OSnews

Kaspersky Labs has developed its own operating system for switches and other networking devices.First, it's based on microkernel architecture, which allows to assemble 'from blocks' different modifications of the operating system depending on a customer's specific requirements.Second, there's its built-in security system, which controls the behavior of applications and the OS's modules. In order to hack this platform a cyber-baddie would need to break the digital signature, which - any time before the introduction of quantum computers - would be exorbitantly expensive.Third, everything has been built from scratch. Anticipating your questions: not even the slightest smell of Linux. All the popular operating systems aren't designed with security in mind, so it's simpler and safer to start from the ground up and do everything correctly. Which is just what we did.More details will follow soon, the company promises.

Command Prompt has been around for as long as we can remember, but starting with Windows 10 build 14971, Microsoft is trying to make PowerShell the main command shell in the operating system.As a result, PowerShell officially replaces the Command Prompt in the Win + X menu, so when you right-click the Start menu, youâll only be allowed to launch the more powerful app. Additionally, in File Explorerâs File menu and in the context menu that appears when pressing Shift + right-click in any folder, the old Command Prompt will no longer be available.Typing cmd in the run dialog will launch PowerShell as well, so Microsoft has made a significant step towards phasing out the traditional Command Prompt.It's funny - cmd has always been seen as a sort-of Baby's First Command Line, and compared to the shell that comes standard with any UNIX-based operating system, that was certainly true. However, now that Windows has a replacement that is much more capable than cmd, people will cry foul and hell over the possible deprecation of cmd.Us nerds are fickle.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today announced that Microsoft has joined the organization at a Platinum member during Microsoft's Connect(); developer event in New York.For those of us who witnessed the Microsoft of the late '90s and early 2000s, this is yet another one of those "the industry has really changed" moments.

The Verge's Surface Studio review (there's more reviews at Engadget and CNet):It's an engineering marvel of a monitor, but I really wish Microsoft sold it separately. I want to dock my Surface Book to it, or transform any laptop into a full Surface Studio. If I'm investing in a desktop PC at this kind of price then I also really want to be able to upgrade it and use it for gaming and more powerful work. I can't do either of those things with the Surface Studio. If this was a monitor with a powerful GPU in it designed to complement Microsoft's existing Surface devices and "upgrade" them, I'd probably be throwing my wallet at my screen right now. It's hard to do so knowing that I'm not getting the latest and greatest specs for that $2,999, and that's before you even consider the top model I've been testing is $4,199.That doesn't discount what Microsoft has attempted to do here. It's truly something unique and a hint of real innovation we haven't seen for some years with PCs. Others have tried to experiment, like HP's Sprout, but it's rare to see something more than just an all-in-one. Microsoft's exciting Surface Studio unveil has been compared to Apple's disappointing MacBook Pro launch, and with good reason. Many creatives Iâve spoken to about the Surface Studio have said the same thing: why isn't Apple doing this? Apple seems to be forcing creatives to choose an iPad Pro for touch and pen, but the powerful and professional apps just aren't there yet on iOS, and it's not clear if companies like Adobe are willing to rewrite their software to be just as useful on an iPad Pro. Microsoft has realized the potential in the market to reach out to creatives who feel abandoned by Apple, and it's an influential crowd that could be swayed over by devices like the Surface Studio.As awesome as the Surface Studio looks, the specs of the PC part of the equation lag behind - most of the high price is defined by the display - but I guess the biggest problem with it is that it runs Windows. The creative community has been using macOS for so long, and it's hard to leave a platform behind.

Encryption protects your data if your phone falls into someone else's hands. The new Google Pixel and Pixel XL are encrypted by default to offer strong data protection, while maintaining a great user experience with high I/O performance and long battery life. In addition to encryption, the Pixel phones debuted running the Android Nougat release, which has even more security improvements.This blog post covers the encryption implementation on Google Pixel devices and how it improves the user experience, performance, and security of the device.These kinds of things should've been default a long time ago.

Microsoft is hosting its annual Connect(); developer event in New York today. With .NET being at the core of many of its efforts, including on the open-source side, itâs no surprise that the event also featured a few .NET-centric announcements, as well. For the most part, these center around the .NET Foundation, the open-source organization Microsoft established to guide the future development of the .NET Core project.As the company announced today, Google is now a member of the .NET Foundation, where it joins the likes of Red Hat, Unity, Samsung JetBrains and (of course) Microsoft in the Technical Steering Group.In addition, Samsung is bringing .NET to its Tizen platform, which it claims is installed on 50 million devices. Tizen is uses in Samsung smartwatches and TVs, among other things.

ReactOS 0.4.3 has been released.Notable in this release is the switching to a new winsock library that had been started several years ago by Alex Ionescu and imported into trunk by Ged Murphy. Even after it was brought in however significant work remained to be done before it could replace the old winsock library, work which Peter Hater and Andreas Maier undertook. Their effort has now reached a point wherein the team feels it is ready to supplant the original library and 0.4.3 serves as the first release to incorporate it. As the winsock library underpins effectively all network operations in user mode applications, and its improvement should be a significant boon for ReactOS' compatibility with such programs as the Good old Games (GoG) client and newer versions of the Python runtime.The changelog offers all the details, and you can download it from their website.

