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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.

There's a new form of digital censorship sweeping the globe, and it could be the start of something devastating.In the last few weeks, the Chinese government compelled Apple to remove New York Times apps from the Chinese version of the App Store. Then the Russian government had Apple and Google pull the app for LinkedIn, the professional social network, after the network declined to relocate its data on Russian citizens to servers in that country. Finally, last week, a Chinese regulator asked app stores operating in the countryto register with the government, an apparent precursor to wider restrictions on app marketplaces.These moves may sound incremental, and perhaps not immediately alarming. China has been restricting the web forever, and Russia is no bastion of free speech. So what's so dangerous about blocking apps?Here's the thing: It's a more effective form of censorship.It's almost like an operating system where you can't install applications not approved by its manufacturer is a really, really dumb idea.

There's a new form of digital censorship sweeping the globe, and it could be the start of something devastating.In the last few weeks, the Chinese government compelled Apple to remove New York Times apps from the Chinese version of the App Store. Then the Russian government had Apple and Google pull the app for LinkedIn, the professional social network, after the network declined to relocate its data on Russian citizens to servers in that country. Finally, last week, a Chinese regulator asked app stores operating in the countryto register with the government, an apparent precursor to wider restrictions on app marketplaces.These moves may sound incremental, and perhaps not immediately alarming. China has been restricting the web forever, and Russia is no bastion of free speech. So what's so dangerous about blocking apps?Here's the thing: It's a more effective form of censorship.It's almost like an operating system where you can't install applications not approved by its manufacturer is a really, really dumb idea.

The next version of Google's smartwatch operating system is slated to arrive on February 9th, according to mobile reporter Evan Blass. The leak follows last week's report that Google had notified developers of Android Wear 2.0's upcoming release so they could prepare to update apps for continued support.I'm sure all three Android Wear users are jumping up and down with excitement.

This document gives an overview of how security is designed into Googleâs technical infrastructure. This global scale infrastructure is designed to provide security through the entire information processing lifecycle at Google. This infrastructure provides secure deployment of services, secure storage of data with end user privacy safeguards, secure communications between services, secure and private communication with customers over the internet, and safe operation by administrators.Google uses this infrastructure to build its internet services, including both consumer services such as Search, Gmail, and Photos, and enterprise services such as G Suite and Google Cloud Platform.We will describe the security of this infrastructure in progressive layers starting from the physical security of our data centers, continuing on to how the hardware and software that underlie the infrastructure are secured, and finally, describing the technical constraints and processes in place to support operational security.This document also touches on something I always find quite fascinating - Google is, actually, an incredibly successful hardware company.A Google data center consists of thousands of server machines connected to a local network. Both the server boards and the networking equipment are custom-designed by Google.I have no idea how many servers Google actually owns, but this could make them one of the biggest hardware companies in the world.

axle is a small UNIX-like hobby operating system. Everything used within axle is implemented from the ground up, aside from the bootloader, for which we use GRUB. axle is a multiboot compliant kernel. axle runs C on 'bare metal' in freestanding mode, meaning even the C standard library is not included. A subset of the C standard library is implemented within axle's kernel, and a userspace version is planned. axle is mainly interfaced through a shell.Open source, custom educational operating system. The first public alpha release is out.

The sprawling investigation into President Park Geun-hye of South Korea took a dramatic turn on Monday with word that prosecutors were seeking the arrest of the de facto head of Samsung, one of the world's largest conglomerates, on charges that he bribed the president and her secretive confidante.Nobody should be able to escape justice - not even CEOs. I know of a few others who need to follow in Lee's footsteps.

VSI (the men and women porting OpenVMS to x86 hardware) has released an update outlining some of the issues so far in porting this old battleship of an operating system to x86 and liberating it from IA64.This update provides a high level view of our current efforts to port OpenVMS to the Intel x86 hardware platform. The report highlights topics including: Compilers, Objects & Images, Early Boot Path, Virtual Machines, Dump Kernel, Paravirtualization, and Condition Handling.Still a long way to go, but it is exciting for VMS fans.

