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It's Day 0 of E3 2015. This is the time when all the giants of popular gaming make their big announcements, competing for your attention and future gaming dollars. Today is also a big day for YouTube, which doesn't make games, but will soon be introducing a dedicated YouTube Gaming service. It too will be competing for the attention of millions.The goals of YouTube Gaming are as grand as YouTube itself. Google wants its new website and app to become "the biggest community of gamers on the web" and the destination for live-streamed game video, whether it comes from professional tournaments or amateurs playing just for fun. If that sounds exactly like Twitch, that's because it is. Having lost out to Amazon in the pursuit to acquire Twitch last summer, Google has spent the past year building up its own alternative, and that's what we have to look forward to in the coming weeks.YouTube is well-positioned to compete with Twitch, since most streamers upload the VODs to YouTube anyway. Why not have it all in one place?In any event, yet another case of competition breeding product improvements.

One of the big complaints about Chrome currently is that it's a battery hog, especially on Mac where Safari seems to do better.The team has been working on addressing this; here are some cases that have recently been improved on trunk.I'm glad Google is taking this matter seriously.

A 30-year-old computer that has run day and night for decades is what controls the heat and air conditioning at 19 Grand Rapids Public Schools.The Commodore Amiga was new to GRPS in the early 1980s and it has been working tirelessly ever since. GRPS Maintenance Supervisor Tim Hopkins said that the computer was purchased with money from an energy bond in the 1980s. It replaced a computer that was "about the size of a refrigerator."Either 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it', or, 'why is a school in the US not using newer, more modern technology?'.

When Android Wear came out over the course of last year, Google promised that the young, new platform would receive updates "early and often". While it wasn't said with so many words, it's easy to read between the lines: Google was going to make sure Android Wear users wouldn't face the same headaches as Android users when it comes to updates. Wear would be a more tightly controlled platform, built in such a way that updates could go straight to users' devices without meddling from carriers or roadblocks thrown up by crappy customisations.Fast forward to June 2015, and Google has recently released Android Wear 5.1.1, which, despite its humble version number increase over 5.0.1, is a pretty significant update to the smartwatch platform. It enables WiFi on devices that support it, adds new ways to interact with your watch, and makes it easier to launch applications. All in all, it looks like a great update.Sadly, I can only go by what others have told me, despite owning the poster Android Wear device - the Moto 360. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

I tend not to link to podcasts - I don't like podcasts and prefer good ol' text - but this one is pretty great.Recorded in front of a live audience at Mezzanine in San Francisco, John Gruber is joined by Phil Schiller to discuss the news from WWDC: OS X 10.11 El Capitan, iOS 9, the new native app SDK for Apple Watch, Apple Music, and the 2004 American League Championship series.It's a bit feelgood, of course, but it's still totally worth it. Schiller and Gruber hit it off on this one, and there's some great stories in there.

But internally, Android One was seen as an attempt to avoid another China, where Android is popular but comes without Google's services. It was also a hedge against the rising power of Facebook, which is becoming, in many parts of the developing world, the gateway to the Web.So far, it has done neither. And the audacious hardware program has been anything but.

Most web users tolerate ads; many web users hate advertising with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. There are many good reasons that users dislike ads (theyâre bad for performance, security, and privacy) as well as less universal, more arguable grievances (e.g. annoyance factor, disagreement about the value exchange for ad-funded services, etc).Apple, a company that makes ~80%ish of their revenue from iOS-based products, recently announced that iOS 9 will ship with a compelling ad-filtering API for the Safari browser.A brilliant move by Apple to force news providers (the rich ones, at least) to move to creating applications or join its Flipboard clone.Apple's Flipboard clone uses Apple's own iAds, of course, which cannot be blocked at all.

Users of DOS or older versions of Windows will have invariably stumbled upon a quirk of Windows' handling of file names at some point. File names which are longer than 8 characters, have an extension other than 3 character long, or aren't upper-case and alphanumeric, are (in some situations) truncated to an ugly shorter version which contains a tilde (~) in it somewhere. For example, 5+6 June Report.doc will be turned into 5_6JUN~1.DOC. This is relic of the limitations brought about by older versions of FAT used in DOS and older versions of pre-NT Windows.So far, nothing new. This article, however, delves deeper into a special aspect of this relic: a built-in checksum function that, up until now, was undocumented.

