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And so, a day before I leave for Italy for my Summer vacation, we've got some... News about Jolla. The company just put out a press release, announcing a focus shift.Jolla Ltd., the Finnish mobile company and developer of open mobile operating system Sailfish OS, today announced a change in its company structure and management as further action toward company's strategy to focus on Sailfish OS licensing and development.As of today, the company Jolla Ltd. will concentrate on the development and licensing business of the independent and open mobile operating system Sailfish OS. A new company will be established to continue Jolla's device business, where the company sees a specific interest from privacy-aware consumers and corporations around the world.The press release - of course - frames this as happy news, but years of experience in covering technology (or just years of not living under a rock, really) has taught me that moves like this are never borne out of desire, but out of necessity. Combined with several delays of Jolla's tablet and of Sailfish 2.0, it's hard not to conclude the company (companies?) is facing bleak times.I haven't exactly kept my displeasure with the slow pace of progress regarding Sailfish development a secret, and I've had worries about the company's future for a long time now. The Jolla phone is now 19 months old, and it wasn't exactly flagship-quality to begin with when it was first released in December 2013. While there's been considerable updates to Sailfish 1.0, it, too, is now 19 months old. In addition, the promised support for paid applications never arrived.One also has to wonder just how wise it was to focus on building a tablet. Tablets don't get replaced very often, and they are a far smaller market than smartphones. In addition, adding a whole new form factor to support is surely to negatively affect the smartphone experience. Had the company instead focused on releasing a new phone, we might have had it sooner - no new form factor to develop - and we'd have a replacement for the under-performing original Jolla phone. Hindsight, though, right?Regarding the tablet:Jolla is committed to deliver the Jolla Tablet to its Indiegogo crowdfunding contributors and is working hard to start first shipments as soon as possible. "The software (Sailfish OS) part of the work is in good shape but we have been slowed down by supply issues of certain hardware components. We expect to solve this issue very soon," Mr. Saarnio says.I hope the company can stay afloat long enough to ensure we get our tablets (I ordered one within minutes of the announcement). Maybe things are not as bleak as I make them out to be here, but I'm not exactly getting the positive vibes.

On Sunday, while most of Twitter was watching the Women's World Cup - an amazing game from start to finish - one of the world's most notorious security firms was being hacked.Specializing in surveillance technology, Hacking Team is now learning how it feels to have their internal matters exposed to the world, and privacy advocates are enjoying a bit of schadenfreude at their expense.Hacking Team is an Italian company that sells intrusion and surveillance tools to governments and law enforcement agencies.Feels poetic.

Big changes afoot for Firefox.We intend to move Firefox away from XUL and XBL, but the discussion of how to do that is in the early stages. There are a ton of unanswered questions: what technologies/best practices for web development should we adopt in its place? How does this affect add-on developers? Is there space for a native-code main-window on desktop like we have on Android? How much time should we spend on this vs. other quality issues? What unanswered questions have we not asked yet?This clearly isn't a small endeavour, but the rationale given seems sound to me.

Itâs a fascinating time to take stock of startup innovation in the Netherlands, a rare turning point where you can watch the hard work of the past give way to the immense promise of the future.Behind London and Berlin, the Dutch startup scene is already considered to be one of the most prominent in Europe. (If it feels unfair to weigh an entire country against individual cities, consider that the Netherlands has 17 million people crammed into an area half the size of South Carolina.)The world of startups is intricately linked to technology, software, and Silicon Valley, but at the same time, it's a world that's very far away from me. The working hours, the insecurity, the minute chances at success - I would never opt for such a life.Which is why people like me don't found the next Apple or Google.

Microsoft is planning to finalize Windows 10 this week, ahead of its official launch later this month. Sources familiar with Microsoftâs plans tell The Verge that the company is currently working on final copies of Windows 10, with a release to manufacturing (RTM) build expected later this week. RTM candidate builds have already been spotted online. Once the RTM build is ready, Microsoft will send the final copy of Windows 10 to its PC partners ahead of a release to the public on July 29th.The actual release will be staggered; not everyone will get the update on 29 July. Probably a wise thing - hopefully this will allow Microsoft to catch problematic hardware components and drivers before it's pushed to all users.

