OSnews

Basically: not having a headphone jack might not be enough to deter sales of a phone, but it's still really annoying and requires users to spend additional money to reclaim very basic functionality from their devices. And most of that money flows back to the device vendor, effectively increasing the price of the phone. We've taken something simple and universal, and turned it into something complex and proprietary, for no obvious benefits. It's a bad trade-off. It's... user-hostile and stupid. There's just no getting around it.There's no tangible benefit to ditching the universal 3.5mm jack - whether Apple does it, or Samsung does it, or anyone else does it.We're months and months into this discussion now, and to this day, nobody - not Apple, not Samsung, not John Gruber, not any commenters anywhere - has given me a real, valid, tangible reason why removing the 3.5mm jack is a good idea. Lightning audio is stupid because only the iPhone/iPad support it (not even Macs come with Lightning ports), and wireless audio is garbage - something even Apple is only now finding out. Those wireless AirPods Apple unveiled to much fanfare? They have been delayed and delayed, and are actually still unavailable, because Bluetooh audio is complete and utter garbage.It almost feels like removing the 3.5mm jack was a sociological science experiment to determine just how far people were willing to go to defend and rationalise a deeply dumb idea.

Last year I created an account on Twitter to create a targeted feed for my hobby content and tweets for like-minded retro-gaming folk, separate from my personal account. On this hobby account I mainly follow retro-gaming and Commodore fans. When you use Twitter in a very targeted way like this, it actually can be extremely useful and enjoyable. In any event, during this time I began to see a healthy amount of discussion around BBS'es (Bulletin Board Systems) becoming "a thing" again for retro-computing nerds. And, amazingly, a few popular BBSes were being served off of 8-bit machines. "8-Bitters" were connecting to them, having virtually "off the grid" discussions and playing games outside the watchful eye of Google and the rest of the internet. I wanted to connect to them, too.

The architect of this reorganization - known as "Alphabetization" at the ever-sunny Google - was Ruth Porat, the new chief financial officer. Porat, who was born in England but grew up in Palo Alto, led Morgan Stanley's technology banking division during the first dot-com boom, served as an adviser to the Treasury Department during the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and became Morgan Stanley's CFO in 2010. She joined Google in May 2015 with a mandate to bring discipline and focus to a company so awash in cash that it never needed much of either. She instituted rigorous budgeting and, according to people familiar with Alphabet's operations, forced the Other Bets to begin paying for the shared Google services they used. Projects hatched with ambiguous timelines of 10 or more years in some cases had to show a path to profit in half the time.At most big companies, such financial controls are standard operating procedure, and Alphabet's investors are pleased. Its stock is up 35 percent since Porat joined. But within the Other Bets, Porat's tenure has been controversial, earning her an unflattering nickname: Ruthless Ruth. "She's a hatchet man," says a former senior Alphabet executive. "If Larry isn't excited about something," the executive continues, referring to CEO Page, "Ruth kills it."I love these stories of problems few of us will ever have to deal with.

It's official: Microsoft is taking another stab at Windows on ARM, but this time around, it seems like they're taking it a lot more seriously. First, in collaboration with Qualcomm, Microsoft has created 32bit win32 emulation for Windows on ARM. This allows all 32bit win32 applications to run on ARM, unmodified. Microsoft showed win32 Photoshop running on an ARM machine. Second, Microsoft seems to be going beyond tablets this time around - they're promising laptops and desktops, too.And technically, there's nothing stopping them from allowing ARM phones to run win32 applications (e.g. when docked) either. This is something I personally really, really want to see: a phone that can become a full-fledged PC just by connecting it to a display and input devices. While such a device won't be a powerhouse, it'd be great for the kinds of office workloads I'd want it for.There's no technical details on the implementation of the emulation yet, but look for those to arrive over the coming months.

