OSnews

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?

Bww bitwise works has announced the fitfh beta of its Firefox port to OS/2 and eComStation. Bww bitwise works also announced that they are makking progress porting SWT/Eclipse, and that they are starting to work on porting a newer version of VirtualBox to OS/2.

Did you know that The Verge delivers you to around 20 companies for advertising & tracking purposes? I didn't. That might foul up your web experience a little bit. Maybe we should try something different.The Verge obviously isn't alone in this. There's a reason I use an ad blocker.

Aside from the app void and the questionable value of Scopes, Ubuntu Phone is a bit of a nightmare to use the majority of the time. Something's often refreshing in the background, causing the phone to slow down. Apps take longer to load than they should, and even then you're probably waiting on a web app. The gesture-based navigation is unrefined; there are bugs and glitches all over the place; and in general, many core experiences are severely lacking in polish. Despite years of development, Ubuntu Phone still feels like an early beta, and I think Canonical needs to think long and hard about the implementation of Scopes and bump native apps up the agenda. There's nothing wrong with trying to be different, but there's a reason Android/iOS are so popular. Ignoring the headway they've made in refining the mobile experience is, in my mind, setting yourself up for failure.It's taking Canonical way, way too long. If the much further along Sailfish and Jolla can't really make a serious dent into anything, it's easy to imagine this won't go anywhere either.

With the permission of Electronic Arts, Inc. the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code to the 1986 version I of DeluxePaint. There are 89 files of C language source, comprising almost 17,000 lines of code in about 474 KB of text.The CHM keeps on doing awesome stuff like this. Also thanks to EA for releasing this historic code.

NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed the first near-Earth-size planet in the "habitable zone" around a sun-like star. This discovery and the introduction of 11 other new small habitable zone candidate planets mark another milestone in the journey to finding another "Earth."All the recent successes in space - Philae/Rosetta, New Horizons, the never-ending stream of discoveries from Keppler, like this one - actually make me sad, because it makes me wonder how much more we could've achieved and discovered has we not developed this anti-science and pro-war climate we've been living in for a while now.Maybe these new achievements will reignite the hunger for space. We can hope.

Apple needs to change its priorities for the Mac App Store or just shut the whole thing down. As it now stands, developers who are tired of being second-class citizens are making that decision for them and leaving on their own.Even as a mere user the Mac App Store is a horrible experience. It's slow, has a crappy user interface, and many developers ignore it anyway. They might as well shut it down.

The change should help end the annual frustration experienced by app developers when users running beta versions of iOS discovered a third party app wasn't compatible with the beta software and then left a 1-star rating on the App Store. Poor reviews on the App Store can hurt sales, and developers often can't do anything to fix the problem because they can't submit software built for the new versions of iOS whilst it remains in beta, and the bug could be one for Apple to fix, not the developer.Good move, although it ook them way too long.

Rupert Loman, owner of Gamer Network which boasts Eurogamer, Games Industry, Rock Paper Shotgun, VG247 and more within its network of sites, says that ad-blockers are a real threat to the future of journalism."Ad blocking is probably the biggest existential threat to the future of online games journalism," he told MCV.Cry me a river.

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA is holding a two day event celebrating the Amiga, and other events will be held around the world. The museum's event will include exhibits of Amiga machines and other computers of the era from Commodore, Apple and Atari, speakers, rare artifacts and art, and a special showing of a new Amiga documentary.

Got an Xperia Z3 and a home address somewhere in the Kingdom of Sweden? Sony wants your help with testing its next round of software updates for Android, which the company has rounded up in an initiative it's calling "Android concept." The goal, says Sony, is to develop new software "from the ground up," meaning no additional Google Play apps like YouTube on the test build, just the core Google communications software and Sony's stack of custom apps like Camera, Music, and Xperia Lounge.Yet another random, disparate, limited, little, and utterly insignificant 'effort' to merely test bringing regular updates to Android devices. This is pointless. This is not what Android needs. At all.Android needs Google to step up and reign its OEMs in.