Update: there's a denial, which in turn is also being questioned. Conclusion: nope, not happening.Russian manufacturer Yota, well known for its Yotaphone dual screen phones, has announced that its next devices will no longer operate using Android but Sailfish, an alternative developed by former Nokia engineers at Jolla.Interesting, if not a bit of an odd decision. One has to wonder what prompted this decision, because even though I like Sailfish for what it represents, it's far from a true alternative to Android or iOS. Maybe Yota knows something about Sailfish 2.0 we don't?I'm intrigued.

At the 1989 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nintendo of America's then-chairman Howard Lincoln took the stage to reveal some unexpected news: the company was partnering with European electronics firm Philips to make a CD-ROM-based games console. While the announcement took everyone in the audience by surprise, Sony engineer Ken Kutaragi was the most shocked of all. Just the night before, he and several Sony executives had been demonstrating a product developed in partnership with Nintendo. It was to be the world's first hybrid console, featuring an SNES cartridge slot and a CD drive, with both formats available to game developers. That product, called "Play Station" (with a space), would never see the light of day.Industry lore suggests that only 200 of the Play Station consoles were ever produced, and hardly anyone has actually seen one of the fabled consoles in the flesh. However, pictures of the legendary original Play Station surfaced on reddit yesterday, showing the hybrid console in all its grey and yellowed-plastic glory.Absolutely glorious. I could look at the pictures for hours.

Recently there has a been a lot of debate wether Safari is the new IE, or Apple simply is building a user-centric web, but I think that removes focus from the real problem.The problem isn't Safari. It's a somewhat modern browser that in the eyes of some might lack some important features, but overall is still pretty good and modern.The real problem is Apple's lack of browser-choice in iOS, and that's a problem for several reasons.When Apple allows other browsers (not just wrappers!), email clients, mapping services, etc. to be set as default by iOS users, we're going to see a whole bunch of Google iPhones. I'm pretty sure Apple is not looking forward to that as of yet.Maybe later, when Apple Maps stops being a joke, Mail.app doesn't choke when it's displaying more than 3 emails, and Safari stops sucking.

From The Verge:We've expected for a month or so that BlackBerry is working on an Android phone with a "dual curved display" that slides up to reveal a physical keyboard underneath. It is supposedly based on a device that was originally announced at Mobile World Congress back in March, and back then the best image we had to go off of was a low-resolution snapshot of the device being held up on stage. Now, Evan Blass (aka @evleaks) has posted a high-resolution render of the device, codenamed Venice, to Twitter.If this is for real, and BlackBerry doesn't mess it up by tying it to carriers and making it very hard for normal people to buy it, this is my next phone. Finally a modern phone with a keyboard.