Jean-Louis Gassée:When the Apple smartphone project started, the key decision was the choice of software engine. Should Apple try to make a 'lite' version of OS X (as it was then known)? Go in a completely new direction?It appears that a new direction may have been tempting. At the time that Apple's smartphone project began, an Apple employee and former Be engineer offered Palm Inc. $800K for a BeOS "code dump"â-âjust the code, no support, no royalties. The engineer was highly respected for his skill in mating software to unfamiliar hardware; BeOS was a small, light operating system; draw your own conclusion... Palm, which had purchased Be a few years before that, turned him down.Interesting historical footnote. This would be the second time that Apple tried to buy BeOS. I've been told that while Forstall (who wanted OS X) and Fadell (who wanted the iPod's Pixo) were battling it out, a former Be engineer then working at Apple wanted to prove BeOS was a viable iPhone candidate, and thus tried to buy it. As history knows, Forstall won out, and only after the fact did the Apple engineer inform the higher-ups of what he tried to do. Apparently, this happens more often inside Apple's culture.

Jean-Louis Gassée:When the Apple smartphone project started, the key decision was the choice of software engine. Should Apple try to make a 'lite' version of OS X (as it was then known)? Go in a completely new direction?It appears that a new direction may have been tempting. At the time that Apple's smartphone project began, an Apple employee and former Be engineer offered Palm Inc. $800K for a BeOS "code dump"â-âjust the code, no support, no royalties. The engineer was highly respected for his skill in mating software to unfamiliar hardware; BeOS was a small, light operating system; draw your own conclusion... Palm, which had purchased Be a few years before that, turned him down.Interesting historical footnote. This would be the second time that Apple tried to buy BeOS.

Jean-Louis Gassée:When the Apple smartphone project started, the key decision was the choice of software engine. Should Apple try to make a 'lite' version of OS X (as it was then known)? Go in a completely new direction?It appears that a new direction may have been tempting. At the time that Apple's smartphone project began, an Apple employee and former Be engineer offered Palm Inc. $800K for a BeOS "code dump"â-âjust the code, no support, no royalties. The engineer was highly respected for his skill in mating software to unfamiliar hardware; BeOS was a small, light operating system; draw your own conclusion... Palm, which had purchased Be a few years before that, turned him down.Interesting historical footnote. This would be the second time that Apple tried to buy BeOS.

An amazing QEMU disk image every day! Brightening your days in the winter holiday season.This is a great idea.

What's interesting is that there is evidence in the design of an intellectual tension between safety and pushing the boundaries. Samsung engineers designed out all of the margin in the thickness of the battery, which is the direction where you get the most capacity gain for each unit of volume. But, the battery also sits within a CNC-machined pocket - a costly choice likely made to protect it from being poked by other internal components. Looking at the design, Samsung engineers were clearly trying to balance the risk of a super-aggressive manufacturing process to maximize capacity, while attempting to protect it internally.Fascinating look - with photos - at the (possible) cause of the Galaxy Note 7 fires.

The Supreme Court has overturned Apple's $400 million award in its long-running patent lawsuit against Samsung. Apple won the case in 2012, convincing a federal court that a number of Samsung devices had infringed upon iPhone design patents - including one for a rectangular device with rounded corners and bezels, and another for a home screen comprised of a grid of colorful apps. The Supreme Courtâs decision today does not reverse Appleâs win, but does mean that the case will be returned to the Federal Circuit so that the damages can be reassessed.Yeah, this thing is still going on.