Microsoft held the keynote for its Connect() developer conference today, where it announced the next version of its integrated development environment (IDE), Visual Studio 2017. The company is also offering a release candidate, which you can grab from VisualStudio.com.[...]The company's latest IDE has a heavy focus on mobile cross-platform development, coming with an iOS Simulator, a feature that used to be exclusive to developing on a Mac.In addition, as accidentally spoiled earlier this week, Visual Studio for the Mac has also been released. Technically, it's Xamarin, but Microsoft is rebranding it as Visual Studio.

Samsung has announced that it has acquired Harman, the company behind over 20 brands including audio companies AKG, JBL and Harman/Kardon, as well as a suite of connected car technologies.Although you're probably more familiar with Harman for their audio brands, the company earns around two thirds of its revenues from automotive-related segments where it produces telematics, security and 'embedded infotainment' solutions.

For about $50, you can get a smartphone with a high-definition display, fast data service and, according to security contractors, a secret feature: a backdoor that sends all your text messages to China every 72 hours.Security contractors recently discovered preinstalled software in some Android phones that monitors where users go, whom they talk to and what they write in text messages. The American authorities say it is not clear whether this represents secretive data mining for advertising purposes or a Chinese government effort to collect intelligence.Through Chinese manufacturer BLU, some 120.000 BLU phones in the US were affected as well. According to BLU, the company immediately removed the offending software. The original purpose of the software was, supposedly, to aid in the detection of junk messages.

Complete formal verification of a non-trivial concurrent OS kernel is widely considered a grand challenge. We present a novel compositional approach for building certified concurrent OS kernels. Concurrency allows interleaved execution of kernel/user modules across different layers of abstraction. Each such layer can have a different set of observable events. We insist on formally specifying these layers and their observable events, and then verifying each kernel module at its proper abstraction level. To support certified linking with other CPUs or threads, we prove a strong contextual refinement property for every kernel function, which states that the implementation of each such function will behave like its specification under any kernel/user context with any valid interleaving. We have successfully developed a practical concurrent OS kernel and verified its (contextual) functional correctness in Coq. Our certified kernel is written in 6500 lines of C and x86 assembly and runs on stock x86 multicore machines. To our knowledge, this is the first proof of functional correctness of a complete, general-purpose concurrent OS kernel with fine-grained locking.Some light reading for your late Tuesday afternoon.

Here's a short little tip with some interesting background information. If you are running Windows on your Mac - like I'm doing on my 2015 retina MacBook Pro because macOS is far too unoptimised to run on it - and it's using an Intel graphics chip, be sure to replace Apple's own Boot Camp graphics drivers with Intel's own latest drivers.The reason why you should do this is kind of fascinating. I noticed that while Windows as a whole ran quite fast and snappy - much more so than macOS with its crappy responsiveness, FPS drops, and hangs, even after reinstallations - two applications had responsiveness issues: Chrome and Microsoft Office. With Chrome, I chalked it up to #justchromethings and moved on. With Office though, I was perplexed.The past few versions of Office, including the current one, are fast, snappy, and instant. The days where Office applications were slow and cumbersome are long gone, even on lower-end hardware like the 2015 retina MacBook Pro. However, Office applications were slow, rendering was terrible, and things like dragging and resizing Office windows was literally a slide show - and I wanted to know why.I found out that on Windows, Microsoft Office uses its own rendering pipeline (framework? I'm not really sure what the accurate terminology is here), different from both Win32 and Metro applications. As it turns out, Office does its own check of the video card and driver to determine if hardware acceleration for Office should be disabled or not.By default, hardware acceleration is automatically disabled in Office programs if certain video card and video card driver combinations are detected when you start an Office program. If hardware acceleration is automatically disabled by the program, nothing indicates that this change occurred.Well, except that Office now runs like a total dog, of course.Apparently, the Office team maintains its own list of video card/driver combinations and keeps this list a secret.The list of video card/video driver combinations that trigger this automatic disabling of hardware graphics acceleration is not documented because the list is hard-coded in the Office programs and will be constantly changing as we discover additional video combinations that cause problems in Office programs.When I ran the Intel Driver Update Utility on my retina MacBook Pro to determine if the Apple-provided Intel graphics driver was up-to-date, the tool found a newer driver, but warned me that my OEM (Apple) had modified the already-installed driver, and that I would lose those customisations. I proceeded to download the new driver anyway, only to be hit by a very peculiar dialog upon trying to install the driver Intel told me was newer than what I had installed: the installer warned my I was installing an older driver than what I had installed.So, I decided to download the latest driver (the latest beta) manually, installed it, and this fixed not just Office, but also Chrome - which I find particularly baffling (maybe Chrome maintains a similar list?).The list that the Office team maintains is not of good drivers, but of bad drivers. For Office's hardware acceleration to fail, the driver needs to be on the list. This means that the combination "Apple-modified Intel graphics driver/Iris 6100" was, at some point, added to the list, triggering the disabling of hardware acceleration for Office. The combination "Intel's own graphics driver/Iris 6100" is not on the list.There's a number of possible explanations here, and I'm not really sure which one makes the most sense. Apple cares too little about Boot Camp users to intentionally cripple the Apple-supplied Intel drivers, so that's definitely not the cause. I also don't think the Intel driver magically improved a ton in the span of just a few weeks (there's only a few weeks of difference between the two versions, but I'm not trusting version numbers here) - but maybe it did? I honestly don't know. It's Intel's beta driver that isn't even signed by Microsoft, but somehow, the Office team tested it and removed it from their list? My first instinct was to think that because Apple had modified the driver, it wasn't on Microsoft's list - but since the list is for bad drivers, that makes no sense.The most logical explanation I have right now - suggested by Steven Troughton-Smith - is that Apple changes a few things in the Intel driver to optimise Windows' battery life, which in turn tune down the performance, causing the Office team to add this specific driver/video card combination to the list. I've been keeping an eye on battery life since installing the driver, but haven't noticed much of a difference.I don't think this little tip will be useful for a lot of people, but I really enjoyed trying to figure out what was going on. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