Buying a phone in combination with a contract - the mislabeled "free phone" - just became a whole lot more complicated in my home country of The Netherlands. Today, our minister of finance, Jeroen Dijsselbloem (if you follow international news - yes, that one) today announced that he is not going to create an exemption in Dutch finance laws specifically for mobile carriers offering "free" phones on contract.Last year, The Hoge Raad der Nederlanden (our supreme court) ruled that if carriers offer a loan of â¬250 or higher, they need to abide by the same rules as any other company, institution, or entity providing such loans - meaning, they will have to perform an income check, check if people have prior debts, and in general, if their financial situation is sound enough for them to be able to take on a loan for a smartphone. They will also need to be a lot more transparent and upfront about the fact they are offering a loan, including warnings, the terms, and so on.This, of course, affects carriers a great deal; a lot of expensive, high-end phones, like iPhones or the latest Galaxy phones, are sold in combination with contracts, their true price hidden in monthly payments. Making it harder for consumers to take on these loans hurts their business model. As such, carriers had asked our minister of finance to create an exemption specifically for them - but he refused.Carriers are, of course, not happy. T-Mobile, Vodafone, and KPN - our three major carriers - have already voiced their displeasure. They're complaining they will have to do considerable investments to change their sales model, and that it will become a lot harder for customers to buy high-end phones. To be fair to the carriers, all this does mean consumers will have to reveal a considerable amount of private information to carriers if they want to take out a loan to buy a phone.That being said, there are alternatives: carriers could simply charge the price of the phone upfront. This, of course, is not something they want - they'd much rather be a little bit shady and fuzzy about the true price of smartphones. Samsung, Apple, and other smartphone makers surely won't be happy with this either, as they rely on these somewhat shady deals to peddle their wares. Half of Dutch consumers are already on SIM-only contracts, and this will only push more consumers to cheaper phones.As a Dutchman, I find this great news. My financial means are such that I don't have to worry about this sort of thing, but there are enough people out there for whom this is not the case, and there are certainly quite a few people lured into these seemingly "cheap" phones, only to suffer for it down the line. While I'm sure people living in Libertarian la-la-land will scream bloody murder, the fact of the matter is that if left to their own devices, these companies will abuse people left and right.

Later this year, Ultima Online will turn 18 years old. In the genre of MMOs, that makes the game positively ancient - and it's even more remarkable when you consider that it's still funded via a subscription model.I've never played an Ultima game, much less one that's nearly my age. I wanted to find out what the game is like to play today as a newcomer, and to ask people why theyâve continued visiting Britannia for nearly two decades.I have little to no interest in MMOs, but seeing one of them run for this long is fascinating.

A recent draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal would give U.S. pharmaceutical firms unprecedented protections against competition from cheaper generic drugs, possibly transcending the patent protections in U.S. law.This article focuses on pharmaceuticals, but just imagine what similar restrictions would mean for technology. This is disastrous.

Set backstage at three iconic product launches and ending in 1998 with the unveiling of the iMac, Steve Jobs takes us behind the scenes of the digital revolution to paint an intimate portrait of the brilliant man at its epicenter.Judging by this trailer, Apple and its bloggers are not going to like this film. It doesn't exactly paint Jobs in a pretty light.

Brent Simmons:You the indie developer could become the next Flexibits. Could. But almost certainly not. Okay - not.Whatâs more likely is that you'll find yourself working on a Mobile Experience for a Big National Brand(tm) and doing the apps you want to write in your spare time.If there's a way out of despair, it's in changing our expectations.John Gruber, referencing Simmons' article:There is so much that could and should and will be said about this. But the bottom line is that indie development for iOS and the App Store just hasn't worked out the way we thought it would. We thought - and hoped - it would be like the indie Mac app market, only bigger. But it's not like that at all.I've been saying this for years. I'm glad the rest of the world is catching up.

Speaking of Apple:Apple today released OS X Yosemite 10.10.4, an under-the-hood update that introduces several bug fixes and performance improvements. Most notably, 10.10.4 includes the removal of the problematic Discoveryd process, which has caused multiple networking issues for some users in OS X Yosemite.I'm curious to see if this will solve the reconnect-on-wake issues my retina MacBook Pro has. In addition, Apple also released iOS 8.4, which includes a radio station, in case you're sick of listening to the music you want without some random dude blabbering through your songs.

In late March a handful of the western world's best-known iPhone hackers were flown business class to Beijing. They were put up in the five-star Park Hyatt and given a tour of the sites; the Great Wall, the Forbidden City. "They kept referring to us as 'great gods'. I'm guessing it just translates to 'famous person', but we couldnât contain our giggles every time the translators said it," says Joshua Hill, a 30-year-old from Atlanta who was one of the chosen few.It was a bizarre trip hosted by an equally bizarre and secretive entity called TaiG (pronounced "tie-gee"), which flew the hackers to China to share techniques and tricks to slice through the defences of Apple's mobile operating system in front of an eager conference-hall crowd. Why such interest and why such aggrandisement of iOS researchers? In the last two years, jailbreaking an iPhone - the act of removing iOS' restrictions against installing unauthorized apps, app stores and other features by exploiting Apple security - has become serious business in China. From Alibaba to Baidu, China's biggest companies are supporting and even funding the practice, unfazed at the prospect of peeving Apple, which has sought to stamp out jailbreaking ever since it became a craze in the late 2000s.I had no idea jailbreaking iOS was this popular in China.