Here's what you don't want to do late on a Sunday night. You do not want to type seven letters into Google. That's all I did. I typed: "a-r-e". And then "j-e-w-s". Since 2008, Google has attempted to predict what question you might be asking and offers you a choice. And this is what it did. It offered me a choice of potential questions it thought I might want to ask: "are jews a race?", "are jews white?", "are jews christians?", and finally, "are jews evil?"Are Jews evil? It's not a question I've ever thought of asking. I hadn't gone looking for it. But there it was. I press enter. A page of results appears. This was Google's question. And this was Google's answer: Jews are evil. Because there, on my screen, was the proof: an entire page of results, nine out of 10 of which "confirm" this. The top result, from a site called Listovative, has the headline: "Top 10 Major Reasons Why People Hate Jews." I click on it: "Jews today have taken over marketing, militia, medicinal, technological, media, industrial, cinema challenges etc and continue to face the worlds [sic] envy through unexplained success stories given their inglorious past and vermin like repression all over Europe."Hatred, lies, and stupidity spread easily on the internet - it's a perfect storm of the ease of technology and - very bluntly put - the stupidity of people. Most people have absolutely no understanding of the scientific method, and lack the basic mental tools to objectively assess information and its source. The end result is swaths of people believing that the moon landings were faked, man-made climate change isn't real, that witches have magical powers and need to be burnt at the stake, or - indeed - that Jews, women (try it!), and so on are "evil", because uncle Jimmy's neighbour's aunt's niece thrice removed posted it on Facebook.This is a problem that's going to be very tough to solve. Stupid people have always existed - but the internet is new.

Amazon Go is a new kind of store with no checkout required. We created the worldâs most advanced shopping technology so you never have to wait in line. With our Just Walk Out Shopping experience, simply use the Amazon Go app to enter the store, take the products you want, and go! No lines, no checkout. (No, seriously.)Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning. Our Just Walk Out technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you're done shopping, you can just leave the store. Shortly after, we'll charge your Amazon account and send you a receipt.I find this absolutely fascinating and immensely desirable.I live in a small rural town in the middle of nowhere, and only very recently did we finally get a brand new supermarket with the latest self-checkout and contactless payment technologies (voted most beautiful supermarket in the country, I might add, and a 73-year old family business - we're proud of our own), and it's just so much more convenient than old-fashioned cash registers. I know a number of people prefer being served by a cashier, but honestly - to me it's just wasted time I could spend on something useful.In any event, the idea of just taking stuff off the shelves, without even having to scan them or pay for them at a terminal seems like the next logical step. I don't like the idea of online grocery shopping (I want to see how fresh my produce is before buying it), so this is an excellent compromise.

The FireBee is a new Atari-compatible computer. Ataris and Atari-Clones are special computers with their own hard & software. They aren't PC's, Mac's nor Amiga compatible.A FireBee is similar to an Atari Falcon and works very much like that. It will run most of the Atari compatible software that would run on a Falcon. Different to older Ataris and their clones, the FireBee is a modern computer that supports almost everything you'd expect from a today's machine, like USB ports, Ethernet, DVI-I monitor connector, SD-card reader and more.This brand-new Atari compatible is not cheap, but much like the current Amiga computers, if you're worried about the price, you're probably not the intended audience. Note that even though the order page says "pre-order", I think that's a typo - you can order them directly from the Swiss company that makes them, too.I love that people and companies are passionate enough to keep developing, building, and selling machines like this - it's a vital effort to keep platforms alive well into the future.

The Windows' NTFS file system has supported symlinks since Windows Vista. However, it hasn't been easy for Windows developers to create symlinks. In our efforts to continually improve the Windows Developer experience we're fixing this!Starting with Windows 10 Insiders build 14972, symlinks can be created without needing to elevate the console as administrator. This will allow developers, tools and projects, that previously struggled to work effectively on Windows due to symlink issues, to behave just as efficiently and reliably as they do on Linux or OSX.Pretty sure a few developers out there are rolling their eyes, sighing 'finally'.

Last month we did a quick exercise aiming to see how far we could get in a few weeks in porting Sailfish OS to a new kind of mobile device, an Android smartwatch. Compared to the competition, Sailfish OSâs interaction paradigm is particularly suited for small screens, it being gesture-driven and designed to maximize display estate available for the user content. We also had the watch demo with us as a teaser in Slush 2016 this week, to emphasize to journalists, partners and other people how versatile platform Sailfish OS is. And naturally an implementation like this, could fit nicely also into our licensing strategy.This looks pretty good, actually, but as an owner of the limited edition version of the Jolla Phone and the incredibly elusive and rare Jolla Tablet - what I want is not more device categories, it's applications.This has been the platform's number one weakness since its inception, and they seem unwilling to do anything about it.