iPhone app purchasers may sue Apple Inc over allegations that the company monopolized the market for iPhone apps by not allowing users to purchase them outside the App Store, leading to higher prices, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Thursday.Apple bloggers obviously kneejerk straight into defence mode in response to this news, but if you actually dive into the decision, the court makes a very compelling argument as to why this case ought to be allowed to continue, that preempts all the usual terrible analogies they tend to come up with and/or parrot from the party line:Apple argues that it does not sell apps but rather sells "software distribution services to developers." In Apple's view, because it sells distribution services to app developers, it cannot simultaneously be a distributor of apps to apppurchasers. Apple analogizes its role to the role of an owner of a shopping mall that "leases physical space to various stores." Apple's analogy is unconvincing. In the case before us, third-party developers of iPhone apps do not have their own "stores." Indeed, part of the anti-competitive behavior alleged by Plaintiffs is that, far from allowing iPhone app developers to sell through their own "stores," Apple specifically forbids them to do so, instead requiring them to sell iPhone apps only through Apple's App Store.[...]Instead, we rest our analysis, as compelled by Hanover Shoe, Illinois Brick, UtiliCorp, and Delaware Valley, on the fundamental distinction between a manufacturer or producer, on the one hand, and a distributor, on the other. Apple is a distributor of the iPhone apps, selling them directly to purchasers through its App Store. Because Apple is a distributor, Plaintiffs have standing under Illinois Brick to sue Apple for allegedly monopolizing and attempting to monopolize the sale of iPhone apps.Over on Twitter, John Gruber asked me "iPhones are their own market? Does BMW have a monopoly on BMWs?" This clearly demonstrates a lack of understanding of how the car market actually works (and, quite clearly, indicates Gruber didn't even read the actual decision quoted above). In fact, exactly because car manufacturers have a de facto monopoly on their own products, they are legally obliged to open up their specifications to allow other companies to manufacture competing, off-brand parts and to allow third parties to service and maintain the cars according to the manufacturer's own specifications.As I've argued before, there's absolutely no reason why the technology world should be treated any differently. Computers have become integral parts of our society, much like cars, and as consumers we should not be forced into relying on just one company for servicing, maintaining, and using them. It's high time we stop treating technology companies like special little flower children, and force them to grow up and become real companies with real responsibilities.

In 1999, armed with a brand new copy of Metrowerks Codewarrior and a PowerMac running Mac OS 8.5.1, I wrote a basic implementation of Minesweeper to test out the Powerplant application development environment. It's the oldest project of mine that I've kept, so I wanted to see if I could get it running again for the first time in 17 years.There's no Swift or Objective-C code in this article but there are disk-eating koalas, deliberately misspelled cities, Zernike polynomials, Cocoa software (but not the Cocoa you're thinking of), resource forks, master pointer blocks and in the end, I finally earn the admiration of my family.Great, entertaining story, you learn something, and it mentions BeOS. I can't think of anything that would make this story even more likely to get posted on OSNews.

The Nintendo Switch will be released March 3 worldwide for $299, Nintendo announced today during a press briefing in Tokyo.Nintendo will sell the Switch for 29,980 yen in Japan. In Europe, the price will vary by retailer. The Switch will be available in two configurations: one with gray Joy-Con controllers, and the other with neon red and blue Joy-Con devices. Otherwise, the hardware will be the same: 32 GB of internal storage with a 720p touchscreen.I'm somewhat curious about the hardware, somewhat interested in the new Zelda they showed off, but I'm appalled at the pricing in Europe (you'll be plonking down around â¬400 for the console and a game), and disappointed in the weak launch line-up and pretty meagre collection of games they showed off for the coming year.The Mario and Zelda franchises have basically become like Call of Duty - every year, we get pots, remakes, of a new game with a few new mechanics, and that's it. There's nothing wrong with that - if people enjoy them, they enjoy them, and that's great - but I feel like Nintendo could be doing so much more than this.