At this point, we in the web community need to come to terms with the fact that Safari has become the new IE. Microsoft is repentant these days, Google is pushing the web as far as it can go, and Mozilla is still being Mozilla. Apple is really the one singer in that barbershop quartet hitting all the sour notes, and it's time we start talking about it openly instead of tiptoeing around it like we're going to hurt somebody's feelings. Apple is the most valuable company in the world; they can afford to take a few punches.

The Apple Watch has been out for over two months now, and other modern smartwatches well before that. Itâs no longer the stuff of sci-fi to consider using your watch to play music, control your TV, or track your fitness. But these are all things that youâve been able to do for a surprisingly long time - well, if you maybe lived in Japan in the â90s and didnât mind carrying around a bunch of Casio watches, that is.I already highlighted several of these Casio classics in my Moto 360 review, but The Verge does a nice job of listing them with beautiful photos.

On Monday, the Supreme Court opted not to review a 2014 ruling on copyright law that held Google's Android operating system infringed copyrights relating to Oracle's Java platform. This is a disaster for the software industry.Here's the problem: the digital economy depends on gadgets and software being able to communicate seamlessly. Last year's decision by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals opened the possibility that efforts to make software work together better could trigger copyright liability. The result could be more compatibility problems and less innovation.The most disgusting and most despicable lawsuit in technology. Oracle is a horrible, horrible company.

Researchers have shown that machines are inching closer to self-learning, and perhaps even copping a little attitude.Over at Google, a computer program using a database of movie scripts was asked again and again by researchers to define morality. It struggles to do so, and in a conversation recorded by its human engineers, becomes exasperated and ends the conversation by lashing out at its human inquisitor.Eerie. The full paper is more interesting.

Every year we see the same promise: this is the year that Android-first development will become a reality. At the same time we see big companies like Instagram repeatedly introduce new apps that are iOS-only. Android has been able to tout more market share than iOS for quite some time, but that doesn't seem to have translated into app developers releasing Android apps at the same time as their iOS counterparts, much less Android-first. Over the past few weeks I've been talking with developers and researching why this is still the case.A major reason not discussed in this article: the large companies - Twitter, Facebook, etc. - as well as the major technology press outlets, are all US-based, and clearly have a very US-centric view of the world (or maybe at the very least an Anglo-Saxon view). In the US, iOS and Android both sit at around ~45% market share, so it makes sense that developers working for these companies focus on iOS more than on Android, simply because iOS development tends to be an easier experience (I'm simply echoing what I hear from developers on both sides of the aisle). The same applies to the technology press.Outside of the English-speaking countries, however, Android reigns supreme. If these companies had a more world-centric view, their Android efforts would surely improve - because as it stands right now, most major companies' Android applications lag behind their iOS counterparts considerably. Over here in The Netherlands, though, every major new local application - banks, brands, stores, etc. - are always iOS+Android on day one.It'd be great if American companies finally started getting their acts together too. Don't assume that veteran iOS developers are automatically also good Android developers (they're not), and hire real, proper Android developers. I translate English to Dutch, and my clients would never ask me to translate, I don't know, Spanish documents into Dutch. Small indie Android developers have proven that, even if it may be a little harder, it's perfectly possible to create Android applications that are just as good as, and often even better, than their iOS counterparts.In 2015, there's no excuse for releasing lousy, crappy Android applications. You only have yourself to blame.