Late yesterday it was reported by The Information that Fitbit is close to buying wearable startup Pebble, news that has since been independently confirmed by The Verge. Fitbit and Pebble have been in the final stages of the deal since before the Thanksgiving holiday; the buying price has not yet been confirmed. While it ultimately might not be as good of a deal as Pebble would have hoped for, there are a lot of reasons why a Pebble-Fitbit deal makes sense.Pebble is popular among OSNews readers, so those of you with a Pebble might want to keep an eye out for the future of this possible deal.

Following the feature-rich release in August, with the new version 16.11, Genode's developers took the chance to work on long-standing architectural topics, most prominently the low-level interplay between parent and child components. Besides this low-level work, the release features much improved virtual-networking capabilities. Originally introduced in the previous version, Genode's network-routing mechanism has become more versatile and easier to use. Further topics include the added support for smart cards, kernel improvements of the NOVA hypervisor, and a virtual file system for generating time-based passcodes.The efficient interaction between user-level components is one of the most important aspects of microkernel-based systems like Genode. The design space for this interplay is huge and there is no widely accepted consensus about the "right" way. The options include message passing between independent threads, the migration of threads between address spaces, shared memory, and various flavours of asynchronous communication.When the Genode project originally emerged from the L4 community, it was somehow preoccupied with the idea that synchronous IPC is the best way to go. After all, the sole reliance on unbuffered synchronous IPC was widely regarded as the key for L4's excellent performance. Over the years, however, the mindset of the Genode developers shifted away from this position. Whereas synchronous IPC was found to be a perfect match for some use cases, it needlessly complicated others. It turns out that any IPC mechanism is ultimately a trade-off between low latency, throughput, simplicity, and scalability. Finding a single sweet spot that fits well for all parts of an operating system seems futile. Given this realization and countless experiments, Genode's inter-component protocols were gradually shaped towards the combination of synchronous IPC where low-latency remote procedure calls are desired, asynchronous notifications, and shared memory. That said, Genode's most fundamental inter-component communication protocol - the interplay between parent and child components to establish communication sessions between clients and servers - remained unchanged since the very first version. The current release reconsiders the architectural decisions made in the early days and applies Genode's modern design principles to these low-level protocols. The release documentation contrasts the original design that was solely based on synchronous IPC with the new way. Even though the new version overcomes long-standing limitations of the original design, at the first glance, it gives the impression to be more complicated and expensive in terms of the number of context switches. Interestingly, however, the change has no measurable effect on the performance of even the most dynamic system scenarios. The apparent reason is that the parent-child interactions make up a minuscule part of the overall execution time in real-world scenarios.Even though the architectural work mentioned above is fundamental to the Genode system as a whole, it is barely visible to users of the framework. With respect to user-visible changes, the most prominent improvement is the vastly improved infrastructure for virtual networking, which is covered in great detail in the release documentation. Further topics are the added support for using smart cards, a new VFS plugin for generating time-based passcodes, and updated versions of VirtualBox 4 and 5 running of top of NOVA. Speaking of NOVA, the release improves this kernel in several respects, in particular by adding support for asynchronous map operations. Each of the topics is covered in more depth in the release documentation.

There's a rumour going around that Oracle is close to ending all development of Solaris, effectively killing the operating system.Solaris being canned, at least 50% of teams to be RIF'd in short term. All hands meetings being cancelled on orders from legal to prevent news from spreading. Hardware teams being told to cease development. There will be no Solaris 12, final release will be 11.4. Orders coming straight from Larry.It's just rumours for now, but they've been gaining steam over the past few days.