China will take a tit-for-tat approach then. A batch of Boeing orders will be replaced by Airbus. US auto and iPhone sales in China will suffer a setback, and US soybean and maize imports will be halted. China can also limit the number of Chinese students studying in the US. Trump as a shrewd businessman will not be so naive. None of the previous presidents were bold enough to launch an all-out trade war against China. They all opted for a cautious line since it's most consistent with the overall interests of the US, and it's most acceptable to US society.That's China's state-run newspaper, threatening to hit - among others - Apple where it hurts.I don't think American companies are going to, uh, just allow Trump and his administration to carry out this promise he made to voters - one of his core promises, I might add.

Frank Azor explains to PC Gamer why SteamOS seems to have kind of... Faded away:"Valve ran into some delays with the controller, and while that was occurring, Windows 10 was being released," Azor said. "I think Microsoft learned a very valuable lesson - a lot of valuable lessons - with Windows 8 and tried to correct those with Windows 10. It's more gamer focused, I would say. Every subsequent release has focused on gamers. Although their execution isn't perfect, it's definitely improved compared to Windows 8."He continued: "I think the need right now, for Steam Machines and for SteamOS, isn't as great as it was two years ago, and thatâs contributed to the reason why the momentum has faded. We still offer SteamOS and the Steam Machine platform with the new version of the Alpha - the new Steam Machine R2 - and we still sell hundreds of units, thousands of units every month. But it's not a major initiative for us like it was two years ago because it's not necessary right now. We're in a good place with Windows."Microsoft did better with Windows 10, and lest we forget: Valve totally botched everything they could possibly botch with SteamOS.

Ars Technica:A lucky few were able to secure and purchase the new NES Classic Edition when it launched on Friday, but not every buyer is playing games on it. The hacking community has pounced upon the device to see what the little box can do, and you know what that means: installing Linux.Or, at least, your own Linux kernel. The NES Classic Edition already runs on Linux, and Nintendo has complied with open source license rules by offering downloads of the tiny hardware's Linux source files. While a few enterprising hackers have posted about connecting a serial cable to the motherboard and trying to install their own kernels, one Japanese hacker pulled it off - and posted a guide explaining how he did so (if you really care, he also posted the entire bootlog from his first successful boot).I still really kind of want to build my own little machine that can emulate classic consoles. One of those project that's actually not too hard to do these days.

At Connect(); in November, Microsoft is launching a preview of Visual Studio for Mac. This is an exciting development, evolving the mobile-centric Xamarin Studio IDE into a true mobile-first, cloud-first development tool for .NET and C#, and bringing the Visual Studio development experience to the Mac.

We all know the feeling. You just want to use some of your favourite 16bit Windows applications, only to realise that since you moved to 64bit, Windows no longer runs them. This gets me every time, probably 4-5 times a day. Every time I'm like - there's got to be a better way than firing up my old 386 laptop, or running an entire Windows 3.x VM just to get my daily fix of Skifree.Right?I jest, of course, but when Brad Robinson's partner, Jen, wanted to play some old 16bit Windows games, he did actually want to create a less frustrating user experience. So, he decided to write a Windows 3 emulator.The basic idea is to write a program that can read a 16-bit Windows executable file, run it on an emulated CPU and map any 16-bit API calls that it makes onto the x64 equivalents.The emulator itself isn't available just yet, but his series of articles on Medium detailing its development are fascinating reads.

Darling, the project to bring macOS binaries to Linux, is still active. After a period of inactivity, the project has picked up speed, according to phoronix.com.Darling is still progressing but in its latest state can not run any macOS GUI applications but rather only basic command-line apps with both 32-bit and 64-bit capabilities. From the Darling Shell there is support for working with DMG images and even using Apple's Xcode toolchain for compiling basic "Hello World!" type applications for macOS and running from a Linux system.