Who would spend more than the cost of a PS4 on a video game console that only plays NES games? Well, who would spend thousands of dollars on a digital camera that canât autofocus? Leica shooters, of course, and people of similar persuasion might just be interested in the Analogue Nt for their gaming needs. The Nt is a modern Nintendo Entertainment System hewn from a solid block of aluminum, and retails for $499 (plus an extra $79 if you want HDMI output and hardware upscaling.)Beautiful piece of hardware - and I love the fact that there might be a market for this. There are way more sensible options, of course, but none of them look this good.

The Clear Linux Project for Intel Architecture is a project that is building a Linux OS distribution for various cloud use cases. The goal of Clear Linux OS is to showcase the best of Intel Architecture technology, from low-level kernel features to more complex items that span across the entire operating system stack.Don't dismiss it - Intel is doing a lot of interesting under-the-hood stuff with this one.

If you've been watching the news recently, you'll know of the huge debate in the U.S over the role of the Confederate flag in contemporary America. Many see it as a reminder of the many pre-Civil War injustices while others see it simply as a way to honor the soldiers who died for the Confederacy. Many large US companies, like Walmart and Amazon, have already banned the sale of any Confederate flag merchandise as a reaction to the recent events. Now, it appears that Apple has decided to join them by pulling many Civil War wargames from the App Store. As of the writing of this story, games like Ultimate General: Gettysburg and all the Hunted Cow Civil War games are nowhere to be found. Apple is famous for reaching for the axe rather than the scalpel when it comes to political issues (like rejecting Hunted Cow's Tank Battle 1942 for depicting Germans and Russians as enemies), so this move doesn't come as a great surprise.While it's obvious that the Confederate flag has no place in, on, or around government buildings, it seems a bit insane to ban games (movies? Books? Comics?) that take place in the US Civil War era for showing the flag.On a sidenote - three Apple stories in a row? What's happening?

For a long time, iOS apps have been able to open links as web views. When you tap a link in a Twitter client, an RSS reader, or a bookmark utility, it usually opens in a mini browser that doesn't leave the app, providing you with the convenience of not having to switch between Safari and the app. For years, in spite of some security concerns, this worked well and became the de-facto standard among third-party iOS apps.With iOS 9, Apple wants this to change - and they're bringing the power of Safari to any app that wants to take advantage of it.

I took a little time out today to watch WWDC Session 511 to learn about how Safari Content Blocking will work in iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan. After an hour, I had a little concept app running. I wont really explain the technical details of how the extensions work or how to create them, that is better done by watching the WWDC Session video directly, but I will say its frightfully easy and the code I used for the blocker detailed below is at the bottom of this page.I'm not complaining.

It is showing hidden files (that have names starting with a dot) when invoked by root and doesnât show them (as expected) when running as a normal user. This differs from what ls on Linux (the one coming from coreutils) does.Why does ls behave this way?Very interesting answer. I love stuff like this.

If you pay close enough attention to these things, you've probably seen Google Play Services updating from time to time on your Android devices. If you follow the more technical side of Android, you'll know it was announced a couple of years ago to introduce new APIs and features in a way that doesn't require a firmware update. You could be forgiven for dismissing it as a dry and technical part of the OS, but in reality it's a crucially important part of the way modern Android works.Play Services is a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because it makes the lives of developers easier and because it bypasses incompetent carriers and OEMs so that users get considerable updates. It's a curse because they're closed source - making it impossible to dig into the code. They make your device less your device, and that's always a bad thing, especially in today's world.So much of this could be addressed if Google opened up as much of it, but that's very unlikely to happen.

On my home forum Sysnative, a user (wavly) was being assisted with a WU issue, which was going well, aside from the fact that wavly's WU kept getting disabled randomly. It was figured out eventually after using auditpol.exe and registry security auditing that the program that was responsible for disabling WU was Disable_Windowsupdate.exe, which is part of Samsung's SW Update software.SW Update is your typical OEM updating software that will update your Samsung drivers, the bloatware that came on your Samsung machine, etc. The only difference between other OEM updating software is, Samsung's disables WU.No matter how much work Microsoft puts into cleaning up Windows, crappy OEMs like Samsung will undo all their work.How about that line of Surface laptops and desktops, Microsoft?