Back in May, we heard that HMD Global - a new mobile company made up of ex-Nokia staffers - is looking to use the Nokia name to manufacture smartphones running Android as well as feature phones. Today, HMD has announced that it has secured exclusive licensing rights to Nokia's branding for 10 years.The first batch of Android smartphones bearing the Nokia name will make their debut in the first half of 2017.HMD is a Finnish company staffed with ex-Nokia people, so it makes sense they'd be working together on this. Hopefully this means Nokia can focus on what it does best - the backend - while the smaller, more nimble HMD san focus on making great phones.

The pre-release version of AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update #1 is an official update to AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition released by Hyperion Entertainment in 2014. It is the combined result of many many years of effort by the core AmigaOS developers, translators and beta testers and includes a number of bug fixes and updates to the original AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition release.The naming and versioning system could use some work.

Like LOL, like, entrenched in all kinds of sentences, used subconsciously, and difficult to parse the real meaning of without careful consideration, has all the hallmarks of a piece of grammar - specifically, in the pragmatic department, modal wing. One thing making it especially clear that the new like is not just a tic of heedless, underconfident youth is that many of the people who started using it in the new way in the 1970s are now middle-aged. People's sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality, and the person of a certain age who claims never to use like "that way" as often as not, like, does - and often. As I write, a sentence such as There were like grandparents and like grandkids in there is as likely to be spoken by a forty-something as by a teenager or a college student. Just listen around the next time you're standing in a line, watching a talk show, or possibly even listening to yourself.Great article.Just goes to show how complex and deep language can be. This is a good, detailed article on the changing use of the word "like", which, despite its length, doesn't even touch upon another now-common use of the word "like" that has even transcended borders and languages: Facebook's "like", which has become a noun in several languages - including my own - and carries with it a new verb meaning: to click that particular Facebook button.

Walt Mossberg:So, yes, in my view, Facebook has a direct responsibility to get rid of fake news, and it cannot simply rely on its audience or others to shoulder the burden. I'm happy to see tools made available to readers that help report such trash, and happy that Facebook is working with third-party fact checkers. But the ultimate responsibility is Facebookâs.Nobody wants Facebook to tinker with legitimate news and opinion - again, except for hate speech. But getting rid of purely fake news from purely fake sources is an eminently achievable task, especially for a well-funded, tech-savvy, huge media company serving nearly 2 billion people.I've written about my thoughts on this subject before, but I want to make them clearer by presenting you with an example.Consider this clip from Fox News' Bill O'Reilly.Everything in this clip is not true. Everything said in that clip about Amsterdam and The Netherlands is literally - literally literally, not the fake kind of literally - made up. It's all lies. Flat-out, bold-faced lies. This is clearly, unapologetically, fake news.Yet, I doubt people like Mossberg and other people who claim it's easy as pie for Facebook and Twitter to 'block' fake news would agree with me that Facebook should block this kind of news from their sites. Even though it's nothing but flat-out lies, it would not be considered 'fake news'.And therein lies the problem with this whole outrage over 'fake news'. No matter how many times people say it's easy to separate real news from fake news, there's going to be so many edge cases to trip up generic algorithms, and it's simply not feasible to have human curation on sites as large in volume as Facebook and Twitter.Is it really Facebook's job to solve for people's stupidity? In my view, it really isn't. On top of that, I somehow doubt the tech media would be as worked up over this as they are now had Clinton won the election - and all of you know my political leanings well enough by now to understand the value of me saying this.

The Colour Maximite is a small and versatile single chip computer running a full featured BASIC interpreter with 128K of working memory and eight colours on a VGA monitor.It will work with a standard PC keyboard and because the Maximite has its own built in SD memory card and BASIC language you need nothing more to start writing and running BASIC programs.You can either build it yourself, or buy a prebuilt kit. This seems like a great DIY project.