A detailed article about how Google transformed itself from scoffing at design, to embracing it.Such attention to detail used to be Apple's thing. Today, that distinction falls to Google. Unveiled last year, Material Design - Google's evolving design language for phones, tablets, and desktop - offers relentless consistency in interactions; invisible rules that govern everything, so that every app feels familiar; and beauty in the service of function. It's why so many designers will tell you, as they've told me, "I just like Android better." Whereas iOS is still inching along without improving much, Google is creating a coherent, unified language that easily scales across phones, with enough flexibility to jump to watches and cars. "It's not even about composing a UI in one place," says Nicholas Jitkoff, who helped lead the creation of Material Design. "It's about composing interactions from one device to the next."Most of OSNews' readers will scoff at this article, because they consider "design" to be a dirty word. They're Pine.This was Google. And this was Larry Page, a man who, when asked by one designer what Google's aesthetic was, responded, "Pine." That is, a command-line email system common during Page's college years, whose main draw was its speed.Page's answer spoke to a philosophy that still dominates in the minds of many engineers: That the best design is no design at all, because speed is the only metric that matters. Adding anything charming to a computer interface simply slowed down. For many years, that made sense. In the dawn of computing, and the dawn of the internet, it didnât matter of the computer spat out something ugly, so long as it spat out something as soon as you asked. This was a version of the so-called two second rule, formulated in the 1970s: If a computer didn't respond within that time frame, humans naturally drifted away. For a computer to actually augment your mind, it had to respond almost instantaneously.As far as design languages go, Material Design is quite minimalist, yet still retains the depth and the kind of information required to easily grasp what things do, where things go, and where things are coming from. It borrows heavily from Metro - as does every modern design - but improves upon it by the heavier use of the Z-axis and subtle animations to understand where things are going and where they're coming from. The clear colours make it easy to identify what you're doing and where you are. It's welcoming, without being overbearing.Contrast this with the Aero-like iOS 7/8 design, with its are-these-buttons-or-just-labels-or-perhaps-an-input-field, endless use of transparency and blurriness for no particular reason, and just an overall sense of chaos, and the differences couldn't be more stark. I find iOS overwhelming, unclear, unfocused, messy, inconsistent; every application is different and implements its own rules, buttons, and design. On Android 5.x, thanks to Material Design, I never feel lost. I never have to learn yet another new set of icons or interactions.Matias Duarte is, quite clearly, the leading voice in UI design right now. Microsoft set the current trend, Google perfected it, and Apple just made stuff flat and blurry with no sense of purpose or direction. Before Material Design, I could've easily been swayed towards iOS. Now, though?No way.

An important bit of news from WWDC that deserves its own news item: you no longer need to be a licensed developer (i.e., paying) to test your applications on your own devices.Xcode 7 and Swift now make it easier for everyone to build apps and run them directly on their Apple devices. Simply sign in with your Apple ID, and turn your idea into an app that you can touch on your iPad, iPhone, or Apple Watch. Download Xcode 7 beta and try it yourself today. Program membership is not required.Of course, to distribute them, you still need to pay up.

Seconds later, deGrasse Tyson turned out to be the least of the problem. Apple also trots out McKinsey's James Manyika in the video, who starts off his quote with a phrase that should never be heard at tech conferences: "If you think the industrial revolution was transformational..."I wasn't in San Francisco for WWDC, but I can only imagine the crowd at the keynote either fell silent or started howling uncontrollably as he finished that sentence: "...the App Store is way bigger."It requires a special kind of chutzpah to compare any innovation to the industrial revolution. But to actually suggest that a collection of apps - a million or so fart soundboards, greedy casual games, and programs that help you get through you email a fraction faster - is anywhere close to the industrial revolution is beyond delusional.I'm glad I wasn't the only one who did a triple-take when this was said in Apple's App Store video last night. If this is truly how Apple feels about its contributions to the world - and everything points in the direction that it does - then the company has lost all sense of perspective and has transcended its usual playful arrogance towards full-on insanity.Very disappointed in Neil deGrasse Tyson, too, for making similarly outrageous claims in this video.

TempleOS is somewhat of a legend in the operating system community. Its sole author, Terry A. Davis, has spent the past 12 years attempting to create a new operating from scratch. Terry explains that God has instructed him to construct a temple, a 640x480 covenant of perfection. Unfortunately Terry also suffers from schizophrenia, and has a tendency to appear on various programming forums with a burst of strange, paranoid, and often racist comments. He is frequently banned from most forums.This combination of TempleOS's amateurish approach and Terry's unfortunate outbursts have resulted in TempleOS being often regarded as something to be mocked, ignored, or forgotten. Many people have done some or all of those things, and it's understandable why.You really have no excuse to not read this article.

With WWDC still underway, there's a lot more news than what made it in yesterday's article. First and foremost, Apple announced watchOS 2.0, which will bring native applications to the platform, as well as a feature called Time Travel that works much the same way as the timeline UI on the new Pebbles. It allows you to scroll into the future to see the upcoming appointments, the weather, and so on.Apple is also merging its various developer programs. Instead of having to buy access to iOS and OS X separately, a single $99 fee will now net you access to iOS, OS X, and watchOS. Tangentially related: CarPlay now allows car makers to create applications that expand what CarPlay can do; e.g. control the climate control, radio, and other in-car features.Apple also announced its new music streaming service, called Apple Music, which will be available for iOS, Windows, and Android. Speaking of Android - Apple has also made an Android application to help switchers move from Android to iOS.