At some point, enough is enough. That time has come for me - Apple Music is just too much of a hassle to be bothered with. Nobody I've spoken at Apple or outside the company has any idea how to fix it, so the chances of a positive outcome seem slim to none.As if all of that wasn't enough, Apple Music gave me one more kick in the head. Over the weekend, I turned off Apple Music and it took large chunks of my purchased music with it. Sadly, many of the songs were added from CDs years ago that I no longer have access to. Looking at my old iTunes Match library, before Apple Music, I'm missing about 4,700 songs. At this point, I just don't care anymore, I just want Apple Music off my devices.I trusted my data to Apple and they failed. I also failed by not backing up my library before installing Apple Music. I will not make either of those mistakes again.Wait, you mean entrusting your data blindly to a company without managing your own local backup is a bad idea? I am so surprised.The cloud should never be your only storage medium. It should be an additional storage medium. How on earth do supposedly tech savvy people make such a stupid mistake?

For its part, Vector Graphic went on to become one of the best known PC makers of the late 1970s. Like Apple, it was one of the first computer companies to go public, and like Apple, it set its products apart from the crowd with its attention to industrial design.But unlike Apple, Vector vanished from the face of the earth. It faded from our collective memory because it did not survive the massive industry upheaval brought about by the release of the IBM PC in late 1981. Very few PC makers did. But the story of how the Vector trio went from nothing to soaring success - and then collapse - is a tale worth retelling.There must be so many local computer companies in all corners of the world that have been nearly forgotten. A treasure trove of fascinating stories.

Beats 1 radio wasn't the only Apple service to temporarily go down during the MTV's VMA nominee announcements. As TechCrunch first reported and Apple's own status page confirmed, many more of Apple's services experienced issues Tuesday morning that stretched into the afternoon. Normal service was restored just before 2PM ET. The outages appeared limited to services related to Apple's online storefronts, but "limited" here is a relative term as many popular services are apparently tied in: Apple Music, Apple Radio, the App Store, Apple TV, the Mac App Store, iTunes Match, and even OS X Software Update all suffered problems. The outage wasn't universal, but still proved an unexpected headache for users.From what I understand, iTunes Music was having problems for European users since late last week.The cloud is the future.

The Jolla phone recently got its long-awaited keyboard 'other half', and Jolla Users just published a long video detailing this new addition to the Jolla family. The Other Half Keyboard, as it's officially called, was a Kickstarter project completed in someone's garage - figuratively speaking - and the video does indeed show that while clever, the product is a bit unwieldy and too large for my tastes. I do admire the whole project, though - it's quite something to build a product from nothing all the way to shipping to users, especially something as niche as this.Realistically speaking, however, this is not the product for those of us looking for a modern smartphone with a real keyboard.

With Google Drive, you can keep all your important files in one place, then open them with your choice of apps and devices. Building on this open approach, we recently made it possible to launch your favorite desktop applications directly from Google Drive. And today we're taking it a step further by bringing Google Drive to Microsoft Office. Using the new Google Drive plug-in, people using Office for Windows can now open their Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents stored in Drive, then save any changes back to Drive once they're done.There's an interesting bit of speculation making the rounds about recent activity between Microsoft and Google. Microsoft is, step by step, selling off or shutting down all parts of the company that directly compete with Google - ads, maps, and even Windows Phone seems to be contested right now - which may mean nothing, or, it may mean closer cooperation between the two companies is afoot. Bing is interesting exception, but even that may be sold off in some way sooner rather than later (although Microsoft will most likely retain at least several crucial parts of it for Cortana).Don't be surprised when you see more Microsoft-oriented software from Google in the near future.

Now, your reaction to this might be, "How could this possibly work? You are just randomly ignoring instructions!" But the strange thing is, this idea was so crazy it actually worked, or at least worked a lot of the time. You might have to hit Ignore a dozen times, but there's a good chance that eventually the bad values in the registers will get overwritten by good values (and it probably won't take long because the 8086 has so few registers), and the program will continue seemingly-normally.Your random periodic reminder to read The Old New Thing.