Ghost Push has continued to evolve since we began to track it. As we explained in last year's Android Security report, in 2015 alone, we found more than 40,000 apps associated with Ghost Push. Our actions have continued at this increasingly large scale: our systems now detect and prevent installation of over 150,000 variants of Ghost Push.Several Ghost Push variants use publicly known vulnerabilities that are unpatched on older devices to gain privileges that allow them to install applications without user consent. In the last few weeks, we've worked closely with Check Point, a cyber security company, to investigate and protect users from one of these variants. Nicknamed 'Gooligan', this variant used Google credentials on older versions of Android to generate fraudulent installs of other apps. This morning, Check Point detailed those findings on their blog.As always, we take these investigations very seriously and we wanted to share details about our findings and the actions we've taken so far.An interesting post by Adrian Ludwig, Android's security chief, on a site called "Google Plus".

Jolla Ltd., the Finnish mobile company and developer of open mobile operating system Sailfish OS today announced that Sailfish OS has been officially accepted as the only mobile OS in Russia to be used in governmental and government controlled corporations' upcoming mobile device projects. Jolla has also started discussions in China and South Africa about building local mobile OS ecosystems for the countries.Good news for the company of course, but can someone from Russia shed some light on just how impactful this is? If you take the announcement at face value, it'd mean that starting from today, every new phone issued to a government employee in Russia will run Sailfish, but for some reason, that just seems implausible. What does it really mean?

When HP designed the 3000 series 30 using the processor from the HP 300 they had to make it compatible with previous HP 3000s and the HP MPE OS they ran. This entailed breaking down the MPE OS into 2 parts, those that were entirely software dependant, and those that were hardware dependant, and then writing the microcode to handle the hardware dependent part of the OS. Like the HP 300, the HP 3000 architecture is stack based, with the PCU chip holding 2 Top of Stack registers for fast access to the (off chip) stacks. The Series 30/33 have a total of 214 instructions while the HP 300 uses just under 200 instructions. Instructions are 32 bits long and typically [sic]The exact same ICs are used for the HP 300 as for the Series 30/33 with 'one pin of each chip tied to a different voltage level.' Exactly what pin that is and what voltage is not said. Looking at the handdrawn schematic of the Series 33 does show the /DIS pin pulled high (12V) on both the RALU/RASS chips, though what that pin is for is unknown.Snippet from a concise but dense and interesting article.

I think it's safe to say the macadmin community has been hearing rumblings about the future of macOS administration. Whether it was Michael Lynn's excellent blog post, m(DM)acOS, APFS or even Sal Saghoian's position being axed, many macadmins (myself included) are worried about the future of macOS administration being a MDM only world.What if the new TBP Macs were the first piece to this future?An interesting technical look at what happens when one of the Touch Bar-equipped MacBook Pros can't find the embedded operating system running the Touch Bar, and what conclusions we can draw from that.

Microsoft has made several adjustments to its design language over the last few years, starting with Windows 8 and evolving into what we now know as "Microsoft Design Language 2" or MDL2 in Windows 10. With MDL2 being the current design language used throughout Windows 10, Microsoft has plans to begin using a much more streamlined design language with Redstone 3, codenamed Project NEON.No matter how many times you refine or change your design language, it won't magically make your apps stop sucking.

The FreeDOS Project has released RC2 for FreeDOS 1.2."If you're having network problems with FreeDOS under VirtualBox, please update your VirtualBox to version 5.1.10, which fixes a compatibility bug from VirtualBox 5.1.8.

The history and evolution of the Unix operating system is made available as a revision management repository, covering the period from its inception in 1970 as a 2.5 thousand line kernel and 26 commands, to 2016 as a widely-used 27 million line system. The 1.1GB repository contains about half a million commits and more than two thousand merges. The repository employs Git system for its storage and is hosted on GitHub. It has been created by synthesizing with custom software 24 snapshots of systems developed at Bell Labs, the University of California at Berkeley, and the 386BSD team, two legacy repositories, and the modern repository of the open source FreeBSD system. In total, about one thousand individual contributors are identified, the early ones through primary research. The data set can be used for empirical research in software engineering, information systems, and software archaeology.The project aims to put in the repository as much metadata as possible, allowing the automated analysis of Unix history.