Over the past few weeks - following an important-but-barbed talk from Apple CEO Tim Cook - the rhetoric has turned to privacy and security and data and how only products you pay for are good and any sort of free services are inherently bad and basically whore out what's left of your post-Snowden soul.It's an important discussion to have. And one we'll continue to have. But it's not one-sided. It's not binary.And, actually, it's interesting to see how the rhetoric has changed recently.Ouch.

It's time for Apple's WWDC, and its keynote. It's currently underway, and much like Google's I/O keynote and the introduction of Android M, we're looking at a lot of catch-up. Both the new OS X and iOS releases are getting new features taken directly from the competition.OS X 10.11 will be named El Capitan, and among its major new features are the ability to snap windows side-by-side, and in case you're wondering how it works, just look at Windows 7 and later. It's a direct copy of the Aero Snap functionality, and I'm really glad Apple finally got around to copying this excellent Windows feature. I use it so often on Windows, I really, really miss it on any platform that doesn't have it.Safari, too, fired up the photocopier, and this time around, Chrome's the obvious target. Safari in El Capitan is getting pinned sites, which is a useful Chrome feature that allows you to keep your favourite sites open all the time. Safari is also copying another great Chrome feature: the little indicator that tells you which tab is producing audio. As a Safari user on my retina MacBook Pro (Chrome is a battery hog on OS X), I am incredibly happy with these new features.Apple is also bringing its Metal graphics API to from iOS to OS X, and Apple really focused on gaming when it comes to this one. I'm still not entirely sure who uses or even cares about gaming on OS X, but for those of you that do - this is surely great news. As has become the norm for OS X, El Capitan will be free, and will ship this fall. A public beta will be released in July.Moving on, the major new features in OS 9 are also catch-up features, this time to Android, of course. The biggest one is Proactive, Apple's Google Now competitor. It offers similar functionality to Google Now, including reading your email to notify you of invitations and the like. Unlike Google, however, all the 'intelligent' stuff happens on the device itself - not on Apple's servers.We'll have to see how well it works - if Proactive works just as well as Google Now, without requiring the kind of information Google claims it needs, Apple's got a winner on its hands. If it sucks, it will be a validation of Google's approach.As a sidenote, I've never actualy really used Google Now. It does not work for me at all because my GMail account is a Google Apps account, which Google Now doesn't work with (yes, paying Google customers cannot use Google Now). It led to a fun situation when my friends and I were on vacation in the US, in October 2014. Google Now on their iPhones worked perfectly fine, bringing up boarding passes and relevant travel information, whereas my Nexus 5, a Google phone running Google software on a Google operating system, just showed me the weather back home. When I found out why, I turned off Google Now.The keyboard has also been improved - and now does what every other smartphone platform has done for years: when you press shift, the keycaps will reflect the state. If you put two fingers on the keyboard, you can user them to move the selection cursor - a great feature that appears to be iPad-only for now. Apple is also introducing a new news application to iOS, which is basically a Flipboard copy.The big new iOS feature is iPad-only: multitasking. If you've ever used Windows 8 on a tablet, you know how this works. Swiping in from the side, splitscreen view - we've all been here before. It literally works and looks exactly like Windows 8. Again - this is great. A lot was wrong with Windows 8's Metro UI for tablets, but its tablet multitasking is absolutely great and fantastic. I'm really glad Apple copied it, and it's high-time Android will do the same (in fact, there's early support for it in Android M).So, much like Google's I/O keynote and Android M specifically, OS X El Capitan and iOS 9 are all about catching up to a number of stand-out features from the competition, so I can repeat here what I said then: another example of how competition between the major platforms makes both of them better - consumers, win.Unlike Android, though, there's no update elephant in the room here. In fact, Apple has heard the complaints about the iOS 8 update being too big for iPhones with little storage, so iOS 9 is only 1.4GB in size. A great move, and it will ensure that every eligible device will be getting iOS 9. In addition, Apple isn't dropping any device with iOS 9 - if it runs iOS 8, it'll run iOS 9.All in all, a great keynote with lots of awesome new features, but nothing we haven't seen before. Every single day, iOS and Android become ever more interchangeable. As consumers, the more these companies copy each other's great ideas, the more awesome features our platforms of choice will get.I'll leave you with two final notes. First, Swift will be released as open source. Second, Apple had women up on stage to present new features for the very first time. It was about time.

