OSnews

This article was not created to say that Linux is better (it's definitely not). It was created to stop Microsoft fans roaring in regard to Windows 10 and how it's better than Windows 7 in every regard - it's actually worse in most regards aside from DirectX 12 (which is actually hidden from the user and it's only exposed in games).Some points are more reasonable than others, but they all have at least a decent grain of truth to them. Sometimes, I don't want carefully crafted, PR-whispered, politically correct reviews that you can interpret either way.Sometimes, you just want a sucker punch.

LG is launching a new Hi-Fi music service later this month, but the company's not touting it as an Apple Music or a Spotify rival. After all, it will only be accessible through certain devices, particularly its premium phones, which likely includes the LG G4 and its predecessors, the G3 and the G2. The service will be available in 70 countries, including the US, the UK, Australia, Brazil, Russia, China and Italy.For the life of me, I cannot understand why companies like LG, who aren't exactly raking in massive profits from their smartphone sales, are wasting precious time and money on pointless nonsense like this. Nobody is going to use this, nobody is going to care, and within less than a few years, it will be shutdown.What's the point?

Windows 8 and Windows 10 contain a surprising feature that many users will find unwelcome: PC OEMs can embed a Windows executable in their system firmware. Windows 8 and 10 will then extract this executable during boot time and run it automatically. In this way, the OEM can inject software onto a Windows machine even if the operating system was cleanly installed.The good news is that most OEMs fortunately do not seem to take advantage of this feature. The bad news is that "most" is not "all." Between October 2014 and April of this year, Lenovo used this feature to preinstall software onto certain Lenovo desktop and laptop systems, calling the feature the "Lenovo Service Engine."Microsoft provides more detailed on what, exactly, this functionality, dubbed the Windows Platform Binary Table, is supposed to be for (.docx file!), and how it works. From reading the document, it becomes clear that installing tracking software - which is what Lenovo is using this for - is not exactly what Microsoft had in mind.The Windows PC world is such a mess.

Oracle's chief security officer is tired of customers performing their own security tests on Oracle software, and she's not going to take it anymore. That was the message of a post she made to her corporate blog on August 10 - a post that has since been taken down.Strangely satisfying to watch this trainwreck unfold. Perhaps because the trainwreck in question is one of the most despicable companies in tech?

Fiddling with installation media for operating systems is annoying and cumbersome - and sometimes it's even impossible to create said installation media to begin with.And Apple's solution to this conundrum is very neat: even with a blank hard disk, the system firmware can connect to Wi-Fi or wired Ethernet, go online, and download the operating system directly from Apple. You can do a bare metal restore with nothing more than an Internet connection.This is just one of those little things that Apple can do relatively easily due to the integration between its hardware and software. Things like this take forever to get done properly on the PC side of things - although on the Linux side of things I used to download the minimal installation ISO and just download the rest of the operating system at install time through FTP or whatever.In true Linux fashion, this was a manual process. I would love for all this to be automated, as well as for the installation medium - even the minimal one that only boots the installer and connects to FTP - to be eliminated. Apple has done it, and so can the rest of the PC world.

Ever since Microsoft announced their Bridge technologies at Build 2015 questions about how they work (and how well) have been asked. The tools let developers port over Android apps (Project Astoria), iOS apps (Project Islandwood), web apps (Project Westminster) and classic Win32 apps (Project Centennial) to Windows 10 including phone.This morning, the actual tools for Project Astoria have leaked onto the web and users can freely (and illegally) download Android APKs and sideload them to their Windows Phone running Windows 10 Mobile. This follows yesterday's leak of the documentation for the project.Project Astoria is fascinating. If you look at the leaked documenation, you'll see Microsoft is running (parts of) the Android subsystem and Linux kernel in kernel mode. This should be nice for performance, but at the same time, it doesn't seem like something that'll be good from a security standpoint.The leaked documentation also explains that in Project Astoria, all activities belong to a back stack within a single task. In regular Android, activities can belong to different tasks, with their own back stacks. If I'm reading this right (and please, do correct me if I'm wrong - this isn't exactly my expertise), this should simplify the back button behaviour - and is probably a consequence of Project Astoria only being able to run one process at a time.Another fun part of Astoria: there's a WebKit rendering engine in there. Yes, Windows 10 Mobile will have a WebKit rendering engine. Fascinating.