As some of you may undoubtedly know, I'm a bit of a sucker for Palm OS. These past few years, I've been busy collecting ROMs for the Palm OS emulator and simulator, making sure I have all the major Palm OS releases covered. There's really not much of a reason to do this - I have working devices which are a much better option than the emulators/simulators in most cases - other than to have a complete collection I can keep around forever.Perfection needs little evolution.From top left to bottom right, you're looking at Palm OS 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, 5.3 (a Palm Zire ROM), 5.4.9 (the last released version of Palm OS available on real devices), and Palm OS 6.1.0 Cobalt (the last version of Palm OS; no 6.x device has ever been released). This is a pretty complete collection, and while it doesn't contain every released version of Palm OS, it covers the most important ones, and provides a great overview of the development of the operating system.One important version is actually missing from this screenshot: Palm OS 5.5, whose official name is actually Garnet OS 5.5. Garnet OS 5.5 was developed by ACCESS (current owner of Palm OS and the associated IP), but was never released on or for devices - its sole function was to serve as the operating system running inside the Garnet VM. Garnet VM was a virtual machine developed to allow Palm OS applications to run on the ACCESS Linux Platform, a Linux-based mobile operating system that never gained any traction; no ALP devices were ever released.As some of you may remember, Garnet VM was also released for Nokia's Maemo. I have a Nokia N900 (maybe even two) that can run Garnet VM, and while it's no longer available from ACCESS itself, it's easy to find all around the web if you know where to look. I'm not sure if my N900 is properly set up (I think it is), but it would be trivial for me to install Garnet VM on it and play with it.So, between my Palm/CLIÉ devices and all these emulators/simulators, every major Palm OS version seems covered, right? Well, no - not entirely. There's quite a few exotic devices, such as the AlphaSmart Dana, the TapWave Zodiac, or the Fossil Palm OS smartwatch, but those are disproportionately hard to come by. Setting those aside, I thought I had all my bases covered.Turns out - as is so often the case - I was wrong. On Twitter, q3hardcore asked "do you have this?"As it turns out, and entirely unbeknownst to me, ACCESS actually released the Garnet VM for Linux and Windows. After coming to the conclusion that this piece of software was entirely impossible to find online (try it), q3hardcore came to the rescue once again, and uploaded his or her copy of the package online. Questionable legality aside, I didn't have to think twice.The purpose of the Garnet VM for Linux and Windows was to allow Palm OS application developers to test their Palm OS applications to see if they would run on the Garnet VM included in the ACCESS Linux Platform, and make changes if needed.This Garnet VM is an amazing piece of technology. It's the Palm OS userland - version 5.5.0 - running on a Linux kernel running on an ARM emulator running on Windows or Linux. The ARM emulator in question is called Janeiro, and it emulates a Zylonite (PXA320) development board, revision B1. As it boots up, there's zero indication that it's running a Linux kernel - the X 'cross' appears briefly (at least, it looks like the X cross), but that's it.The major difference between the Garnet VM and the Palm OS 5.x and 6.x simulators is that while the simulators run x86 Palm OS, Garnet VM runs an ARM Palm OS userland atop an ARM Linux kernel. This means - at least, in theory - that ARM Palm OS applications should run decently well on Garnet VM, something you can't do with the Palm OS simulator, because they would need to be recompiled to x86. I say 'in theory', because the Garnet VM documentation notes that not all Palm OS libraries and components are present, and that only "well-behaved" applications are compatible.I've only had access to the Garnet VM for Windows for a short while, and I haven't yet had the time to really dive into it. For instance, I've yet to figure out how to get applications to run inside the VM, since the usual methods don't seem to want to cooperate. I'll spend some more of my free time on playing with it over the coming weeks to better figure out how it all works.In any event, the Garnet VM for Windows and Linux is a unique piece of computing history, and I am absolutely delighted to be able to add it to my collection of Palm OS memorabilia. I've briefly considered zipping up all the emulators, simulators, and ROMs I have into a nice preconfigured, documented package for people to play with, but that's not something I can do for obvious copyright, trademark, and patent reasons. Most of this stuff isn't particularly hard to find, but it does require a bit of Palm experience to put it all together and document it. I don't think I'll ever get permission from ACCESS, so that's the end of that idea.Still, I think it's important that I continue to collect these Palm OS ROMs and emulators/simulators, because as the years go by, more and more Palm devices will start to break down or get lost, leaving us without to ability to experience this amazingly lovable operating system. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

A year ago, we set out to explore what web browsers might look like in years to come. Now, you can try Opera Neon - a concept browser that gives you a glimpse into the future of desktop browsers.A little too quirky for my tastes, but hats off to Opera for trying out new approaches -browsers feel dead and lifeless at the moment.