But it's also super depressing, because it's just another example of how the rise of streaming media has brought crazy digital rights management back into our lives. We've completely traded convenience for ecosystem lock-in, and it sucks.Right now, the Echo can play music from Amazon's Prime Music service, Pandora, and whatever random music I've uploaded to my Amazon cloud locker. This means that the music selection is pretty bad! I stopped buying music around the time I started using Spotify, so I don't have much new stuff to upload, and Prime Music has a fairly thin catalog compared to Spotify. Basically this thing can play my 2000s-era iTunes collection at me, which means I'm listening Wilco and The Clash way more than I have in the past few years. Is that good? It might be good.Patel has a point - the rise of all these streaming music services has completely undone the end of DRM in the music industry. It's most likely entirely unrelated, but Steve Jobs' scathing letter condemning the use of DRM is no longer available on Apple's website - just as Apple is rumoured to launch its own streaming music service.The same has happened in IM, chat, messaging, or whatever you want to call it. It's 2015, and I have five messaging applications on my smartphone - WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Messenger, Hangouts, Skype - and I also use iMessage occasionally (on OS X) because some of my friends are locked into it and don't want to use something else. These companies - Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook - are actively and consciously making the choice to make the lives of their customers as difficult as possible.If these companies really cared about their customers - as they always claim they do - they would've come together and used or developed a proper open standard for messaging. Instead, we get Facebook (through WhatsApp) banning users for using 3rd party WhatsApp clients on Sailfish, or we have Apple making grandiose promises about turning FaceTime into an open standard, but then backtracking once they realise they can frustrate and lock-in consumers by keeping it closed. Google, meanwhile, seems to have no idea what it's doing at all, flipflopping left and right (Hangouts? Messenger? What's it going to be, Google?). Skype is Skype.Now that iOS and Android (and to a lesser degree, Windows Phone) are entirely and wholly interchangeable, companies are looking for other ways to lock their consumers into their platforms - and much like in music, the companies are placing their own interests above that of their consumers.

The real issue that Apple is trying to address is not really privacy, but rather security. Though Google has all of my data, it is still private. Google does not sell access to my data; it sells access to my attention. Advertisers do not get my information from Google. So as long as I trust Google's employees, the only two potential breaches of my privacy are from the government or from a hacker. If we accept this as a fact, the fundamental privacy question changes from, "Do you respect my privacy?" to "Is the user experience improvement worth the security risk to my private information?"Dustin Curtis hits the nail on the head so hard the nail's on its way to Fiji.

I'm going to let you in on a little secret: Most normal, non-tech-obsessed people don't really need a smartwatch.You can read the entire article if you want, but this opening line is all you need to know. Smartwatches are, right now, useless crap.

In June of last year, I finally decided to commit to an Android device. I had carried every flagship iPhone up through that point from the original iPhone to the 5S. To the world around me, I heaped the praise into a life transforming device, but in my tech circles, and on my blog, I frequently posted about my frustration, mostly with shackles and intentional limitations imposed. So last year, why I decided to make the jump to Android. I outlined 10 reasons why I was finally ready to make the jump to Androidâs 4.4 release, KitKat. A year has passed. It's time to revisit my original assertions and complaints with some follow up and see where I stand one year later. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

The first wave of Steam Machines, console-like computers designed to run Valve's Steam software and its thousands of PC games, will be in some pre-order customers' hands on Oct. 16 and in stores on Nov. 10, Valve announced today. The Steam Controller and Steam Link will also hit on Nov. 10.Not sure what to make of SteamOS at this point - it's just a Linux distribution that launches Steam, and you can even close Steam to go to a desktop... On your TV - but the Steam Link is definitely interesting, so I pre-ordered one straight away.

You see the problem. When white gamers are forced to play people not of their race, it's "forced politics;" when I'm forced into the same scenario, it's business as usual. When you complain, you're making a fuss and being political. The argument is a bit scary when you break it down: The only way games can avoid politics in this situation is to pretend that people of color don't exist.We should raise concerns about race, but it needs to be consistent. Race shouldn't only be an issue for gamers when some white gamers express concerns.Outstanding article.

The Pebble Time iPhone app, as we've all noticed, is not yet live on the iTunes AppStore. It remains "in review." This unexpected circumstance pains us as much it does backers with watches ready to set up. We're doing all we can to mitigate the delay and make Pebble Time Watch for iPhone available for download.A complete coincidence, I'm sure.Meanwhile, to ensure the future usability of your Pebble device, it's highly suggested to switch to Android.

I don't really care much about the voice search and recognition stuff in Now, Siri, and Cortana - but this video demonstrating the capabilities of Hound - an alternative to those three for Android - is mind-blowing. The recognition speed, the talkback, the way it manages to get accurate results for even relatively vague and quite complex compound questions is amazing.I smell an acquisition incoming.