We have built and uploaded the first ever working Qubes Live USB image! It's based on the recently released 3.0-rc2 release. Now you should be able to run and try Qubes OS of any laptop without needing to install it anywhere!We've talked about Qubes before, but since it's been a while, here's a quick primer: Qubes is an open-source operating system designed to provide strong security for desktop computing using Security by Compartmentalization approach. Qubes is based on Xen, the X Window System, and Linux, and can run most Linux applications and utilize most of the Linux drivers.This new live USB image should make it a lot easier to give Qubes a go.

This is the annotated transcript of our DefCon 23/BlackHat 2015 talk, which presented the full details of Thunderstrike 2, the first firmware worm for Apple's Macs that can spread via both software or Thunderbolt hardware accessories and writes itself to the boot flash on the system's motherboard. The original slides are available.While I think it's unlikely this worm will pose any real threat in the real world, I find it amazing that we're living in a world where this is possible in the first place.

Windows 10 IoT Core is a new edition for Windows targeted towards small, embedded devices that may or may not have screens. For devices with screens, Windows 10 IoT Core does not have a Windows shell experience; instead you can write a Universal Windows app that is the interface and "personality" for your device. IoT core designed to have a low barrier to entry and make it easy to build professional grade devices. It's designed to work with a variety of open source languages and works well with Visual Studio.Internet of Things, coming to you from a proud tradition of the tech industry being horrible at coming up with decent names.

In a few years, after the dust has settled, we're all going to look back at today's web's excesses and abuses as an almost unbelievable embarrassment. Hopefully, the worst is behind us. And it's time to stop demonizing people who use tools to bring that sanity to their web browsers today.Yes.

Google has just announced a major reorganisation if its company structure, as well as a new CEO. Basically, the company has created a sort of umbrella corporation containing all the independent business that (used to!) make up Google. In this new structure, Google is just one company within Alphabet, but so are Alphabet's other ventures, such as its medical companies, the driverless car company, and so on, and so forth.What is Alphabet? Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies. The largest of which, of course, is Google. This newer Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main Internet products contained in Alphabet instead. What do we mean by far afield? Good examples are our health efforts: Life Sciences (that works on the glucose-sensing contact lens), and Calico (focused on longevity). Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that arenât very related. Alphabet is about businesses prospering through strong leaders and independence. In general, our model is to have a strong CEO who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed. We will rigorously handle capital allocation and work to make sure each business is executing well. We'll also make sure we have a great CEO for each business, and we'll determine their compensation. In addition, with this new structure we plan to implement segment reporting for our Q4 results, where Google financials will be provided separately than those for the rest of Alphabet businesses as a whole.Alphabet will be headed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, but Google will get a new CEO in Sundar Pichai.This new structure will allow us to keep tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities we have inside of Google. A key part of this is Sundar Pichai. Sundar has been saying the things I would have said (and sometimes better!) for quite some time now, and I've been tremendously enjoying our work together. He has really stepped up since October of last year, when he took on product and engineering responsibility for our Internet businesses. Sergey and I have been super excited about his progress and dedication to the company. And it is clear to us and our board that it is time for Sundar to be CEO of Google. I feel very fortunate to have someone as talented as he is to run the slightly slimmed down Google and this frees up time for me to continue to scale our aspirations. I have been spending quite a bit of time with Sundar, helping him and the company in any way I can, and I will of course continue to do that. Google itself is also making all sorts of new products, and I know Sundar will always be focused on innovation - continuing to stretch boundaries. I know he deeply cares that we can continue to make big strides on our core mission to organize the world's information. Recent launches like Google Photos and Google Now using machine learning are amazing progress. Google also has some services that are run with their own identity, like YouTube. Susan is doing a great job as CEO, running a strong brand and driving incredible growth.Possible bonus perk: this is an antitrust lightning rod.It's going to take me a while to adjust to this somewhat strange - for now - naming scheme.

The post-PC era is a term that was made popular by Apple at its introduction of the iPad in 2010, and one that a lot of people took to mean the PC will eventually die and tablets and smartphones will take its place. The PC isn't exactly healthy right now, but it's also nowhere near death, no matter how many stories try to exaggerate its continued decline.I've never been a fan of the term "post-PC era", since it's obviously just a marketing ploy.