I don't think we'll ever see Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and the cliffhanger conclusion makes Half-Life 3 unlikely as well. The best chance of Half-Life getting a second wind will likely come if J. J. Abrams and Bad Robot can get the Half-Life film to screen. If that comes to fruition, and it doesn't bomb like almost every game movie before it, maybe, just maybe there's a chance of Gordon Freemanâs story continuing. Roll your eyes at the movie mention if you want, but how else will this franchise get a pulse again?The interview you are about to read sheds some insight into how Valve works as a developer. Yes, someone at Valve could just say, "Let's make another Half-Life" and do it, but there are huge risks and hurdles involved in doing that. Prior to this interview, I was in the camp of, "Valve just doesn't get it." Now I'm in the camp of, "Valve is probably doing the right thing, but it's disappointing." This interview opened my eyes to Valve's unique way of developing games, but also provided a bit of closure for someone who wants to see Half-Life continue. In the days before publishing this story, I reached out to Valve one last time for comment, but my request went unanswered. Without further delay, here's the interview.This is a must-read.

That's where the company's new software tool Qbsolv comes in. Qbsolv is designed to help developers program D-Wave machines without needing a background in quantum physics. A few of D-Wave's partners are already using the tool, but today the company released Qbsolv as open source, meaning anyone will be able to freely share and modify the software."Not everyone in the computer science community realizes the potential impact of quantum computing," says Fred Glover, a mathematician at the University of Colorado, Boulder who has been working with Qbsolv. "Qbsolv offers a tool that can make this impact graphically visible, by getting researchers and practitioners involved in charting the future directions of quantum computing developments."

VentureBeat has a great, in-depth sourced look at the rise of and fall of Ara, Google's modular phone project. One paragraph in particular stands out to me."One of the modules that we were working on was basically like a tiny aquarium for your phone," said the source. "It was a little tiny biome that would go inside of a module and it would have a microscope on the bottom part, and it would have live tardigrades and algae - some people call them water bears. They are the tiniest living organism. We had this idea to build a tardigrade module and we'd build a microscope with it. So you'd have this app on your phone and you could essentially look at the tardigrades up close and watch them floating around." Brooklyn-based art, design, and technology agency Midnight Commercial conceived the idea, and was commissioned by Google to build it, demonstrating the depth of what developers could create.If the people working on Ara had the guts to come up with and actually build things like this, they were on the right track. This is exactly the kind of crazy, outlandish stuff that would be a perfect fit and marketing gimmick for a crazy, outlandish product like Ara.I am incredibly sad that Ara has been cancelled. I realise full well it would never be the kind of massive product like the Galaxy series or the iPhone, but I don't care - I just really, really like the idea, the concept, and the possibilities, mass appeal be damned.

The beauty of the internet: there's always someone else who is also interested in the things you're interested in. It turns out, even people who are working on trying to bring Mac OS 9 to the PowerPC G5 can find each other online. Now, it's important to note that even the people themselves acknowledge that this project is a very, very long shot and unlikely to succeed - but that doesn't mean it isn't worth trying and learning something along the way.This project (we call it "CountDown G5") is ambitious, sure, and unlikely to succeed. But a few things make it worthwhile:I am learning a lot about low-level kernel programming, which I find fascinating as a hobby.We are crafting a build system in MPW, inspired by that source leak, for very low-level assembly and linking of a NewWorld ROM. This will be useful to other hackers in the future.We have an intermediate goal of increasing the usable logical address space on OS 9 to near the 2 GB hardware limit.The G5 isn't all that different. It has facilities for running 32-bit OSes, and early G5s thankfully left the Block Allocation Table mechanism intact.Be sure to follow the thread on the forum if you're interested in this type of exotic hacking.Meanwhile, also definitely 100% be sure to follow Steven Troughton-Smith, who, over the past few days, has been doing an absolutely crazy amount of work on things that go far beyond my comfort zone (he pointed the above thread out to me just now). He's been investigating all the work the Qemu people have been doing on PowerPC emulation, and he's trying to get all the early and often exotic Mac OS X builds to boot on Qemu. This includes things like altering and recompiling BootX, diving deep into Open Firmware to remove a number of 'fixes' put in place that prevented early OS X versions from booting, and tons of other things.

Jehanne is a new distributed operating system designed for programmers.The core values that lead the development are simplicity and security. Jehanne is a fork of Harvey (which in turn is a fork of Plan 9 from Bell Labs merged with Nix's kernel sources) but diverges from the design and conventions of its ancestors whenever they are at odds with its goals. Read about development progress made in 2016.