PicoC is a very small C interpreter for scripting. It was originally written as a script language for a UAV's on-board flight system. It's also very suitable for other robotic, embedded and non-embedded applications.The core C source code is around 3500 lines of code. It's not intended to be a complete implementation of ISO C but it has all the essentials. When compiled it only takes a few k of code space and is also very sparing of data space. This means it can work well in small embedded devices. It's also a fun example of how to create a very small language implementation while still keeping the code readable.

Google's developer tools are an ever-evolving and changing set of utensils that allow the folks building our apps to tie into Google's services while making things we want to install and use every day. They're free, and while they are powerful, some of the finer points of great design have been tricky for devs to handle, and the IDE itself - that's the program that developers use to write the code and build their apps - can be clunky when you stray outside the "hello world" box and get into the nitty-gritty of coding. And testing apps has been a nightmare. Google has addressed these three issues in a big way.Nice overview of some of the things Google has done to make Android development - a pain point for many developers - a little easier. The new testing initiative is pretty rad.

Google has just released a new tool to manage your privacy and information. Here's some of the things the new My Account tool can do:Take the Privacy Checkup and Security Checkup, our simple, step-by-step guides through your most important privacy and security settings.Manage the information that can be used from Search, Maps, YouTube and other products to enhance your experience on Google. For example, you can turn on and off settings such as Web and App Activity, which gets you more relevant, faster search results, or Location History, which enables Google Maps and Now to give you tips for a faster commute back home.Use the Ads Settings tool to control ads based on your interests and the searches you've done.Control which apps and sites are connected to your account.Google has always been at the forefront of providing its user insight into and control over the information it has on you, and this tool fits right into that. It'd be great if the other tech giants - who collect the same information on you but act secretive and deceptive about it - were to follow in its footsteps.Good thing this stuff isn't tied to Android updates, though, or we wouldn't be able to use it until 2034.Anywho, in the same blogpost, the company also introduced a site where it answers questions regarding your information and privacy. In it, the company dispels a persistent myth - namely, that the company sells your information.No. We do not sell your personal information.We do use certain information, such as the searches you have done and your location, to make the ads we show more relevant and useful. Ads are what enable us to make our services like Search, Gmail, and Maps free for everyone. We do not share information with advertisers in a way that personally identifies you, unless you gave us permission. With our Ads Settings tool, you can control ads based on your interests and the searches you have done.When you think about it, it makes zero sense for Google to "sell" or otherwise reveal your personal information to third parties. The information Google has on you is the goose that lays the golden eggs. It's the very reason Google can earn so much money through advertising - it knows more about you than other advertisers do, and is better at inferring patterns and connecting the dots to show you more relevant ads.In the end, though, the question is one of trust. Do your trust Google with your data? Do you trust Apple with that same data? Microsoft? Facebook? Personally, I have zero trust in any of these companies, and thus, anything that I do not want other people to know will not find its way onto my computers or devices. I have a very simple test for this: if I wouldn't yell something loudly in a crowded restaurant or mall or something, it's not going to be input in a computer or device.As for 'regular' information that I have no issues with if companies know it, I personally definitely "trust" Google more than Apple or Microsoft, if only because Google is under a lot more scrutiny than others. Apple is incredibly secretive and deceptive about the information it collects on you, and provides far less insight into and control over it than Google does. Microsoft, meanwhile, has a proven history of questionable behaviour that's well-documented - new Microsoft or no. Let's not even talk about Facebook.In the end, all these companies have virtually the same privacy policies, and you give them the same rights to your stuff if you upload it to them. I choose to use the one under the closest and most scrutiny and which gives me the most insight into and control over my data. Your choice might be different, but don't delude yourself into thinking your data is safe at Google, Microsoft, Apple, or Facebook.When it comes to privacy on the web, just assume everybody can see every bit you send - just like how everyone can hear you when you talk loudly in a crowded place. Do not trust any company, no matter how nice the PR sites look or how vicious its blogger attack dogs are.

Microsoft has just officially announced that it will release Windows 10 on 29 July.Familiar, yet better than ever, Windows 10 brings back the Start menu you know and love. Windows 10 is faster than ever before, with quick startup and resume. And Windows 10 provides the most secure platform ever, including Windows Defender for free anti-malware protection, and being the only platform with a commitment to deliver free ongoing security updates for the supported lifetime of the device.Marketing blabber aside, the update will be free for the first year for all Windows 7 and 8 users. You'll get a notification in your notification area which will allow you to reserve your Windows 10 upgrade.