In order to address some of the sources of CPU overhead and provide developers with more explicit control over rendering, w've been working to bring a new 3D rendering API, Vulkan, to Android. Like OpenGL ES, Vulkan is an open standard for 3D graphics and rendering maintained by Khronos. Vulkan is being designed from the ground up to minimize CPU overhead in the driver, and allow your application to control GPU operation more directly. Vulkan also enables better parallelization by allowing multiple threads to perform work such as command buffer construction at once.

That wasn't all. Vestager (pronounced Vestayer) announced a new investigation into whether Google had abused its dominant position with the Android operating system for smartphones. She suggested other cases were possible, too - regarding Googleâs expansion into the markets for local search, maps, images, travel, etc. For Google, this was a nightmare portending years of scrutiny, a fine of up to $6 billion, and edicts that could forever limit the effectiveness of its products. The company must file a response to Vestige's "statement of objections" by Aug. 17.In the span of just 15 months, Google somehow lost Europe.I honestly don't believe this will go that far - I'm sure Google's learned from Microsoft's mistakes in Europe, and that it will give in just enough to avoid serious consequences.

The Moto G often feels like the culmination of everything that Motorola has learned in the course of making its other phones. Yes, it's a stripped-down version of Motorola's so-called flagship, the Moto X, but it's by no means an afterthought. It's reason to question what a "flagship" really is. If a flagship is literally the standard-bearer, then it's worth remembering that the Moto G is the Motorola phone that most people are going to use - it's the phone that's going to define Motorola. When you consider that the Moto G is Motorola's "best selling smartphone ever," Motorola's top-of-the-line phones start to seem more like testing grounds than devices designed to take over the market. Given how impressive and popular the Moto G is, it's hard to see it as anything but Motorola's actual flagship.I wouldn't only call the Moto G the culmination of everything Motorola has learned, but also what Android has learned. I just can't get over the fact that they managed to pack so much quality and smartphone into this cheap device.

We're releasing the iOS bridge as an open-source project under the MIT license. Given the ambition of the project, making it easy for iOS developers to build and run apps on Windows, it is important to note that todayâs release is clearly a work-in-progress - some of the features demonstrated at Build are not yet ready or still in an early state. Regardless, we'd love for the interested and curious to look at the bridge, and compare what we're building with your app's requirements. And, for the really ambitious, we invite you to help us by contributing to the project, as community contributors - with source code, tests, bug reports, or comments. We welcome any and all participation in building this bridge.I can think of a few developers who are probably poking around this code as we speak. Good move by Microsoft.

The biggest internet players count users as their users, not users in general. Interoperability is a detriment to such plays for dominancy. So there are clear financial incentives to move away from a more open and decentralized internet to one that is much more centralized. Facebook would like its users to see Facebook as 'the internet' and Google wouldn't mind it if their users did the same thing and so on. It's their users after all. But users are not to be owned by any one company and the whole power of the internet and the world wide web is that it's peer to peer, in principle all computers connected to it are each others equals, servers one moment, clients the next.If the current trend persists we're heading straight for AOL 2.0, only now with a slick user interface, a couple more features and more users. I personally had higher hopes for the world wide web when it launched. Wouldn't it be ironic if it turned out that the end-run the WWW did around AOL because it was the WWW was open and inclusive ended up with different players simply re-implementing the AOL we already had and that we got rid of because it was not the full internet.The writing's been on the wall for a while now.

Microsoft first revealed its redesigned Xbox One dashboard back at E3 earlier this year, and now the company is announcing that it will arrive on consoles in November. Powered by Windows 10, the new dashboard includes features that focus on speed and performance, and a design that's a lot more simplified.Just imagine if the Xbox One had a developer switch, so you could do all sorts of cools tuff with Windows 10 on it.

As we ask our employees to bring their "A" game to work every day to achieve our mission, we believe it's our responsibility to create an environment where people can do their best work. A key component of this is supporting our employees with benefits that matter most to them. This is why today we're announcing enhancements to our U.S. corporate employee benefits in three areas that employees consistently rank among the most important: having time to renew; saving for the future; and flexibility needed to spend time with new children.And yet another technology company investing just a little bit more into its employees. I think these changes bring Microsoft more in line with Google's policies, and from a European point of view this is still pretty abysmal, but it's a major step forward for new fathers and mothers, and that's a great thing.