The FTC has launched an investigation into Apple's dealings with competing music streaming services in its App Store, according to multiple sources. The investigation is targeting Apple's 30 percent fee charged to subscription services who sign up new users through the App Store. This has been a major point of conflict between Apple and rival music services as The Verge reported back in May.The FTC's inquiries have picked up over the recent weeks, on the heels of its initial investigation into whether Apple pressured labels to kill Spotify's free streaming tier. Sources with direct knowledge of the matter tell The Verge that the FTC has already issued subpoenas to music streaming services as it gathers more information to determine whether Apple's App Store rules are anticompetitive.The sooner they crack open the App Store, the better.

Ashley Madison, an online dating website that specifically targets people looking to have an affair, has been hacked by a group that calls itself Impact Team. A cache of data has been released by the Impact Team, including user profiles, company financial records, and "other proprietary information." The company's CEO, Noel Bilderman, confirmed with KrebsOnSecurity that they had been hacked, but did not speak about the extent of the breach.I'm really surprised by the amount of comments online stating that this is not a problem, because they're just "cheaters" anyway, so they don't deserve privacy, right?Cheating on your "loved" one is despicable, low, and disgusting (and an immediate, unequivocal relationship/friendship termination in my book), but one, it's not illegal, and two, even if it were, mob justice is not the way to go. This hack and possible release of personal information is just as bad as any other hack.

After 22 years, 2 months, 2 days and 2 hours since System 6.0.1 was released, this is a summary of the visible changes. There have been many bugs fixed and many features added that are not immediately visible - they will enable developers to create better future products. Be sure to also read the Shortcuts file on the SystemTools3 disk for more information.Crazy.

Nilay Patel, writing for The Verge:But man, the web browsers on phones are terrible. They are an abomination of bad user experience, poor performance, and overall disdain for the open web that kicked off the modern tech revolution. Mobile Safari on my iPhone 6 Plus is a slow, buggy, crashy affair, starved for the phone's paltry 1GB of memory and unable to rotate from portrait to landscape without suffering an emotional crisis. Chrome on my various Android devices feels entirely outclassed at times, a country mouse lost in the big city, waiting to be mugged by the first remnant ad with a redirect loop and something to prove.With The Verge itself being the poster child for how slow the mobile (and non-mobile) web can be, this article did leave a bit of a funny taste in my mouth. Luckily, The Verge's parent company - Vox Media - is going to put its money where its mouth is, and focus entirely on performance - with solid promises we can hold them to. Very nice.

Today, I am excited to announce that Visual Studio 2015 and .Net 4.6 are available for download.These releases are the next big step in the journey we outlined last November to bring the productivity of Visual Studio and .NET to any developer working on any kind of application while also delivering a new level of innovation in developer productivity for all Visual Studio developers.

A significant new development as Haiku continues pushing towards a stable release.Since the switch to our package manager, there was no longer a way to influence the boot process at all. The only file you could change was the UserBootscript which is started only after Tracker and Deskbar; the whole system is already up at this point.The launch_daemon gives the power back to you, but also allow software you install to automatically be started on system boot as well. You can also even prevent system components from being started at all if you so wish.A summary of features:Furthermore, it allows for event based application start, start on demand, a multi-threaded boot process, and even enables you to talk to servers before they actually started.Read the full article for a detailed description.

Ladies and gents, meet Smart Boy, the Game Boy-inspired smartphone. Designed by Pierre Cerveau, it has everything a Nintendo lover could dream of giving a phone, from power-saving 8-bit mode to a 'Game Bat' controller that basically turns the thing into a DS. I might actually cry because this beautiful phone will probably never be made.Probably a bit too retro for most, but if Nintendo made this, I would be all over it.

With this week's update to the entire iPod lineup, many have been asking "Who are iPods even for these days?" Well, I worked the last 3 years managing an electronics department for Target, and have sold a lot of Apple devices over that time. Since Apple doesn't break down demographics for who is buying each device, I thought I would share my experience.Kind of exactly as you expect it to be.