A few days ago, Google filed its official response to the EU antritrust investigation into Android. The company details its main arguments on the Android Blog, and it's definitely worth a read. The blog post is remarkably open about one of Android's main shortcomings - fragmentation.To manage this challenge, we work with hardware makers to establish a minimum level of compatibility among Android devices. Critically, we give phone makers wide latitude to build devices that go above that baseline, which is why you see such a varied universe of Android devices. That's the key: our voluntary compatibility agreements enable variety while giving developers confidence to create apps that run seamlessly across thousands of different phones and tablets. This balance stimulates competition between Android devices as well as between Android and Apple's iPhone.Android's compatibility rules help minimize fragmentation and sustain a healthy ecosystem for developers. Ninety-four percent of respondents who answered questions on fragmentation in a Commission market survey said that it harms the Android platform. Developers worry about it, and our competitors with proprietary platforms (who don't face the same risk) regularly criticize us for it. The Commission's proposal risks making fragmentation worse, hurting the Android platform and mobile phone competition.The whole post is worth a read. As I've said before - I'm glad the EU keeps these large companies on their toes, but the accusations regarding Android seem way off base to me. In the end, market regulation needs to benefit consumers, not harm them - and it's easy to see how fragmenting Android into incompatible Samsung, Sony, HTC, and Google Androids would definitely harm consumers and developers alike.I think there's a lot more fodder to be found looking at the relationship between companies like Samsung and Apple on the one hand, and carriers on the other. On top of that, the EU could've invested a lot more effort into fostering alternative platforms, instead of letting Microsoft ruin Nokia and run it into the ground (speaking of places where there's fodder to be found).Nobody wants the proverbial Android N.

With the US presidential elections right behind us, there's been a lot of talk about the role platforms like Facebook and Twitter have in our modern discourse. Last week, it was revealed that teens in Macedonia earns thousands of dollars each month by posting patently false stories about the elections on Facebook and getting them to go viral. With Facebook being a major source of news for a lot of people, such false stories can certainly impact people's voting behaviour.In a statement to TechCrunch, Facebook responded to the criticism that the company isn't doing enough to stop this kind of thing. The statement in full reads:We take misinformation on Facebook very seriously. We value authentic communication, and hear consistently from those who use Facebook that they prefer not to see misinformation. In Newsfeed we use various signals based on community feedback to determine which posts are likely to contain inaccurate information, and reduce their distribution. In Trending we look at a variety of signals to help make sure the topics being shown are reflective of real-world events, and take additional steps to prevent false or misleading content from appearing. Despite these efforts we understand there's so much more we need to do, and that is why it's important that we keep improving our ability to detect misinformation. We're committed to continuing to work on this issue and improve the experiences on our platform.This is an incredibly complex issue.First, Facebook is a private entity, and has no legal obligation to be the arbiter of truth, save for complying with court orders during, say, a defamation or libel lawsuit by a wronged party. If someone posts a false story that Clinton kicked a puppy or that Trump punched a kitten, but none of the parties involved take any steps, Facebook is under no obligation - other than perhaps one of morality - to remove or prevent such stories from being posted.Second, what, exactly, is truth? While it's easy to say that "the earth is flat" is false and misinformation, how do you classify stories of rape and sexual assault allegations levelled at a president-elect - and everything in between? What if you shove your false stories in a book, build a fancy building, slap a tax exempt status on it, and call it a religion? There's countless "legitimate" ways in which people sell lies and nonsense to literally billions of people, and we deem that completely normal and acceptable. Where do you draw the line, and more importantly, who draws that line?Third, how, exactly, do we propose handling these kinds of bans? Spreading news stories online is incredibly easy, and I doubt even Facebook itself could truly 'stop' a story from spreading on its platform. Is Facebook supposed to pass every post and comment through its own Department of Truth?Fourth, isn't spreading information - even false information - a basic human need that you can't suppress? Each and every one of us spreads misinformation at one or more points in our lives - we gossip, we think we saw something, we misinterpreted someone's actions, you name it. Sure, platforms like Facebook can potentially amplify said misinformation uncontrollably, but do we really want to put a blanket moratorium on "misinformation", seeing as how difficult it it is to define the term?We are only now coming to grips with the realities of social media elections, but as a politics nerd, I'd be remiss if I didn't raise my hand and reminded you of an eerily similar situation the US political world found itself in in the aftermath of the 26 September, 1960 debate between sitting vice president Nixon and a relatively unknown senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy.It was the first televised debate in US history. While people who listened to the debate on the radio declared Nixon the winner, people who watched the debate on television declared Kennedy the winner. While Nixon appeared sickly and sweaty, Kennedy looked fresh, calm, and confident. The visual impact was massive, and it changed the course of the elections. Televised debates are completely normal now, and every presidential candidate needs to be prepared for them - but up until 1960, it wasn't a factor at all.Social media will be no different. Four years from now, when Tulsi Gabbard heads the Democratic ticket (you heard it here first - mark my words) versus incumbent Trump, both candidates will have a far better grasp on social media and how to use them than Clinton and Trump did this year. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

The 1.13 release includes several extensions to the language, including the long-awaited ? operator, improvements to compile times, minor feature additions to cargo and the standard library. This release also includes many small enhancements to documentation and error reporting, by many contributors, that are not individually mentioned in the release notes.

If you were hoping that this new Surface Book would be a complete overhaul, you'll have to keep waiting. It is quite truly a midlife cycle spec refresh and nothing more. Most people will probably be just fine with one of the less expensive Surface Books, which havenât been updated, but if you want to pony up to the top of the line, that top is slightly higher than before.The question now is do you plunk down $3,000 for this ultimate Surface Book, or do you wait for the inevitable Surface Book 2 that will likely come next year? If you have a Surface Book already, it doesn't make much sense to upgrade this soon into its lifespan. And there is certainly a good argument to be made to wait for the Microsoft's next revision, which will likely have Intel's seventh-generation processor.But if you can't wait, and you're looking for the ultimate Windows laptop, it's hard to look past Microsoft's latest Surface Book.I doubt Microsoft sells a lot of these Surface Books - in fact, I think they're only available in like 3 countries - but they probably serve more as a halo device for the Surface Pro. Still, looks like a really nice, if a very, very expensive, laptop.