It's been 10 days since Zimperium's Joshua Drake revealed a new Android vulnerability called Stagefright - and Android is just starting to recover. The bug allows an attacker to remotely execute code through a phony multimedia text message, in many cases without the user even seeing the message itself. Google has had months to write a patch and already had one ready when the bug was announced, but as expected, getting the patch through manufacturers and carriers was complicated and difficult.But then, something unexpected happened: the much-maligned Android update system started to work. Samsung, HTC, LG, Sony and Android One have already announced pending patches for the bug, along with a device-specific patch for the Alcatel Idol 3. In Samsung's case, the shift has kicked off an aggressive new security policy that will deploy patches month by month, an example that's expected to inspire other manufacturers to follow suit. Stagefright seems to have scared manufacturers and carriers into action, and as it turns out, this fragmented ecosystem still has lots of ways to protect itself.Seeing is believing, but the signs are at least somewhat positive. I doubt all of these will get the fix, though.That being said, as the linked article explains, this bug really isn't as worrisome as people made it out to be. Security researchers (often working for companies selling security software) have cried wolf so many times I really don't take any of them seriously at this point, no matter which operating system's users they are trying to scare into buying their crap.

At Netflix, we work hard to foster a "freedom and responsibility" culture that gives our employees context about our business and the freedom to make their own decisions along with the accompanying responsibility. With this in mind, today we're introducing an unlimited leave policy for new moms and dads that allows them to take off as much time as they want during the first year after a child's birth or adoption.Great, great move by Netflix - especially considering it's an American company. Technology companies are raking in more cash than ever before, and it's great to see a small number of them investing that money back into their own employees, and not into foreign tax havens or CxO's pockets.

Windows 10, by default, has permission to report a huge amount of data back to Microsoft. By clicking through "Express Settings" during installation, you allow Windows 10 to gather up your contacts, calendar details, text and touch input, location data, and a whole lot more. The OS then sends it all back to Microsoft so that it can be used for personalisation and targeted ads.[...]That isn't to say you should be happy about this state of affairs, however. If you'd like to retain most of your privacy and keep your personal data on your PC, Windows 10 can be configured in that way. Just be warned that there are quite a few toggles that need to be turned off, and you'll lose some functionality as well (Cortana won't work, for example).Or, you know, don't use Windows.

Today, HTC has taken the "native advertising" a step further and begun sending push notifications straight to user's devices. The push advertisement is for a custom theme available in HTC's theme store. Sponsored themes like these are nothing new (Samsung offers Marvel based themes on the S6), but pushing them to users' notification panels without their consent is more aggressive than we're used to and it's reminiscent of a practice which Google itself fought against.Google has managed to keep Android completely separate from its advertising business; i.e., there are no Google ads in Android, even though the temptation to do so and the ease and efficiency with which this can be done is tremendous. Luckily for us users, unless you willingly and actively install ad-supported applications, you won't be bothered with ads.Unless you're an HTC user. HTC has been trying to inject ads into several parts of its Android customisations, and now it's also started pushing ads to the notification drawer. This leaves an incredibly bad taste in my mouth, and it's made it very sure I'm not going to buy an HTC device any time soon.

And right now, early adopters and smartphone aficionados are really the limit of OnePlus' customer base. Though the company has been able to build tremendous amounts of hype and attention through its fan forums, social media accounts, and on technology blogs, the reality is that OnePlus is far from a household name at this point. Selling 1.5 million phones, as OnePlus did for its first phone, is certainly impressive for an upstart company, but it pales in comparison to the number of units Apple and Samsung move each quarter.I find these numbers jaw-dropping, to be honest. This completely unknown - at the time - company managed to sell 1.5 million of its first phone, and now its second phone has already seen more than one million pre-orders. I don't know about you, but I find that really, really impressive.As for the headline question - I find that unlikely at this point, but does it really matter? Does every company need to be either Apple or Samsung to be considered even remotely interesting by American/western technology media?

