch-filled speedrun through Valve's PC classic Portal. After that, the scene somehow transitioned to a Skype video call with a number of speedrunners speaking live from the AGDQ event through the SNES.No one on the AGDQ stage acknowledged how weird this all was, leaving hundreds in the Herndon, VA ballroom and nearly 200,000 people watching live on Twitch temporarily guessing at what, exactly, was going on.AGDQ (and its Summer counterpart, SGDQ) are some of my favourite events in technology, and I have the entire marathon streaming for the whole week. The TASBot block this year was, as the excerpt above describes, insane, and this article explains how they did it.

Early December of last year, I posted the rumour that Oracle was going to end Solaris development. While the company denied these rumours at the time, there still seems to be something going on.Rumors have been circulating since late last year that Oracle was planning to kill development of the Solaris operating system, with major layoffs coming to the operating system's development team. Others speculated that future versions of the Unix platform Oracle acquired with Sun Microsystems would be designed for the cloud and built for the Intel platform only and that the SPARC processor line would meet its demise. The good news, based on a recently released Oracle roadmap for the SPARC platform, is that both Solaris and SPARC appear to have a future.The bad news is that the next major version of Solaris - Solaris 12 - has apparently been cancelled, as it has disappeared from the roadmap. Instead, it's been replaced with "Solaris 11.next" - and that version is apparently the only update planned for the operating system through 2021.Read into that what you will. Sounds like maintenance mode to me.

I'll almost certainly buy another MacBook, especially if future iterations can give me back the rationalization that paying so much money allows me to have the best computer. (The best for me, of course; the person who does not need to play videogames on his laptop, for example, because he is going to write a short story or record a pop song.) But in the meantime, I'm enjoying a new type of anticipation which for now only seems to be available in Windowsland: that someday, despite the funfetti working environment and Homermobile nature of the hardware, I may actually be on a path that's going somewhere not just new, but better, or at least more exciting.Quite the enjoyable read.