Project Vault is a secure computer contained entirely on a micro SD sized device. Google's ATAP said the micro SD format made sense because there's already advanced security features on your phone, contained in the SIM card, which protects the things important to carriers. Vault is designed to be an equivalent, but designed to project a user's important content.Would be fun to play with on my Google Nexus 5.Oh wait.

The internet, though, has been a mixed blessing for Esperanto. While providing a place for Esperantists to convene without the hassle of traveling to conventions or local club meetings, some Esperantists believe those meatspace meet ups were what held the community together. The Esperanto Society of New York has 214 members on Facebook, but only eight of them showed up for the meeting. The shift to the web, meanwhile, has been haphazard, consisting mostly of message boards, listservs, and scattered blogs. A website called Lernu! - Esperanto for the imperative "learn!" - is the center of the Esperanto internet, with online classes and an active forum. But it's stuck with a Web 1.0 aesthetic, and the forum is prone to trolls, a byproduct of Esperanto's culture of openness to almost any conversation as long as it's conducted in - or even tangentially related to - Esperanto.But there's hope that the internet can give the language new life. Wikipedia and its 215,000 pages was a first step, and yesterday, Esperanto debuted on Duolingo, a virtual learning app with 20 million active users - far more people than have ever spoken Esperanto since its invention.This article is the perfect mix between two of my favourite subjects - technology, and language. A highly recommended read.

While Apple's WWDC is of little interest to hard-core Android customers, Google I/O can and often is of significant interest to Apple customers. It's where Google shows off its big new initiatives and previews updates for its existing services. Some years, those are blips on the radar, here for a moment, gone the next. Other years their scope and implications shake the world. This year, for me, fell somewhere in the middle. Google was restrained, relatively speaking, and focused. Yet as much as they acknowledged the need to shore up what came before, the company's focus is clearly on what's coming next. And that's worth a deeper discussion.How iMore's Rene Ritchie perceived the Google I/O accouncements.

The Verge has a long and detailed profile of and interview with Sundar Pichai, the man at Google responsible for just about anything you use.We sat down with Pichai to hear his vision for the Google of the future. He laid out a plan to improve Google's products through machine learning - but more importantly, he sketched out a grand effort to deliver computing capabilities to billions of people around the world. Both in the way he manages his internal teams, and in his belief that technology can change people's lives for the better, Pichai advocates an egalitarian ethos.If there's one thing that stood out during the I/O keynote yesterday, it was that Google was really hammering on the fact that it wants to create products for everyone. It wasn't said with so many words, but the clear implication was "unlike Apple, which only builds products for rich people in the west".This egalitarian view permeated every aspect of the keynote, including the people on stage - instead of the usual procession of western, white 40-something men, almost half of all the presenters were women (I think there were three, like a VP of engineering), and a few people weren't even western to begin with. This is unprecedented for technology companies - Apple, for instance, hasn't ever had a woman present on stage (although Tim Cook did interview a supermodel on stage once).We need this. Technology needs this. We need people from "new" economies, as well as women, to play a big part in the development of our technology to ensure that technology isn't just designed for rich white people, but for everyone. Pichai knows this, and it was drop-dead obvious throughout the entire keynote.Say what you want about Google - and there's a lot to say - but in this aspect, they are so far ahead of the competition it's not really a competition to begin with.

This is the first Mono release that contains code from Microsoft's open sourced .NET code.We are only getting started with this work. We are swiftly moving ahead in mono/master much more code that is being replaced and ported.This version also is the first one to ship with C# 6.0 enabled by default. Learn all about C# 6.0 in only eight minutes on this presentation.The release notes will tell you more.

Google's Android operating system is set to give users more detailed choices over what apps can access, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter remains private. That could include photos, contacts or location. An announcement of the change, which would put Android closer in line with Apple Inc.âs iOS, is expected for Googleâs developerâs conference in San Francisco this month, one of the people said.If there's ever been a use case for 'finally', this is it. iOS gains Android features, Android gains iOS features. They pressure each other into becoming better, and we, all, benefit.The Apples and Googles of this world might rather not have to deal with it, but isn't competition beautiful?

"Right now weâre releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, weâre all still working on Windows 10." That was the message from Microsoft employee Jerry Nixon, a developer evangelist speaking at the company's Ignite conference this week. Nixon was explaining how Microsoft was launching Windows 8.1 last year, but in the background it was developing Windows 10. Now, Microsoft employees can talk freely about future updates to Windows 10 because there's no secret update in the works coming next. It's all just Windows 10. While it immediately sounds like Microsoft is killing off Windows and not doing future versions, the reality is a little more complex. The future is "Windows as a service."Call me a convert. Instead of having to buy several copies of Office every few years for multiple computers (I require Office for my translation company), I now have a â¬99/year Office subscription allowing me to install Office on 5 PCs and 5 mobile devices. I know most of our readers are not a fan of this model, but I, personally, am all for it.