After skipping the month of July, Google is back in August with the latest distribution numbers for each version of Android. The numbers show that Android Lollipop is now on 18.1 percent of devices, making the jump from 12.4 percent when distribution numbers were last reported in June. Interestingly, KitKat is now on 39.3 percent, marking a tiny increase from 39.2 percent when numbers were last reported. Jelly Bean took a slight dive, making up 33.6 percent of installs, down from 37.4 percent in June.I always find these distribution numbers depressing.

On the heels of the recent 6.0.2 [ed. note: and I posted it again because I'm dumb] build of the Apple IIgs System Disk set, comes the next revision. Many loose ends have been tied up and documentation has been updated with changes described in detail.This release has been packaged as six 800K disk images in BXY format (Shrinkit Compatible Binary II Encoded), .PO format, and as a versatile 32MB âLive Installer in .PO format that boots to Finder for immediate access to all portions of the System Software and installing without the need of mounting multiple images or swapping floppies. This image can also be installed to a 32MB partition, CD ROM, etc.An absolutely amazing initiative, and so far, it seems like it's sticking. Awesome.

In 1996 Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen published a thought experiment, The Anti-Mac Interface. It's worth a read. By violating the design principles of the entrenched Mac desktop interface, G and N propose that more powerful interfaces could exceed the aging model and define the "Internet desktop."It's been almost 20 years since the Anti-Mac design principles were proposed, and almost 30 since the original Apple Human Interface Guidelines were published. Did the Anti-Mac principles supersede those of the Mac?Here I reflect on the Mac design principles of 1986, the Anti-Mac design principles of 1996, and what I observe as apparent (and cheekily named) Post-Mac design principles of 2016... Er, 2015.Quite a read, but definitely worth it.

Three months ago, Mr. Price, 31, announced he was setting a new minimum salary of $70,000 at his Seattle credit card processing firm, Gravity Payments, and slashing his own million-dollar pay package to do it. He wasn't thinking about the current political clamor over low wages or the growing gap between rich and poor, he said. He was just thinking of the 120 people who worked for him and, let's be honest, a bit of free publicity. The idea struck him when a friend shared her worries about paying both her rent and student loans on a $40,000 salary. He realized a lot of his own employees earned that or less.Yet almost overnight, a decision by one small-business man in the northwestern corner of the country became a swashbuckling blow against income inequality.Whether you support his actions or not, ask yourself this question: what does it say about our society that a young man slashing his own salary to increase that of his employees draws more ire than a CEO raising his own salary to 70 times that of an average employee?Most mystifying of all, though, are the employees leaving because their coworkers got a pay raise to $70000, while they themselves already earned $70000. I don't understand this mindset. You still have your salary. You still get your $70000, except now your fellow men and women on the work floor also get it. Is your self-worth really derived from earning more than the people around you? Is your sense of self really dictated by how much more you earn than Jim from accounting or Alice from engineering?Maybe I'm just too Dutch and too little American to understand this mindset, but I firmly believe this world would be a massively better place if more CEOs cut their own salaries to raise that of their employees.

If you're interested in the intricacies of game engine development, you should definitely keep track of Gavan Woolery's Voxel Quest. The latest blog post deals with a whole bunch of new stuff implemented in the voxel-based engine.The fact that VQ has undergone three tech revisions over two years probably seems a bit ridiculous, and maybe it is. Something like this would normally kill a game. That said, the point here is not just to make a game (plenty of people are doing that already), but to make a unique engine, and that could not happen in a vacuum. All I know is that I am finally happy with where the engine is at in terms of performance and flexibility, and I couldn't have gotten here without knowing everything I've learned since the start.So the most common question I get, of course, is how does this stuff work? It is actually simpler than it might seem.Voxel Quest is more about developing a unique game engine than it is about developing a unique game, but its developer wants to release the engine as open source so that others can do cool stuff with it too.

When Microsoft released Windows 95 almost 20 years ago, people packed into stores to be among the first lucky buyers to get their hands on this cutting edge new technology. Microsoft had an iron grip on productivity software in the enterprise, but even ordinary consumers were accustomed to paying hundreds of dollars for software. Two decades later, Microsoft is releasing Windows 10. But most people wonât have to rush out and purchase a copy. Anyone with a copy of Windows dating back to Windows 7 can upgrade for free, a first for Microsoft.Whether we're talking tiny smartphone applications, or entire operating systems, people now expect software to be free. It's a reality that, obviously, hurts software makers the most. If you'd told me only a few years ago Microsoft would adapt to this new reality this (relatively) quickly, I wouldn't have believed it.