Over in Europe, things work a little differently. The carrier model still dominates, but it's just as easy to pick up unlocked, unbranded versions of Android phones big and small that work on just about any local operator (and often many not-so-local ones.)Nice overview of the situation in Europe, but to be honest, I haven't seen any carrier-specific models in The Netherlands in years. In fact, at least on my carrier, you can unlock your phone the moment you get it (a low fee may be charged), and after 12 months, the unlock process is always free (at least for T-Mobile - I'm guessing the same applies to the other two carriers).You can buy unlocked phones from major stores - both online and offline - everywhere, and nobody bats an eye. In fact, in the first quarter of 2014, almost half of all 'mobile connections' were SIM-only - i.e., the mobile phone contract is just the SIM card, without any "free" phone. When you do the maths, clever shopping for a SIM-only contract and an unlocked phone can be hundreds of euros cheaper in the total running time of the contract than going the traditional contract+phone route.Coincidentally, I'm pretty sure this explains why Android is so popular here. You can get unlocked Android flagship-quality phones or last year's flagships for a few hundreds euros, whereas unlocked iPhones are two to three times as expensive. When you give consumers an honest breakdown of what a contract+phone really costs, most people will opt to save hundreds of euros.

Google Inc.'s life sciences group has created a health-tracking wristband that could be used in clinical trials and drug tests, giving researchers or physicians minute-by-minute data on how patients are faring.The experimental device, developed within the company's Google X research division, can measure pulse, heart rhythm and skin temperature, and also environmental information like light exposure and noise levels. It won't be marketed as a consumer device, said Andy Conrad, head of the life sciences team at Google.Like Apple's ResearchKit, I'm really glad technology companies are actively trying to help advance medical research, treatments, and so on. Technology can have a huge impact here.

A new iOS 9 feature added in beta 1 was only discovered when users attempted to update to beta 2 earlier today. This new feature will allow the operating system to intelligently delete applications if you don't have enough free space to perform a software update. Once the update is complete, the apps will automatically be reinstalled and your data will remain intact.Clever feature. I would say 'something for Android to adopt', but then I remembered I'm an idiot.

Like all modern processors the Mega-processor is built from transistors. It's just that instead of using teeny-weeny ones integrated on a silicon chip it uses discrete individual ones like those below. Thousands of them. And loads of LEDs.Hand-built. Insane, but also very cool.

Apple's impulsive response to Swift stands in stark contrast to their treatment of indie app developers, who have been lobbying Apple for almost seven years, requesting Apple reform policies in the App Store to no effect. In particular, Cue's use of the word "indie" can only be described as a callous slap in the face given the circumstances that indie developers have been facing.iOS application developers are expendable, and have zero reach. Taylor Swift is unique, and has a quarter metric frickton of reach.Do the math.

Yesterday, news broke that Google has been stealth downloading audio listeners onto every computer that runs Chrome, and transmits audio data back to Google. Effectively, this means that Google had taken itself the right to listen to every conversation in every room that runs Chrome somewhere, without any kind of consent from the people eavesdropped on. In official statements, Google shrugged off the practice with what amounts to "we can do that".Remember how everyone used to make fun of people like Richard Stallman? Way back in 2012, we already reached the point where we had to acknolwedge Richard Stallman was right all along (useless sidenote: this is one of the three most popular OSNews articles of all time). In recent years, people have been putting stickers and tape on their laptops to cover up built-in webcams. The next step is, apparently, to rip out the built-in microphones, too. That's what you get when you entrust a major technology company with automatic updates.If it runs software from any of the major companies, your computer isn't yours. Handle it accordingly.