Still, for those who have taken the plunge, Amazon continues providing software updates. Fire OS 4.6.1 includes a fair number of changes, but the largest is one Amazon doesn't mention - it updates the underlying version of Android from 4.2 Jelly Bean to 4.4 KitKat. KitKat is still a year-and-a-half old at this point, but that's a year newer than Jelly Bean, and it's still the most-used version of Android according to Google's developer dashboard.Why anyone would buy these outdated Amazon frankendroid devices is beyond me.

My dislike for application stores, the race to the bottom they enabled, and the myth of it being a great way for small developers to make it big is well-documented at OSNews, so yeah, I couldn't pass up this story (don't click the link yet!). Developer Sam Soffes released an interesting application on the Mac App Store, and when he looked at how well his application as doing later that day, he was in for a shock.For launch, the price was $4.99. I may play with that some over time. I was originally thinking $2.99 and a bunch of folks on Twitter said $4.99 was better. Anyway, Redacted was #8 top paid in the US and #1 top paid in Graphics at the end of launch day. It was also at the top of Product Hunt with 538 up votes! Wow!This sounds amazing, right? Surely, this is a story of an indie developer making it big, becoming a millionaire overnight. Good feels were had all around, right?Now read the post.

Federico Viticci's iOS 9 wishlist contains my number one gamebreakinig missing feature in iOS:Seven years into the App Store, I struggle to find a reasonable motivation for not allowing users to set different default apps on iOS. I believe Apple should accept that they can't make the perfect email client or web browser for all kinds of users, and, just like custom keyboards, they should let users choose their favorite app for a specific set of core tasks. If personalization of a user's iOS device has truly become a priority at Apple, then it should be extended to activities that users frequently perform on an iPhone or iPad.If Apple were to finally make this possible, there's going to be a whole lot of Google iPhones and Google iPads out there.

As always, AnandTech has the only review of the new Surface 3 that really matters.So with those caveats aside, we can finally get to the conclusion that you have likely guessed already. The Surface 3 is a great device. The build quality is really at the top level of any OEM out there. The form factor is finally the right one after two previous generations that got it slightly wrong. The weight is lighter than any previous Surface, and just as balanced. Performance of the x7 Atom CPU is great for light tasks, and if you need more than light tasks then this is not the device for you. As a tablet, it is great to use in either orientation, with the portrait mode being especially good now for browsing the web. The kickstand is improved, they keyboard is improved, the base tier steps up to 64 GB of storage, making it actually useful without immediately adding micro SD to the mix.When I was weighing the pros and cons of the retina MacBook Pro vs. the Surface, I eventually ended up not going with the Surface because of the keyboard and trackpad. As nice as the Surface hardware is, its detachable keyboard and trackpad (whether it's the Pro or the regular) are several orders of magnitude worse than those on the MacBook Pro, which are best-in-class (well, the trackpad at least). Those are the primary input methods for my kind of use, so the MBP won out in the end.The point: Microsoft should just make a Surface laptop. Keep the detachable model as well if you want, but also offer a proper Surface laptop that can compete with actual laptops.

Hugo Barra, currently Xiamoi's vice president of international and formerly VP of Google's Android vision, on SD cards in an interview with Engadget:"For high performance devices, we are fundamentally against an SD card slot."Barra backed up his statement by pointing out that his team didn't want to sacrifice battery capacity, ergonomics, appearance and, in the case of the new Mi 4i, the second Micro SIM slot for the sake of letting users add a storage card. More importantly, microSD cards "are incredibly prone to failure and malfunctioning of various different sorts," and the fact that there are a lot of fake cards out there - and we've seen it ourselves - doesn't help, either.In case you disagree with him, The Verge's review of the LG G4 states it's a pretty decent phone.

After almost 24 months of constant development the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 8 (code name Jessie), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and of the Debian Long Term Support team.Jessie ships with a new default init system, systemd. The systemd suite provides many exciting features such as faster boot times, cgroups for services, and the possibility of isolating part of the services. The sysvinit init system is still available in Jessie.Screenshots and a screencast are available.