With Lollipop, Google did something that developers had wanted for a while: a dev preview of the upcoming Android build. With the M release, it made that even better with OTA updates for the first time... But that hasn't gone quite as smoothly as we'd hoped it would.I'm not going to make the joke about Android updates.

Microsoft Corp. is considering an investment in Uber Technologies Inc. at a valuation of about $50 billion, a person with knowledge of the matter said.The WSJ confirms the report.I'm not so sure what to think of Uber. They are disrupting the horrible, horrible taxi market with a clearly superior product - I loved using Uber when I was in New York late last year - but at the same time, they are incredibly slimy. Not sure I would want to be associated with a company like this.

The Facebook application for Android isn't exactly, shall we say, best-in-class for a multitude of reasons, but at least Facebook is trying to improve it. This is their latest effort.In our exploration of alternate formats, we came across FlatBuffers, an open source project from Google. FlatBuffers is an evolution of protocol buffers that includes object metadata, allowing direct access to individual subcomponents of the data without having to deserialize the entire object (in this case, a tree) up front.Might be useful for other Android developers as well.

A Microsoft employee who wishes to remain anonymous to the public has informed Windows Central that as of 8 AM this morning, the Windows 10 OS has reportedly been installed on a massive 67 million machines.Even more interesting is the claim that Microsoft hit a max bandwidth of 15 Tb/s, topping the previous record of Apple's 8 Tb/s during their last OS push. Microsoft has reportedly reserved up to 40Tb/s "from all of the third-party CDNs combined".These are pretty insane numbers.

Microsoft started rolling out Windows 10, its shiny new operating system from 29th of July and there have been reports of bugs and issues with installing the Windows 10 operating system on PC/Laptops. Of course, with new OS come new error messages but this one takes the cake.Question time: which mail application of which operating system has a dialog that reads "bummer"? Your prize will be a firm handshake, to be administered by yourself or by whoever is standing closest to you.

Hello, it has been some time since my last article, in the meantime I continued to improve things out and since I changed some important parts of the media_kit, I think it's correct to notify the community about new and 'old' features added recently. This is an article mostly written for application developers, but I tried to explain the improvements made with simple words so I hope it will be interesting to anyone.Of all the alternative operating systems from the golden days (2000-2005 or so), Haiku is one of the very few - possibly the only one - still going strong. And by "going strong" I mean seeing a ton of development seemingly without seeing a sort of definitive release. They're trying to reach zero by endlessly dividing by 2, it seems, getting ever so much closer to zero without actually getting there.

Google may soon offer a new version of its Google Glass wearable later this fall. A new report says that the company will keep the hype down on this release, as it plans to offer it to businesses working in healthcare, manufacturing, and energy.Like I said over a year ago:No, I think the real value of Glass lies in an entirely different area Google seems to have been ignoring so far. It's a far less sexy area than the world of designer glasses and paragliders, but one that offers far, far more potential: 'traditional' workplaces. Construction. Road works. Law enforcement. The military. Farmers. Firefighters. Plumbers. Roofers. You name it. People who work with their hands in potentially dangerous environments, who can use the heads-up display for at-a-glance, crucial information while out in the field.If I can come up with something, anybody can.

The latest numbers from market research firm IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker show that Apple remains the largest vendor in a declining tablet market, shipping 10.9 million iPads in the second quarter of 2015. While the iPad continues to be the best-selling tablet, its worldwide market share fell below 25% as Apple faced increased competition from low-cost rivals Lenovo, Huawei and LG.With phones hitting 5.5-6.0" now, there's very little need for tablets.