After being publicly smacked down by music's biggest star, Apple is changing its tune. Late Sunday night, Apple VP Eddy Cue responded to the open letter that Taylor Swift posted earlier in the day, revealing that Apple now plans to pay artists, labels, and publishers for streams during Apple Music's three-month free trial. The premium streaming service is due to launch on June 30th.Taylor Swift just outsmarted one of the biggest, richest, and most arrogant companies on earth. Impressive.The fact that Apple announced this sudden tail-between-its-legs change of heart in the middle of the night (might've been late Sunday night for US - I suck at timezones), via Twitter no less, is indicative of how badly thought-out this whole Apple Music thing seems to be. The presentation during WWDC was awkward, the three month trial period heavily criticised, and now this. Curious.

Nokia's CEO Rajeev Suri told Germany's Manager Magazin (in German, Reuters report in English) that they plan to start designing and licensing (but not manufacturing) phones again once their agreement with Microsoft expires in 2016. The license would include the use of the Nokia brand name. Does this open the door for Jolla goodness to eventually return to its roots?

One of the first computers in the world, EDSAC is being rebuilt at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. Andrew Herbert takes us on a walk around inside the computer.The computer memory is pulses of sound waves in long tubes of mercury.

This is not about me. Thankfully I am on my fifth album and can support myself, my band, crew, and entire management team by playing live shows. This is about the new artist or band that has just released their first single and will not be paid for its success. This is about the young songwriter who just got his or her first cut and thought that the royalties from that would get them out of debt. This is about the producer who works tirelessly to innovate and create, just like the innovators and creators at Apple are pioneering in their field... But will not get paid for a quarter of a year's worth of plays on his or her songs.I'm sure the web will be flooded with slightly differently worded but effectively the same this-isn't-Apple's-fault blog posts and comments shortly, but this whole saga does seem like a major punch in the stomach for small and/or upstart artists. They've already got it rough in this business, and along comes the hugely powerful Apple, who, despite the incredible riches it has stashed away in tax havens, wrangles even that little bit of coin from them.Stay classy, Apple.We don't ask you for free iPhones. Please don't ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.I don't know much about Taylor Swift other than that she's really popular in the US, but that is one wicked burn.

I bought an Apple Watch, and I've been wearing it for about two weeks. I'm a notorious mobile computing fanatic and early adopter. How does it hold up to real-world use? How does it compare to the hype?Let's get this out of the way: I've been waiting for an Apple Watch for a long time. While a lot of people were quick to dismiss the whole idea, I've been on board with the idea of a wrist-mounted companion to a smartphone since I first started using a smartphone. I never bought a Pebble or any of the other first generation smart watches, largely because I've been around the block long enough to know that it's hard to be an early adopter, but partially because I wanted to wait and see what Apple would come up with. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

I bought an Apple Watch, and I've been wearing it for about two weeks. I'm a notorious mobile computing fanatic and early adopter. How does it hold up to real-world use? How does it compare to the hype?Let's get this out of the way: I've been waiting for an Apple Watch for a long time. While a lot of people were quick to dismiss the whole idea, I've been on board with the idea of a wrist-mounted companion to a smartphone since I first started using a smartphone. I never bought a Pebble or any of the other first generation smart watches, largely because I've been around the block long enough to know that it's hard to be an early adopter, but partially because I wanted to wait and see what Apple would come up with. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

There's been a lot of chatter lately about BlackBerry working on a device running Android, and at first, the rumour was that the portrait slider - yes, with a keyboard - the company briefly flashed before our eyes early this year was going to run Android. I got excited over this one, because I've been wanting a modern smartphone with a keyboard for a long time now. The Passport is a good example, but it's quite expensive for entry into a platform with dubious longevity (I did actually try to buy one when I was in Canada late last year, but Canadian stores were afraid of my money). So, the prospect of an Android slider from BlackBerry surely had my wallet rumbling.Too bad. A new rumour today suggests that while BlackBerry is indeed working on an Android device, it's not the slider device, but a lower-end, Android One-like device. Still interesting, of course, but not nearly as interest-piquing as a device with a hardware keyboard.Assuming the rumours don't change tomorrow, those of us hoping for a modern Android smartphone with a hardware keyboard will have to wait a little longer.