Today we are excited to be releasing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 15002 for PC to Windows Insiders in the Fast ring. This is a BIG update so please take time to look through all of the new changes we detail below.Usually, these new Windows 10 Insider Preview builds are a pretty low-key affair, but this one has a ton of changes, new features and fixes, and the blog post does a good job of summarising them. They cover things like improving resizing performance, various Edge updates, tile folders in the Start menu, a new share UI, and the first steps towards replacing the dreaded Character Map with a new, faster way of inputting special characters.It really feels like Microsoft is at the point where they can address the various relatively minor things that start adding up when you use Windows.

Rux's goal is to become a safe general-purpose microkernel. It tries to take advantage of Rust's memory model - ownership and lifetime. While the kernel will be small, unsafe code should be kept minimal. This makes updating functionalities of the kernel hassle-free.Rux uses a design that is similar to seL4. While there won't be formal verification in the short term, it tries to address some design issues of seL4, for example, capability allocation.The code is very approachable for anyone interested in capability-based microkernel design.

Robigalia is a project with two goals:Build a robust Rust ecosystem around seL42. Create a highly reliable persistent capability OS, continuing the heritage of EROS and CoyotosThe year-in-review blogpost has a nice overview of where the project stands.

Back before all-digital music, back before the Digital Compact Cassette, back before even the Digital Audio Tape existed, there was a strange audio device that briefly captured the imagination of Hi-Fi freaks across the world. The Elcaset, as it was called, was an enlarged cassette that started in Japan, wove its hidden, spinning spools around the world, and then finished, appropriately enough, in Finland.As someone who swore by MiniDisc up until quite recently, I love obscure audio formats. This article is from the summer of last year, but I only came across it just now thanks to Atlas Obscura.

Viva Amiga is a wonderful look at the the history of the platform, the people who built it, and the users who loved it. The opening title says it all: "One Amazing Computer. One chance to save the company. One chance to win the PC wars." This message sets the stage nicely for a dramatic and passionate tale.You can watch the documentary online, but it isn't free.

In terms of hardware, the Nokia 6 offers a 5.5-inch Full HD display with 2.5D curved glass, Snapdragon 430 SoC, 4GB of RAM, 64GB storage, microSD slot, dual-SIM connectivity, 16MP camera at the back with PDAF, Dolby Atmos sound with stereo speakers, Bluetooth 4.1, LTE, 3000mAh battery, and a fingerprint sensor. The phone runs Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box.Not exactly the most exciting phone.

In short, Amazon is building the operating system of the home - its name is Alexa - and it has all of the qualities of an operating system you might expect:All kinds of hardware manufacturers are lining up to build Alexa-enabled devices, and will inevitably compete with each other to improve quality and lower prices.Even more devices and appliances are plugging into Alexa's easy-to-use and flexible framework, creating the conditions for a moat: appliances are a lot more expensive than software, and much longer lasting, which means everyone who buys something that works with Alexa is much less likely to switch.It's definitely an interesting case to make - and Ben Thomspon does it well - but I still have a very, very hard time seeing voice-driven interfaces as anything but a gimmick at this point in time. Every point I made about this subject in the Summer of 2016 still stands today - limited functionality, terrible speech recognition, inability to deal with dialects and accents, and the complete and utter lack of support for people who live multilingual lives.I can't hammer this last point home often enough: not a single one of the voice-driven interfaces we have today - Alexa, Siri, Google Now, Google Assistant, Cortana, whatever - support multilingual use. Some of them may allow you to go deep into a menu structure to change input language (while some, like smartwatches, even require a full wipe and reset), but that's not a solution to the problem of switching language sometimes even several times a minute, something multilingual people have to do dozens of times every day. And again - there are literally hundreds of millions of people who lead multilingual lives.Heck, Alexa is only available in English and German!If voice-driven interfaces are really as important as people make them out to be, they've got at least a decade of development ahead of them before they become actually useful and usable for the vast majority of the world.

Late last year we reported on Project NEON - the upcoming UI upgrade for Windows 10. Recently we managed a closer look at Microsoft's internal plans for Project NEON and the future of Windows 10's UI (user-interface). Right of the bat I don't want readers to be fooled by those who suggest this is a major or a complete overhaul of Windows 10's design language. In fact, it's a fairly minor update that builds on the current Windows 10 UI (aka MDL2).Nevertheless, change is always exciting, so here's an early look at NEON.Project NEON will heavily focus on animations, simplicity, and consistency - essentially bringing back Windows 7's Aero Glass and mixing it up with animations like the ones from the Windows Phone 8/7 era.This won't be the final design that makes it into Windows, but still - they should really fix that ridiculous border around the titlebar widgets. Other than that - it seems they want to make it less bright and colourful than Metro, which I guess a lot of people will be happy about. Question remains though - there are barely any Metro applications worth using today, so will this change anything?