Tom Warren's got a good piece up in which he interviews a number of people responsible for the development of Windows 10. Lots of interesting bits of information, but this one stood out to me.He's also surprisingly blunt when he characterizes Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8, products he was intimately involved in developing. "We've had a couple of, sort of, practice runs with phone and PC," Belfiore says, before pivoting to the presumably brighter future with Windows 10, "We now have all the devices lined up. I don't expect to see the platform change again, in the same way it has before."What he calls "practice runs", I call the most expensive failure in Microsoft's - and possibly all of technology's - history. When you add up all the years of development, marketing, the endless amount of bribes cash injections to keep Nokia from dumping Windows Phone, the actual acquisition of Nokia's mobile assets, the subsequent wholesale dumping of all those assets - it adds up to billions and billions of dollars down the drain, wasted, for naught. And the poison icing on this horrible cake?They're continuing to scale down the phone part of Windows even further.The practice run quote made me look back upon the past few years of reporting about Windows Phone and Nokia, about how many of us - myself at the forefront here on OSNews - realised years ago what a colossal failure Windows Phone was, and that small number of people insisting all was well with Windows Phone, how its market share was growing rapidly, how Nokia was doing great financially (*), and so on, and so forth. There were no tanks in Baghdad.In this case, it sucks to be right, because these "practice runs" cost thousands and thousands of people their jobs.

The Itanium may not have been much of a commercial success, but it is interesting as a processor architecture because it is different from anything else commonly seen today. It's like learning a foreign language: It gives you an insight into how others view the world. The next two weeks will be devoted to an introduction to the Itanium processor architecture, as employed by Win32.There's part one, two, and three - with more to come.

Summing up these 45 pages, one can say that Microsoft basically grants itself very broad rights to collect everything you do, say and write with and on your devices in order to sell more targeted advertising or to sell your data to third parties. The company appears to be granting itself the right to share your data either with your consent "or as necessary".You done got Scroogled.

Microsoft has been releasing updates to build 10240 on an almost daily basis since it hit RTM. Most of the patches are important security or bug fixes and rather useful but some have reported crashes occurring as a result of the updates. As we had previously reported, Microsoft has made updates mandatory and automatic, thus stopping users from opting out of unwanted updates or till the update has been checked by other users. A new troubleshooting package, KB3073930, however, allows you to hide or block Windows or driver updates.With Windows 10 being released in a few hours, bookmark the knowledge base article or download the update blocker tool mentioned in the article right away. While one can debate the merits - or lack thereof - of forced automatic updates, there's one huge, giant misstep Microsoft has taken with this: they will also force graphics drivers updates through Windows Update, and without this tool, there's no way to block them.I have had such horrible experiences with graphics drivers updates over the course of my life - from back in the 3dfx days all the way up until my current Radeon 970X Special Overlocked Whatever Edition With Kittens - that I am very careful and deliberate about these updates. I generally schedule some time for these late on Friday, but only when I know I won't have any work over the weekend so I have a few days of performing possible fixes.So, when I checked Windows Update last night and say that Microsoft secretly wanted to shove an AMD Radeon graphics driver update down my throat, I nearly panicked. To be clear: my machine is running the official AMD drivers from the AMD website, and not the AMD drivers Microsoft itself distributes through Windows Update. Had I not blocked this update, who knows what could've happend with possible conflicts or version mismatches or whatever.Luckily, I found this tool and blocked the update - and as it turns out, that was probably the right thing to do. This past weekend, Microsoft forced a completely broken NVIDIA graphics driver update to its Windows 10 users, causing a whole slew of problems.My view might be horribly jaded, but I have the suspicion that graphics driver updates are a huge source of issues with Windows. As such, who in their right mind at Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to force these update upon users?

This article is both a tutorial, a war story and a conceptual introduction to GNU Hurd in which I set up a cross-toolchain, and give a colorful tour through some rough edges of the GNU build system. My host system is Slackware Linux 14.1 (running on -current), i686 - which I find preferable due to its highly vanilla nature, running software almost entirely without distro-specific patching.

People have told us that accessing all of their Google stuff with one account makes life a whole lot easier. But we've also heard that it doesn't make sense for your Google+ profile to be your identity in all the other Google products you use.So in the coming months, a Google Account will be all you'll need to share content, communicate with contacts, create a YouTube channel and more, all across Google. YouTube will be one of the first products to make this change, and you can learn more on their blog. As always, your underlying Google Account won't be searchable or followable, unlike public Google+ profiles. And for people who already created Google+ profiles but don't plan to use Google+ itself, weâll offer better options for managing and removing those public profiles.Google is getting rid of its horrible social network and all the means with which it tried to shove it down our throats. Great move, but long, long overdue.