But the people calling for a bytecode for the browser never went away, and they were never entirely wrong about the perceived advantages. And now they're going to get their wish. WebAssembly is a new project being worked on by people from Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, to produce a bytecode for the Web.WebAssembly, or wasm for short, is intended to be a portable bytecode that will be efficient for browsers to download and load, providing a more efficient target for compilers than plain JavaScript or even asm.js. Like, for example, .NET bytecode, wasm instructions operate on native machine types such as 32-bit integers, enabling efficient compilation. It's also designed to be extensible, to make it easy to add, say, support for SIMD instruction sets like SSE and AVX.

Based on the MINIX 3 microkernel, we have constructed a system that to the user looks a great deal like NetBSD. It uses pkgsrc, NetBSD headers and libraries, and passes over 80% of the KYUA tests). However, inside, the system is completely different. At the bottom is a small (about 13,000 lines of code) microkernel that handles interrupts, message passing, low-level scheduling, and hardware related details. Nearly all of the actual operating system, including memory management, the file system(s), paging, and all the device drivers run as user-mode processes protected by the MMU. As a consequence, failures or security issues in one component cannot spread to other ones. In some cases a failed component can be replaced automatically and on the fly, while the system is running, and without user processes noticing it. The talk will discuss the history, goals, technology, and status of the project.

Former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is leaving Microsoft as part of a fresh reorganization. "We are aligning our engineering efforts and capabilities to deliver on our strategy and, in particular, our three core ambitions," says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in an email to employees today. "This change will enable us to deliver better products and services that our customers love at a more rapid pace."And not a single tear was shed.

DuckDuckGo has exploded in popularity since the federal governmentâs surveillance program came to light two years ago. Remember the privacy-minded search engineâs best week ever?The service has grown 600 percent since then, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg said on CNBC.And deservedly so.

Windows is an old and complex operating system. It's been around for a very long time, and while it's been continuously updated and altered, and parts are removed or replaced all the time, the operating system still houses quite a few tools, utilities, and assets that haven't been updated or replaced in a long, long time. Most of these are hidden in deep nooks and crannies, and you rarely encounter them, unless you start hunting for them.Most. But not all.There's one utility that I need to use quite often that, seemingly, hasn't been updated - at least, not considerably - since at least Windows 95, or possibly even Windows 3.x. Using this utility is an exercise in pure frustration, riddled as it is with terrible user interface design and behaviour that never should have shipped as part of any serious software product.This is the story of the dreaded Character Map. I'll first explain just how bad it really is, after which I'll dive into the little application's history, to try and find out why, exactly, it is as bad as it is. It turns out that the Character Map - or charmap.exe - seems to exist in a sort-of Windows build limbo, and has been stuck there since the days Microsoft scrapped Longhorn, and started over. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

Sailfish OS 1.1.6 has been released. The biggest new feature is probably the private browsing mode, but it's also got a host of other new features, bug fixes, and improvements. I would guess this is one of the last 1.x releases, since the tablet, whicvh ships with Sailfish OS 2.x, should be shipping this month.

Thomas van Linge's colorful, detailed maps showing which parties control which parts of Iraq, Libya and Syria are a hit whenever he posts them on Twitter. They have been cited on news stories in the Huffington Post, Lebanon's Daily Star and Vox, as well as on the University of Texas at Austin's website. But van Linge isn't a policy expert and he's never been to the region: In fact, heâs just a Dutch high school student who tracks the war on social media.Quite amazing (van Linge's work, obviously - not the subject matter!).

Looking across the updates in El Capitan, the story is clear: Apple is making life way better for people who live in its ecosystem. But if you don't live in Apple's garden, the benefits are less clear. Yes, it's faster and there are bugfixes all around, but to take advantage of Apple's updates you really need to use Apple's apps.I just want El Capitan's Metal and Aero Snap. That name is horrible, though.