Microsoft recently joined the Linux Foundation while still asserting its patents against the rest of the membership. As I found that odd, I tweeted some casually-calculated statistics about Microsoftâs patent revenues that seemed to me to simply be the aggregation of common knowledge. But maybe not - at least two respondents asked me to substantiate the figures. Having struck a nerve, this post is by way of explanation.I, too, find it odd that Microsoft is now a 'higher' member of the Linux Foundation than, say, Red Hat, yet it still asserts its patents against various companies using Linux. It just doesn't sit right.

If you wanted a portable video editing workstation or a gaming machine you can take with you wherever you go, you'd be hard pressed to find more impressive specs from any manufacturer, let alone one that ships with Linux-compatible hardware like System76. So I mentioned to System76 that I wanted to test the Oryx Pro and compare it to the Dell XPS as a "developer" laptop. Frankly, the company was a little hesitant, pointing out that the two aren't really - aside from both shipping with Ubuntu installed - at all alike. And soon after the Oryx Pro arrived, I really understood just how different these machines area.System76 has really become a household name in Linux circles for great machines with fantastic out-of-the-box Linux support.

The UK is about to become one of the world's foremost surveillance states, allowing its police and intelligence agencies to spy on its own people to a degree that is unprecedented for a democracy. The UN's privacy chief has called the situation "worse than scary." Edward Snowden says itâs simply "the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy."The legislation in question is called the Investigatory Powers Bill. It's been cleared by politicians and awaits only the formality of royal assent before it becomes law. The bill will legalize the UK's global surveillance program, which scoops up communications data from around the world, but it will also introduce new domestic powers, including a government database that stores the web history of every citizen in the country. UK spies will be empowered to hack individuals, internet infrastructure, and even whole towns - if the government deems it necessary."Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame?"

From the debian-devel mailing list:debootstrap in unstable can now install with merged-/usr, that is with/bin, /sbin, /lib* being symlinks to their counterpart in /usr.LWN.net published an article in January 2016 going into this then-proposed change.Debian is the latest Linux distribution to consider moving away from the use of separate /bin, /sbin, and /lib directories for certain binaries. The original impetus for requiring these directories was due to space limitations in the first Unix implementations, developers favoring the change point out. But today, many of the services on a modern Linux system impose requirements of their own on the partition scheme - requirements that make life far simpler if /bin, /sbin, and /lib can be symbolic links to subdirectories within a unified /usr directory. Although some resistance was raised to the change, the project now seems to be on track to make "merged /usr" installations a supportedoption. And perhaps more importantly, the arguments favoring the merge suggest that many Debian developers would like to see that configuration eventually become the default.Any steps to clean up Linux' FHS implementation - no matter how small - is cause for widespread celebration all across the land. Call it forth!

When you have built your retro computer the chances are youâll turn it on and be faced with a BASIC interpreter prompt. This was the standard interface for home computers of the 8-bit era, one from which very few products deviated. If you were a teenager plugging your family's first ever computer into the living-room TV then your first port of call after getting bored with the cassette of free educational games that came with it would have been to open the manual and immerse yourself in programming.[...]The trouble is, in the several decades since, 8-bit BASIC skills have waned a little. Most people under 40 will have rarely if ever encountered it, and the generation who were there on the living room carpet with their Commodore 64s (or whatever) would probably not care to admit that this is the sum total of their remembered BASIC knowledge.10 PRINT "Hello World"20 GOTO 10If you have built a retro-computer then clearly this is a listing whose appeal will quickly wane, so where can you brush up your 8-bit BASIC skills several decades after the demise of 8-bit home computers?When I was very, very young - I'm from 1984 - I did some very basic BASIC, mostly on an MSX, but I remember very little of it. BASIC programming didn't grab me as a kid, and as such, I never went down the programmer's path. Today, with an adult life with adult responsibilities, learning to program seems like such a daunting undertaking, for which I simply don't have the time.