If you were hoping that this new Surface Book would be a complete overhaul, you'll have to keep waiting. It is quite truly a midlife cycle spec refresh and nothing more. Most people will probably be just fine with one of the less expensive Surface Books, which havenât been updated, but if you want to pony up to the top of the line, that top is slightly higher than before.The question now is do you plunk down $3,000 for this ultimate Surface Book, or do you wait for the inevitable Surface Book 2 that will likely come next year? If you have a Surface Book already, it doesn't make much sense to upgrade this soon into its lifespan. And there is certainly a good argument to be made to wait for the Microsoft's next revision, which will likely have Intel's seventh-generation processor.But if you can't wait, and you're looking for the ultimate Windows laptop, it's hard to look past Microsoft's latest Surface Book.I doubt Microsoft sells a lot of these Surface Books - in fact, I think they're only available in like 3 countries - but they probably serve more as a halo device for the Surface Pro. Still, looks like a really nice, if a very, very expensive, laptop.

You can now drive content on a second display from your tablet without ever having to attach a mouse. The virtual touchpad lets you do more with a tablet and a second screen - just connect to another monitor, PC, or TV, go to Action Center and tap on the "Project" Quick Action to extend your screen. Use it just like you would a physical touchpad to control content on the connected screen. To enable it, press and hold on the taskbar and select "Show touchpad button". A touchpad icon will now appear in the notification area (just like Windows Ink Workspace does), and tapping on it will bring it up the virtual touchpad.Fun little feature.

Lenovo created a stir when it said the Yoga 900 and 900S hybrids would work only with Windows, not Linux. The company has now changed its stance, bringing Linux support to those PCs.The PC maker earlier this month issued a BIOS update so Linux can be loaded on Yoga 900, 900S and IdeaPad 710 models.The BIOS update adds an AHCI (Advance Host Controller Interface) SATA controller mode so users can load Linux on the laptops.This is a Linux-only BIOS, meaning it should be used only by those who want to load the OS. If you want to continue with Windows, do not load the firmware. "This BIOS is not intended to be used on machines running Windows operating systems," Lenovo said.Still not an ideal solution, but at least they're listening.

If you've ever been to mainland China, chances are you're familiar with the Great Firewall, the country's all-encompassing internet censorship apparatus. You know the despair of not being able to open Facebook, the pain of going mute on Twitter. But with a good VPN, you can magic many of these inconveniences away - at least temporarily.For software developers based in China, however, it's not that simple. You're not just censored from certain websites. Basic building blocks that you use for product development are suddenly beyond your reach. With software services and libraries spread across the globe, China's internet sovereignty can be a real pain in the ass.Something I've never really put much thought into.

We have a theory: "Android Extensions" is a plan to bring the easily updatable app model to the AOSP APIs. Like Google Play Services, we think this app will be a bundle of API shims that Google can update whenever it wants. The difference is that everything in Play Services is a closed-source Google API, while "Android Extensions" would be collections of fresh AOSP code delivered directly to your device via the Play Store. The CDD's stipulation that OEMs "MUST preload the AOSP implementation" is telling. It says that 1) this is AOSP code, and 2) OEMs aren't allowed to "customize" it.If Ars' assumptions are correct, this looks like a decent step forward - assuming it pans out, of course. Clever, too.

But we know there are millions of older cars on the road that are not compatible with Android Auto, and many don't have a screen at all. We wanted to bring the same connected experience to these drivers too.So today we're excited to introduce a whole new way to use Android Auto: right on your phone screen! This update allows anyone with an Android phone (running 5.0 or later) to use a driver friendly interface to access the key stuff you need on the road - directions, music, communications - without the distraction of things that aren't essential while driving.It's not the UI of a phone that causes the distraction; it's the act of communicating with people not in your car that causes the distraction.Don't use messaging or calling applications while driving. You are a danger to others and yourself, no matter how hard people always protest that "it doesn't apply to them". You can slap large touch targets on a dangerous activity, like Apple and Google do, but that doesn't make it any less inherently and deeply dangerous. You are toying with lives.

A few weeks ago I noticed some foreign exchange students at my university who were huddled around a Panasonic laptop. This wasn't one of the Toughbook models that are sold in the US, but a newer Japanese model. Seeing this rare laptop out in the wild combined with the recent wailing and gnashing of teeth concerning the MacBook Pro piqued my interest in the current Japanese PC market.It really feels like the Japanese electronics industry lost most of its appeal and cachet, with the sector now being lead by American and Chinese companies. I love the design of the Panasonic laptop, though.