Redox OS, a microkernel OS written in Rust, hast just released version 0.0.6, which includes bug fixes and and update to Rust.From the project's 2016 in review post:Today, we have a pretty mature project. It contains many core, usable components. It is already usable, but it is still not mature yet to be used as a replacement for Linux (like BSD is), but weâre slowly getting there.The kernel was rewritten, a memory allocator was added, rendering libc out of the dependency chain, several applications were added, a file system were added, a window manager and display server was implemented, and so on.

Redux OS, a microkernel OS written in Rust, hast just released version 0.0.6, which includes bug fixes and and update to Rust.From the project's 2016 in review post:Today, we have a pretty mature project. It contains many core, usable components. It is already usable, but it is still not mature yet to be used as a replacement for Linux (like BSD is), but weâre slowly getting there.The kernel was rewritten, a memory allocator was added, rendering libc out of the dependency chain, several applications were added, a file system were added, a window manager and display server was implemented, and so on.

Ahead of CES 2017, TCL teased that they would be offering a look at the first device to come out of their smartphone software and brand licensing deal with BlackBerry and they've now made good on that, though, they're keeping a lot of the finer details surrounding the phone secret for just a bit longer.It runs Android, and it's got a keyboard. What more do you need to know? The world needs more of these types of phones.

This has been the winter of our discontent. 2016 was the year the tone changed. There's always been a lot of criticism and griping about anything Apple does (and doesn't do - it can't win) but in 2016 I feel like the tone of the chatter about Apple changed and got a lot more negative.This is worrisome on a number of levels and I've been thinking about it a lot. I'm used to watching people kvetch about the company, but this seems - different. One reason: a lot of the criticisms are correct.Apple, for the first time in over a decade, simply isn't firing on all cylinders. Please don't interpret that as "Apple is doomed" because it's not, but there are things it's doing a lot less well than it could - and has. Apple's out of sync with itself.Here are a few of the things I think indicate Apple has gotten itself out of kilter and is in need of some course correction.This post by Chuq Von Rospach has been widely shared and debated all over the web, and it has some great insights into Apple's 2016. Note that Chuq Von Rospach is a former Apple (and Palm) employee, and certainly has the credentials to talk about these matters.

Me, almost seven years ago (2010), about the dearth of news about alternative operating systems:OSNews has moved on. As much as it saddens me to see the technology world settling on Macwinilux (don't flatter yourself, those three are pretty much the same), it's a fact I have to deal with. It's my job to fill OSNews with lots of interesting news to discuss, and even though I would love to be able to talk about how new and exciting operating systems are going to take over the desktop world, I have to be realistic too. Geeks (meaning you and I) have made a very clear choice, and it doesn't seem like anything's about to bring back those exciting early days of OSNews.Me, almost four years ago (2013), about why there are no mobile hobbyist operating systems:So, what is the cause? I personally think it has to do with how we perceive our smartphones and tablets. They are much more personal, and I think we are less open to messing with them than we were to messing with our PCs a decade ago. Most of us have only one modern smartphone, and we use it every day, so we can't live with a hobbyist operating system where, say, 3G doesn't work or WiFi disconnects every five seconds due to undocumented stuff in the chip. Android ROMs may sound like an exception, but they really aren't; virtually all of them support your hardware fully.With people unwilling to sacrifice their smartphone to play with alternative systems, it makes sense that fewer people are interested in developing these alternative systems. It is, perhaps, telling that Robert Szeleney, the programmer behind SkyOS, moved to developing mobile games. And that Wim Cools, the developer of TriangleOS, moved towards developing web applications for small businesses. Hard work that puts food on the table, sure, and as people get older priorities shift, but you would expect new people to step up to the plate and take over.So far, this hasn't happened. All we can hope for is that the mobile revolution is still young, and that we should give it some more time for a new, younger generation of gifted programmers to go for that grand slam.I sincerely hope so.I don't know, for some mysterious reason I figured I'd link to these seven and four year old stories.