It used to be that the only way to make money from a mod was a) make a standalone sequel or remake b) use it as a portfolio to get hired by a studio or c) back in the pre-broadband days, shovel it onto a dodgy CD-ROM (and even then, it almost certainly wasn't the devs who profited). As of last night, that changed. Mod-makers can now charge for their work, via Steam.It's far too soon to know the long-term outcome of Valve offering the option for mod creators to charge for their work, which went live yesterday using Skyrim as a test case. Everyone has an opinion, and I'll try to cover the main angles below, but first I simply want to express simple sadness. Not fatalistic sadness - I'm genuinely curious as to how this will play out, and there's high potential for excitement - but End Of An Era sadness.The backlash Valve is facing over this whole thing is immense. Every gaming website, and sites like Reddit, are swamped with people lashing out against this new Valve policy. This kind of universal backlash is incredibly rare, and it's kind of interesting to see it unfold. Whatever goodwill Valve had with PC gamer - they managed to throw it all away in a day. Absolutely amazing.As for my personal opinion on this matter - I'm used to mods being free, but considering some of the insane amounts of work people have put into incredibly complex, vast, and terrific mods for games like Skyrim, it does seem more than reasonable to give mod makers the possibility to charge for their work. And let's be absolutely clear here: Valve is forcing nobody to charge for their mods - mod makers choose to make their mods for-pay themselves.That being said, introducing money into an previously pretty much money-less scene is bound to have a lot of negative results - for instance, free mods from Nexus are being offered for sale on Steam; not by their authors, but by pirates. As a result, mod makers are removing their content from Nexus to prevent others from profiting off their work.It's a huge mess right now, and it'll be hard for Valve to regain all the goodwill they threw away in just a day.

Ubuntu Desktop will eventually switch to Snappy packages by default, while continuing to provide deb-based images as an alternative, at least for a while. I'm sure this doesn't come as a surprise for some of you, but further details regarding this have been revealed today.They're slowly moving away more and more from Debian packages.

The European Union's decision to take on Google last week stems from official complaints by 19 companies in Europe and the United States, including Microsoft and a number of small firms, people familiar with the matter said on Friday.Microsoft is actually twice on the list; first as Microsoft-proper, but also as part of a lobby group also on the list. There's also a complaint from a party who remains anonymous.

Good news for Pebble and iOS users: Pebble has just posted on Reddit that it is working with Apple to make sure that rejections like this will no longer happen.Still a work-in-progress, but we're working with Apple to clear up any misunderstandings to make sure rejections like the handful of recent ones don't happen again - they're being super responsive the concerns that bubbled up (much appreciated!). Apps are still getting approved with mentions of Pebble support in the description or metadata (e.g. RunKeeper). For now, developers should continue with their iOS app update plans and approval submissions to the iTunes store as normal (i.e. include Pebble support in your app info if that was your original intent).

As mentioned earlier, in film photography, color balance has a lot to do with the chemical composition of the film. For many decades, color film in the United States was calibrated to highlight Caucasian skin tones. This was the most fundamental problem. With an unusual degree of skill and attention, a photographer could compensate for the biases in most stages of production. But there was nothing they could do about the filmâs color balance. When the famous New Wave filmmaker Jean Luc Godard was commissioned to make a film about Mozambique, he reportedly refused to use Kodachrome film - the most popular color film at the time. He complained the film, developed for a predominantly white market, was "racist."Positively fascinating story.

An update for an actual alternative operating system from the good old days of yore. Yes, it still happens. MenuetOS 0.99.98 has been released, with "MediaPlayer demo, Updated 3DS viewer, Midiplayer, FTP". Here's some of the settings to help you on your way in VirtualBox, an in case you'r eunfamiliar with MenuetOS:MenuetOS is a real-time and multiprocessor Operating System in development for the PC written entirely in 32/64 bit assembly language. Menuet64 is released under License and Menuet32 under GPL. Menuet supports 32/64 bit x86 assembly programming for smaller, faster and less resource hungry applications.

Comcast Corp. is planning to walk away from its proposed $45.2 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable Inc., people with knowledge of the matter said, after meeting with opposition from U.S. regulators.Comcastâs board will meet to finalize the decision on Thursday, and an announcement may come as soon as Friday, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.Great news for American consumers.

I missed this when reports first came out last week: with iOS 8.3, file managers such as iMazing and iExplorer can no longer access the document libraries of iOS apps over a USB connection.Stop hitting yourself and start using a platform that actually fits your needs.

Microsoft's launch of Windows 10 will likely take place in late July, according to AMD. During AMD's latest earnings call last week, president and CEO Lisa Su revealed the launch timing for Microsoftâs Windows 10 operating system. Answering a question on inventory plans, Su said, "With the Windows 10 launch at the end of July, we are watching sort of the impact of that on the back-to-school season, and expect that it might have a bit of a delay to the normal back-to-school season inventory build-up."That seems awfully early considering the stories you hear on Twitter about Windows 10's current state.

Chrome 42 addresses this dilemma by allowing users to engage more deeply with the mobile web experiences that are important to them, by both opting in to receive push notifications directly from websites and easily adding regularly-visited high-quality sites to their home screen.Push notifications from websites to Android devices.I'm sure nothing will go wrong with this one.