Vlad Savov, the tech reporter with the most awesome name in the industry, hits some nails on their heads:Many of us have been talking our way around this issue for the past week without directly confronting it, so I feel like now's as good a time to address it as any: Apple's new MacBook Pro laptops are not designed for professional use.This should come as no surprise to those who've long perceived the Mac platform as inward-looking, limited in compatibility, and generally worse value for money than comparable Windows alternatives. Pros are smart with their tools and their money, after all. But the change with Apple's 2016 generation of MacBook Pros is that those downsides have been amped up - more expensive and less compatible than ever before - to an extreme that exposes the fallacy of the continued use of the Pro moniker. These are Apple's premium laptops, its deluxe devices, but not in any meaningful way computers tailored for the pros. A MacBook Pro is now simply what you buy if you're in the Apple ecosystem and have a higher budget and expectations than the MacBook can fulfill.Basically exactly what I said last week.

Of course, it only works if you have other people to play with. A few gamers who bought Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare through the digital storefront built into Windows 10 have discovered they can only play with other gamers who also bought the game from Microsoft. Xbox One players can only play with other Xbox One players, and PlayStation 4 players can only play with other PlayStation 4 players. This has always been the case. The trouble is that this time not all PC players can play with other PC players. For unknown reasons, Windows 10 Store customers are segregated from customers who bought the game from Steam, which is by far the most popular platform on PC.That's like buying a game from Target and learning you can't play with people who bought it from Best Buy. Call of Duty fans who made the unfortunate of mistake of giving Microsoft their cash are left sitting in lonely multiplayer lobbies waiting for games that'll never start.However, it appears that Microsoft is giving out refunds.Only two people were looking for a multiplayer game.

H.264 is a video compression codec standard. It is ubiquitous - internet video, Blu-ray, phones, security cameras, drones, everything. Everything uses H.264 now.H.264 is a remarkable piece of technology. It is the result of 30+ years of work with one single goal: To reduce the bandwidth required for transmission of full-motion video.Technically, it is very interesting. This post will give insight into some of the details at a high level - I hope to not bore you too much with the intricacies. Also note that many of the concepts explained here apply to video compression in general, and not just H.264.

First up, a bit of clarification. By general purpose OS I'm referring to what most people use for server workloads today - be it RHEL or variants like CentOS or Fedora, or Debian and derivatives like Ubuntu. We'll include Arch, the various BSD and opensolaris flavours and Windows too. By end I don't literally mean they go away or stop being useful. My hypothosis is that, slowly to begin with then more quickly, they cease to be the default we reach for when launching new services.So note that this isn't about desktop workloads, but server workloads.

One of the biggest community and customer benefits of UUP is the reduction you'll see in download size on PCs. We have converged technologies in our build and publishing systems to enable differential downloads for all devices built on the Mobile and PC OS. A differential download package contains only the changes that have been made since the last time you updated your device, rather than a full build. As we rollout UUP, this will eventually be impactful for PCs where users can expect their download size to decrease by approximately 35% when going from one major update of Windows to another. We're working on this now with the goal of supporting this for feature updates after the Windows 10 Creators Update; Insiders will see this sooner.Not earth-shattering or anything, but still a nice improvement.

Plasma Mobile aims to become a complete and open software system for mobile devices. It is designed to give privacy-aware users back the full-control over their information and communication. Plasma Mobile takes a pragmatic approach and is inclusive to 3rd party software, allowing the user to choose which applications and services to use. It provides a seamless experience across multiple devices. Plasma Mobile implements open standards and it is developed in a transparent process that is open for the community to participate in.Great presentation on the website, but the product itself clearly has a long way to go. You can try it out on a Nexus 5 or a OnePlus One.

Based on VS1063 chip, it can playback many music formats in full 16-bit 48Khz audio and additionally mix with the Amiga's native Paula sound. When it is decoding and playing back a MPEGA audio file or various other formats, it frees up the Amiga to do other things. An MHI driver is supplied with the card for AmigaAmp and other various music playing software.I'm continually amazed by the Amiga community.

The first reviews of the new MacBook Pro are in. Note that this only concerns the base 13"model, which does not come with the new Touch Bar.The Verge concludes:While the display, build quality, and looks of the new MacBook Pro are beyond reproach, they're no longer beyond the competition. Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Yoga has a spectacular OLED display. Dell's XPS 13 has great battery life and design. HP's EliteBook Folio has a hinge that folds out to a full 180 degrees, whereas Apple s laptops have always been limited to opening to a little bit beyond vertical. Razer's Blade Stealth has a 4K touchscreen, Thunderbolt 3, and the latest seventh-gen Intel processors, whereas Apple is still using sixth-gen chips. Why does any of that matter? It matters because this new MacBook Pro's compromises are large enough to make me, a loyal and satisfied MacBook user for seven years, look outside the cozy confines of Apple's ecosystem. Apple has built a beautiful computer with all the upgrades I wanted, but it's taken away things that I actually need, and now I'm looking elsewhere.And Ars Technica:Putting aside larger concerns about Apple's stewardship of the Mac as a hardware and software platform, the new MacBook Pro is a very solid design that should serve Apple well over the next few years. Some pros will claim that it isn't "pro" enough, but the 13-inch models have always served as more of a bridge between the consumer MacBooks and MacBook Airs on the low end and the 15-inch Pros and the desktop lineup on the high end. They've never been particularly "pro."