Apple, maker of the ever-popular iPhone, is being sued on allegations that its FaceTime app contributed to the highway death of a 5-year-old girl named Moriah Modisette. In Denton County, Texas, on Christmas Eve 2014, a man smashed into the Modisette family's Toyota Camry as it stopped in traffic on southbound Interstate 35W. Police say that the driver was using the FaceTime application and never saw the brake lights ahead of him. In addition to the tragedy, father James, mother Bethany, and daughter Isabella all suffered non-fatal injuries during the crash two years ago.The Modisette family now wants Apple to pay damages for the mishap. The family alleges the Cupertino, California-based technology company had a duty to warn motorists against using the app and that it could have used patented technology to prohibit drivers from utilizing the app. I feel for the grieving family, of course, but this is, in no way, Apple's fault. The only person responsible for the horrible death is the driver using Facetime, and possibly - although that's probably quite a stretch - the person he was using FaceTime with, but that's it.

I'm going to use PICO-8, which its creator, Joseph "Zep" White, calls a 'fantasy console', but really it's like an indie-fied emulator of the computers I grew up with, like the BBC B. When you start it, you're presented with a 128 by 128 pixel display glitching into life, this little do-do-do-do! jingle, and a command prompt.Everything you need to make games is right there: a mini Lua code editor, sprite and map editors, and sound and music editors. It's reactive, instant to test to see if things work, and generally delightful. And the stuff people have made in it is extraordinary. Little short-form games: colourful, fun, immediate, varied. Type SPLORE into the command prompt and this little browser for games posted to the PICO-8 forum comes up. Since no game, including its graphics, is bigger than a 65K text file, you're playing them pretty much instantly. It's lovely.This is just the first article in a series.

Software is the umbrella term for computer programs and libraries, the coded logic that makes our machines tick. At the root of all software is the code, the instructions that enable a human to tell a machine what to do. This code is written in one of the hundreds of different programming languages - such as C, Java, or Python - each of which has its own eccentricities and context-dependent advantages.Yet regardless of the programming language being used, the functionality, logic, and efficiency of the language are always paramount - unless, of course, you're talking about

Ending this year, Ron G. Minnich has got Harvey running in RISC-V architecture, booting Harvey on Spike (ISA Simulator) and running rc shell on it. But he never rests and now is working on bringing it to QEMU and to FPGA. It's a big step for Harvey because we fixed some multiarch issues across the source and Ron found some bugs in timer interrupts in the hardware, so we all learned something.What is Harvey OS?Harvey is an effort to provide a modern, distributed, 64 bit operating system. A different environment for researching and finding new lines of work. It can be built with gcc and clang and has an ANSI/POSIX compliant subsystem.Two news items about alternative operating systems in a row?The year's off to a good start.

Hyperion Entertainment is proud to announce the immediate release of AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 1 for all supported systems including PowerPC equipped 68K Amiga machines. Building on the existing AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition platform, Update 1 is the culmination of many man-months of work by our dedicated team of AmigaOS developers, translators and beta testers. It delivers a selection of new features and a host of bug fixes.The naming scheme still confuses me.

Marcan42 of Fail0verflow fame was at the CCC33 event this year, to explain how Fail0verflow exploited the PS4 hardware in order to run Linux on the PS4.The presentation goes back to all the pain the hackers had to go through in order to make Linux compatible with the PS4 architecture, which Marcan42 described several times throughout the presentation as "not being a PC" as it lacks lots of the legacy architecture bits required for a computer to constitute what is known today as an IBM compatible PC.Be sure to watch the actual presentation. It's quite informative and detailed.

Marcan42 of Fail0verflow fame was at the CCC33 event this year, to explain how Fail0verflow exploited the PS4 hardware in order to run Linux on the PS4.The presentation goes back to all the pain the hackers had to go through in order to make Linux compatible with the PS4 architecture, which Marcan42 described several times throughout the presentation as "not being a PC" as it lacks lots of the legacy architecture bits required for a computer to constitute what is known today as an IBM compatible PC.Be sure to watch the actual presentation. It's quite informative and detailed.

Last October at the Windows 10 event in New York City, Microsoft officially unveiled the Windows 10 Creators Update, codenamed "Redstone 2". At the event, Microsoft stated that the update will be released in "early 2017" but we didn't know when exactly the update will arrive.Until now, anyway.Per my sources, Microsoft will be releasing the Windows 10 Creators Update this April.The more regular, smaller updates Windows gets now is such a huge step up from the monolithic releases of yore.