People have told us that accessing all of their Google stuff with one account makes life a whole lot easier. But we've also heard that it doesn't make sense for your Google+ profile to be your identity in all the other Google products you use.So in the coming months, a Google Account will be all you'll need to share content, communicate with contacts, create a YouTube channel and more, all across Google. YouTube will be one of the first products to make this change, and you can learn more on their blog. As always, your underlying Google Account won't be searchable or followable, unlike public Google+ profiles. And for people who already created Google+ profiles but don't plan to use Google+ itself, weâll offer better options for managing and removing those public profiles.Google is getting rid of its horrible social network and all the means with which it tried to shove it down our throats. Great move, but long, long overdue.

From a specs perspective, the OnePlus 2 features a 5.5-inch, 1080p screen, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor, and either 16GB of storage with 3GB of RAM or 64GB of storage with 4GB of RAM. The back-facing camera has a 13-megapixel sensor with optical image stabilization, while the front camera lets you shoot selfies at 5 megapixels. That back camera also includes a two-tone flash and a laser focusing system. While most of these specs are pretty standard fare for a high-end smartphone, the price remains anything but: the 16GB model will retail for $329, while the 64GB version will go for $389. That's more than last year's model, but after spending some time with the phone, I feel like the price increase is justified for what you get.This phone's got some standout features I really like - aside from its price - such as a hardware switch on the side to cycle between the three default notification settings in Android Lollipop (all, priority, and none), similar to the hardware switch every iPhone has had since day one. I've always wondered why Android phones never included this incredibly useful feature. The software is very close to stock, so it's got that going for it as well. There's downsides too - it's still not truly stock, so yeah, expect update problems. It'll only be sold - again - through a silly invite system, and it lacks NFC and an SD card slot.This is very close to what the Nexus 6 should have been, or what the next Nexus should be.

Plasma Phone OS (or simply Plasma Phone) is a complete software stack for mobile devices and includes the following libre technologies: Plasma Mobile (a Plasma-based shell), KWIN/KWayland, Voicecall, Ofono, RIL, OHM, Telepathy. It allows to run several Qt-based applications to run on top of it, for example: Plasma apps, Ubuntu Touch based apps, Sailfish OS based apps, Nemo based apps.The website is pretty minimal, but the first few comments on this Hacker News post gives a good overview.

BoingBoing posted a short movie by The MIT Media Lab's Knotty Objects group and noted hardware hacker Bunny Huang ask the question, "What if phones were designed to please their owners, rather than corporations?" In Southern China, where the majority of the world's mobile phones are made, there's a vibrant market for phones designed for all conceivable niches, where carrier subsidies, marketing campaigns, patents, trademarks, and other corporate-serving restrictions are ignored. If there's a possible market demand for a particular design, then someone makes a phone to meet that demand. It's a brief video, but worth a watch.

Dave Winer, like Linus Torvalds, noticed something strange was happening to his e-mail, which led him to figure out what was going on.On Wednesday I wrote about a problem I've been seeing with GMail, or so I thought. Messages that I knew I must be getting were not showing up in any of my mailboxes in GMail. But when I searched for them, they would show up.I heard from other people who had seen the same behavior.And I heard from two people from Google who work on GMail, who asked all the right questions. And gave me really detailed instructions on how to help them debug this.Creepy.

Ars Technica has a review of Android Auto.While we love the interface, we just wish there was more of it. Android Auto only covers a subset of the things you would want to do on an infotainment system. The result is an interface that - depending on what you want to do - will have you bouncing back and forth between two different interfaces. It's almost like installing Windows 8 in your car - you've got one modern, incomplete interface paired with a more comprehensive legacy interface. Android Auto can't control the AM/FM radio, CD player, or satellite radio. You also can't adjust the screen brightness, pair a device with the car, or mess with any other settings. Every time you start the car, it launches the ugly stock infotainment system, and you've got to plug your phone in and hit the Android Auto icon. Expect to switch from the beautiful-but-limited Android Auto interface to the slow, chuggy, tasteless OEM interface a lot.Can anyone with knowledge on the matter explain to me why, exactly, car manufacturers have such outdated, crappy in-car software? And why, even when we have something like Android Auto that could power everything, do they insist on only letting it do a subset, dumping you back to their own crap software for everything else? Why is the car itself running Gingerbread (yes, Gingerbread!)?Why are they so incompetent?