The first reviews of the new MacBook Pro are in. Note that this only concerns the base 13"model, which does not come with the new Touch Bar.The Verge concludes:While the display, build quality, and looks of the new MacBook Pro are beyond reproach, they're no longer beyond the competition. Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Yoga has a spectacular OLED display. Dell's XPS 13 has great battery life and design. HP's EliteBook Folio has a hinge that folds out to a full 180 degrees, whereas Apple s laptops have always been limited to opening to a little bit beyond vertical. Razer's Blade Stealth has a 4K touchscreen, Thunderbolt 3, and the latest seventh-gen Intel processors, whereas Apple is still using sixth-gen chips. Why does any of that matter? It matters because this new MacBook Pro's compromises are large enough to make me, a loyal and satisfied MacBook user for seven years, look outside the cozy confines of Apple's ecosystem. Apple has built a beautiful computer with all the upgrades I wanted, but it's taken away things that I actually need, and now I'm looking elsewhere.And Ars Technica:Putting aside larger concerns about Apple's stewardship of the Mac as a hardware and software platform, the new MacBook Pro is a very solid design that should serve Apple well over the next few years. Some pros will claim that it isn't "pro" enough, but the 13-inch models have always served as more of a bridge between the consumer MacBooks and MacBook Airs on the low end and the 15-inch Pros and the desktop lineup on the high end. They've never been particularly "pro."

In a few hours of testing, I haven't seen any noticeable problems with the graphic or sound recreation on the NES Classic Edition. Even the flickering and slowdown issues that were a forced part of that original NES game design seem to be captured accurately.Colors are rendered brightly and accurately (unlike similar NES emulation on the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS), with big, sharp pixels by default. So far, I'm really enjoying the CRT filter, which adds a pleasant fuzziness to the edges of the sprites without being distracting.Sounds like a winner. Too bad the device doesn't include the ability to install additional games.

Never have I wanted a computer as much as the Sony VAIO P.Never have I been so wrong.Sony introduced the VAIO P at CES 2009, the height of the netbook boom, and its stunning design soared high above all competitors racing to the bottom. Look at your laptop; now imagine that the bottom half was nothing but the keyboard, and the top half was dominated by an ultrawide high-resolution screen. That's the VAIO P. It is screamingly beautiful even today.If I could wave a magic wand and bring just one dead form factor back to life, it would be the small, (almost-)pocket clamshell. I have a Psion Series 3, and its size, shape, and keyboard would, in a modern incarnation running, say, Android, be a great, much more capable alternative to a modern tablet. Sure, you can lug around an unwieldy external Bluetooth keyboard, but I'd much rather have an integrated, clamshell solution.Too bad nobody else would buy it.

Did you buy the new MacBook or MacBook Pro? Maybe the Google Pixel? You're about to enter a world of confusion thanks to those new USB-C" ports. See, that simple-looking port hides a world of complexity, and the (thankful) backward-compatibility uses different kinds of cables for different tasks. Shoppers have to be very careful to buy exactly the right cable for their devices!Welcome to the dongle.

Minoca OS, which we talked about this past May, has gone open source.Today we're thrilled to announce that Minoca OS has gone open source. We are releasing the entirety of the Minoca OS source code under the GNU GPLv3. We're excited to build a community of users and developers around this new operating system, and we need help. You can check out the source at https://github.com/minoca/os.Here's a refresher on what Minoca OS is:Minoca OS is a general purpose operating system written completely from the ground up. It's intended for devices looking to conserve power, memory, and storage. It aims to be lean, maintainable, modular, and compatible with existing software.

Redox, a Unix-like operating system written in Rust, recently rewrote its kernel:Since August 13, the kernel is going through a complete rewrite, which makes the kernel space ultra-small (about the size of L4). Everything which can run outside the kernel in practice, will do so.It is almost complete and will likely be merged in the coming week.The reasons cited for the rewrite include memory management, concurrent design, SMP support, and 64-bit by default.

Since I'm sure some of you are already angrily typing comments about my claim that the new MacBook Pros aren't designed for professionals at all - on purpose! - but for affluent regular consumers, here's Mac developer Michael Tsai's summary of the community's responses to the new MacBook Pros.I was really disappointed with today's Apple event. It seems like Apple has either lost its way, that it has lost touch with what (some of) its customers want, or that it simply doesn't care about those customers. Developers are a captive audience, and creative professionals can switch to Windows, I guess. Apple no longer considers them core.There's nothing particularly wrong with what Apple announced. I like Thunderbolt 3. The display looks good. I'm not crazy about Touch Bar, but it does seem potentially useful. The problem is that the MacBook Pro is not a true Pro notebook.I really think this line is the core reason why the Mac is being neglected:It has seemed clear for a while that the CEO doesn't really understand the Mac, or simply doesn't like it that much, and that's a problem for those of us who do.Ding, ding, ding.

Although I can't switch wholesale just yet, I see no real reason why I can't use Elementary for around 80% of the stuff I do - probably even more with a few adjustments on my part.And that, in and by itself, should tell you how much Apple has dropped the ball here.The endless stream of articles and tweets from longtime Apple users now looking elsewhere is staggering.

It's strangeâ-âthere's nothing actually wrong with what Apple announced: USB-C on the Mac is great, a thinner, more powerful machine is intriguing and, while it's too early to say, the Touch Bar could possibly be a gimmick, but it could be useful for helping people discover what shortcuts exist as they use the computer.The thing is, I can't figure out who this is for other than those who are on really old machines. Myself, and everyone else, seems to be wondering what, exactly, is the selling point of this upgrade.That's because unlike what the name of the product implies, the new MacBook Pros aren't intended for professionals at all. They are really expensive consumer laptops. Once you learn to accept that Apple is no longer interested in its traditional professional segment of the market, everything starts falling into place.iOS devices at the lower price point, MacBook Pro and possible upcoming iMacs at the higher price point.Suddenly, the Mac falls into place.