Let me be clear: I am well aware of the problematic aspects of Facebook' s impact; I am particularly worried about the ease with which we sort ourselves into tribes, in part because of the filter bubble effect noted above (that's one of the reasons Why Twitter Must Be Saved). But the solution is not the reimposition of gatekeepers done in by the Internet; whatever fixes this problem must spring from the power of the Internet, and the fact that each of us, if we choose, has access to more information and sources of truth than ever before, and more ways to reach out and understand and persuade those with whom we disagree. Yes, that is more work than demanding Zuckerberg change what people see, but giving up liberty for laziness never works out well in the end.Absolutely, 100% spot-on.

Since January 2016 (and maybe before), there's been talk that Microsoft was working on bringing x86 emulation to ARM processors. Sources of mine are now saying that this capability is coming to Windows 10, though not until "Redstone 3" in the Fall of 2017.Here's why this matters: Microsoft officials continue to claim that Continuum -- the capability that will allow Windows 10 Mobile devices to connect to external displays and keyboards -- is going to be a key for the company, its partners and its customers. There's been one very big limitation to Continuum so far, however: It only allows users to run Universal Windows Platform (UWP), and not full-fledged x86 apps.What if an ARM64-based device could run x86 apps via emulation, the same way that the WOW (Windows on Windows) emulator allowed 32-bit apps to run on 64-bit Windows? That would make Windows 10 Mobile, which as of now, continues to support ARM only, and Continuum a lot more interesting, especially to business users who need certain Win32/line-of-business apps.Quite compelling, to say the least. I've always considered the smartphone that turns into a full-fledged desktop when docked the holy grail of the mobile computing world, and I'm excited that Microsoft is still working on it.They'll get it right eventually. Infinite monkeys and all that.

With another wave of restructuring underway, which would see Nokia lay off tens of thousands of employees over the next few years, conversations like these and the close but remote relationship that the two had established might soon come to an end.What they and their fellow Nokians needed was a way to stay in touch. And so, with little fuss or fanfare, Rentrop and Parumog set up the 'Beyond Nokia' Facebook group.[...]"It's a love story," says Sotiris Makrygiannis, who was previously director of applications and site manager of Nokia's Helsinki R&D center. "I've never seen such a large group of people adoring a company. It's remarkable. All these tens of thousands of people lost their jobs and instead of hating the company, actually admiring the company".To understand why, Rentrop points me to Nokia's old company slogan: Connecting People. "It was not just a marketing phrase," she says, "for many members Nokia became a family". That sentiment is echoed in the hundreds of messages and photos currently being posted to the group every hour.To this day, the demise of so much of Nokia is a black page in the EU's history. The deal with Microsoft should have never been allowed to go through, and there's definitely grounds for more thorough investigation into the history and circumstances of the deal. Of course, it's impossible to say if Nokia's smartphone arm would've survived with Android, but I'm quite confident the company would've faced far better odds.As I said from the very beginning: the moment Nokia decided to share the bed with Microsoft, was the moment Nokia signed its own death warrant.

Apple Inc. has disbanded its division that develops wireless routers, another move to try to sharpen the company's focus on consumer products that generate the bulk of its revenue, according to people familiar with the matter.Apple began shutting down the wireless router team over the past year, dispersing engineers to other product development groups, including the one handling the Apple TV, said the people, who asked not to be named because the decision hasn't been publicly announced.Apple hasn't refreshed its routers since 2013 following years of frequent updates to match new standards from the wireless industry. The decision to disband the team indicates the company isn't currently pushing forward with new versions of its routers. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the companyâs plans.You can pry my 2013 AirPort Extreme from my cold, dead hands. After a long string of terrible routers, I have nothing but positive experiences with it, and have zero intention of replacing it with anything else.

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.