From MacRumors:In a series of tweets sent out last night, and now in an interview with The Verge, developer Steven Troughton-Smith has detailed the inner workings of the MacBook Pro's new retina Touch Bar, describing its T1 chip as "a variant of the system-on-a-chip used in the Apple Watch." This means that the Touch Bar is essentially running watchOS on the T1 chip, which macOS then communicates with through an interconnected USB bridge that "relays multitouch events back to macOS."The developer described this software setup as advantageous for the MacBook Pro's security, since the T1 chip also acts as a layer of protection and "gates access" to the laptop's FaceTime camera and Touch ID sensor. In the series of Tweets he sent out last night, Troughton-Smith also theorized that watchOS could power the Touch Bar alone without relying on macOS to be running on the MacBook Pro, which Apple software engineering chief Craig Federighi has now confirmed.You can theorise about the future here. Now that Apple has put an ARM iOS-like device inside every MacBook Pro, you can imagine a future wherein said iOS device takes over more and more functionality from the traditional x86 macOS device, up to a point where macOS only gets called upon when needed.We may actually have just been given a hint of Apple's transition-to-ARM strategy.

With the final major capability for BPF tracing (timed sampling) merging in Linux 4.9-rc1, the Linux kernel now has raw capabilities similar to those provided by DTrace, the advanced tracer from Solaris. As a long time DTrace user and expert, this is an exciting milestone! On Linux, you can now analyze the performance of applications and the kernel using production-safe low-overhead custom tracing, with latency histograms, frequency counts, and more.

Apple today announced the all-new MacBook Pro, confirming that the new computer will come in 13-inch and 15-inch sizes, in both Silver and Space Gray color options. The MacBooks are thinner and lighter than their previous generations, come with a Trackpad that's larger than the ones on the previous MacBooks, and have a redesigned keyboard for better typing. Apple calls it "the most powerful MacBook Pro ever," and the 13-inch model features a 2.9 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.3 GHz, 8GB of memory and 256GB of flash storage. The 15-inch version has a 2.6 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.5 GHz, 16GB of memory and 256GB of flash storage. Both computers reach "up to 2.3 times the graphics performance" of the previous generation. Summary.No new iMacs (more than one year since last update), no new Mac Mini (two years since last update), no new Mac Pro (three years since last update). Apple totally cares about the Mac, folks.

Microsoft held a Windows and Surface event today, and among a number of announcements, the star of the show was the Surface Studio, a downright beautiful all-in-one designed entirely for creative professionals. The huge 28" 4500x3000 3:2 aspect ration display with Adobe sRGB and DCI-P can be tilted downwards to turn the Studio into a huge drawing surface.As the product video demonstrates, this is not a device for the average user, or even for every power user - every aspect of it seems to be designed specifically for designers, graphics artists, possibly video editors, and people of similar profession. I love the Surface Dial, which can be used both on the display and on a desk to control context-specific actions, like changing the colour output of your drawing tool or select thickness of the output, and countless other things.It's got a sxith generation Core i5 or i7, a GTX 965M 2GB (Core i5) or GTX 980M 4GB (Core i7) graphics chip, up to 32GB of RAM, and the usual array of ports and connections. This is clearly a niche device, and the price underlines that: the Surface Studio starts at a whopping $2999. Which is quite a lot, especially taking the video chip into account.Penny Arcade's artist Mike "Gabe" Krahulik has been using a Surface Studio for the past week, and posted his thoughts on his blog.When I first saw the device months ago in that secret room at MS, they asked me what I thought. I said, "Well I have no idea if anyone else will want it, but you have made my dream computer." I recognize that not everyone needs or wants a computer they can draw on. Some people do though and I will tell you that the Surface Studio is without a doubt the best digital drawing experience I have ever tried. I was trying to help Tycho understand why the Studio was so exciting. I spend 6 to 10 hours a day drawing digitally and I have for more than a decade. The Cintiq and the Surface, these are like my tools or my instruments. I am intimately familiar with how it feels to create things on these sorts of devices and the Studio honestly feels like a generational leap forward. If you are a digital artist and you are currently working on a Cintiq you have to go to a MS store and look at the Studio. I've always given you my honest take on this stuff and this time is no different even though I can't think of anything bad to say. If you draw on computers the Surface Studio is something very special.Following Twitter during the unveiling of the Surface Studio was an entirely surreal experience, with a ton of genuine excitement over the product - something I haven't seen in a long, long time in this jaded industry. Specifically remarkable, though, was the response from the Apple and Mac/iOS developer and creative professional community - an endless stream of harsh jabs and words directed at Apple for so blatantly ignoring the creative professional community for years now, while Microsoft seems to be making a power play to win their hearts. It was quite the jarring experience.The general consensus seems to be that Apple really needs to bring more to the table tomorrow than some updated internals and a SideShow ripoff to reconquer the hearts of the creative professionals it seemingly has abandoned.