OSnews

There's a technology conference going on - IFA - and there's lots and lots of Android-related news. First, a lot of Android Wear smartwatches - including the brand new Moto 360.If you were hoping for a radically different design from Motorola this year, you're barking up the wrong tree. As we saw in the leaks, Motorola has kept the imperfect circle design from the original Moto 360 and added lugs on the top and bottom instead of hiding the strap connectors inside the casing itself. This change makes it significantly easier to swap out the strap with whatever you want, but also makes more room in the casing for things like a beefier battery. The single button on the side of the watch has moved to the 2 o'clock position, making it significantly easier to reach for and use. Curiously, this button now has the Motorola M emblazoned across it.Other new Wear watches are the Huawei Watch and the Asus ZenWatch 2. There's really not much to say here - they all have the exact same software as the current (or now 'previous', I guess) crop of Wear devices, so if you weren't impressed then, you won't be impressed now.If you're looking for something different, I suggest you read the next item I'm about to post.

The best class I took in college was on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Until that point, I had avoided philosophy of language as simply being too esoteric and hermetic to be of use. David Pears, a prodigious yet modest and approachable figure visiting from Oxford, changed my mind. In large part because of Pears' instruction, Wittgenstein's philosophy has been directly relevant to my thinking about computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. When other scholars were thinking that language and thought could be reduced to a universal, logical language, Wittgenstein turned the matter to practical questions and raised incredibly inconvenient questions that gained traction in artificial intelligence in the 1970s, 40 years after he was working on them.Great article. I found this paragraph especially interesting:Here's one example. The French equivalents for here and there are ici and là respectively. But if I point to a pen and say, "The pen is here," the French equivalent is not "Le stylo est ici," but "Le stylo est là." In French, là is always used to refer to a specific place or position, while in English here or there can both work. This rule is so obscure I never learned it in French classes, but obviously all native speakers learn it because no one ever uses it differently. It could just as easily be the other way round, but it's not. The situation is not arbitrary, but the way in which language carves up the interaction between mind and world varies in such a way that French speakers recognize certain practices as right or wrong in a different way than English speakers do. This may seem a trivial point, until you have to program a computer to translate "I pointed to Paris on the map and said, 'She is here.' " into French - at which point it becomes a nightmare. (If you are a translator, on the other hand, this is great news.)Aside from the obvious fact that I can relate to the remark about translators, the author touches upon something that I benefit from every day. I always feel that being multilingual (just Dutch, English, German, some French, and a basic grasp of ancient Greek and Latin - relatively limited when compared to true multilinguals) makes it easier for me to express myself. Being able to use words, concepts, ideas, structures, and conventions from foreign languages and incorporate them into my Dutch - even if only in my inner monologue - allows me to describe objects, concepts, and situations in a more fine-grained, and therefore, more accurate manner (accurate to my perception, which does not mean "more correct" in more absolute terms).I appreciate how ridiculously pretentious this sounds, but I do firmly believe this is true: being able to understand, read, write, and speak multiple language makes me better at language.I'm no programmer - something I like to repeat as often as I can to make sure everyone knows where I'm coming from on the subject of programming - but I get the idea that programming is not very different in that regard. That is, being able to program in multiple programming languages will make you better at programming, and not just in the sense that you will be useful in more situations (you can find a job both as a Java and an Objective-C programmer, for instance), but also in the sense that knowledge and experience in programming language Abc will give you new and different insights into programming language Xyz, allowing you to use a certain language in more unconventional ways that people with knowledge of fewer languages might not.As much as language is an expression of culture, a programming language is an expression of how a computer works. Both contain within them invaluable knowledge that cannot be easily expressed in other languages - and as such, they are invaluable in preserving knowledge, both culturally and digitally.

Nextbit, a company founded by former Android engineers from Google, HTC, and others, has unveiled its first smartphone. The Robin has a pretty unique and fun design, but the major selling point - they claim - is that the phone intelligently manages its limited storage by offloading lesser-used or unused stuff (content and applications) to the internet. An interesting strategy in the current climate of privacy wariness - especially since these more boutique Android phones tend to be for technologically inclined users, who will be more aware of these issues. One also has to wonder how well this will work and how reliable it'll be, considering the company's young age.As for specifications:Speaking of hardware, the Robin is a uniquely designed mid-range Android phone. Nextbit tapped former HTC designer Scott Croyle as its head of design in 2014, and set out to make a phone that stands out among the sea of similar looking phones. The result is a device that's starkly rectangular, but with circular details throughout. The Robin's all-plastic chassis houses a 5.2-inch, 1080p display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor, 3GB of RAM, a 2,680mAh battery, and 13-megapixel camera. Unique additions include a USB Type-C charging port and fingerprint scanner embedded into the side-mounted power button. The Robin is completely carrier and bootloader unlocked and is compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile LTE.Decidedly midrange for a phone that's on Kickstarter right now and will (supposedly) ship in January.

The web and tech journalists were all afire yesterday. A major new innovation? A brand new software release? Nope - Google has a new logo. Yeah. That's the hard-hitting tech news deserving of totally unbiased and very unpredictable hot takes.There was actually real Google news too - the company made some changes to how search is displayed on mobile.With mobile devices in mind, we've also made some changes to our search results page to help you more easily find what you need and dive into diverse content such as images, videos, news stories and more - by simply swiping and tapping.

Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Cisco, Intel, Netflix, and Amazon today launched a new consortium, the Alliance for Open Media. The group plans to develop next-generation media formats - including audio and still images, but with video as the top priority - and deliver them as royalty-free open source, suitable for both commercial and noncommercial content.The problem is that the supposed next-generation codec, HVEC, is going to be a lot more expensive, whereas other initiatives, such as Google's VP9/VP10, would surely face patent trolling from the other major players. By coming together like this, all these players can have a say, without fear of them suing each other. That being said, smaller players will still want to sue, but at least the united front should make that a little harder.And, unsurprisingly, one major player is not part of this new initiative. I guess they didn't like the open and royalty-free part.

The Genode project announced the version 15.08 of their OS framework. The most prominent topics of the current release are the use of Genode as day-to-day operating system by their developers and the added ability to run Genode-based systems on top of the Muen separation kernel.Where monolithic kernel architectures represent one extreme with respect to kernel complexity, separation kernels mark the opposite end. The code complexity of monolithic OS kernels such as Linux is usually counted in terms of millions of lines of code. In stark contrast, modern microkernels such as NOVA and seL4 are comprised of only ten thousand lines of code. Separation kernels go even a step further by reducing the code complexity to only a few thousand lines of code. How is that possible? The answer lies in the scope of functionality addressed by the different types of kernels. The high complexity of monolithic kernels stems from the fact that all major OS functionalities are considered as being in the scope of the kernel. In particular, device drivers and protocol stacks account for most of the code in such kernels. Microkernels disregard such functionalities from the scope of the kernel by moving them to user-level components. The kernel solely retains the functionality that is fundamentally needed to enable those components to work and collaborate. In order to accommodate a wide range of workloads, microkernels typically provide interfaces to user land that enable the dynamic management of low-level resources such as memory, devices, and processing time. Genode's designated role is to supplement microkernels with a scalable and secure user-level OS architecture. In contrast to microkernels, separation kernels disregard dynamic resource management from their scope. All physical resources are statically assigned to a fixed set of partitions at system-integration time and remain unchanged over the lifetime of the system. The flexibility of microkernels is traded for the benefit of further complexity reduction. Their low complexity of just a few thousand lines of code make separation kernels appealing for high-assurance computing. On the other hand, their static nature imposes limitations on their application areas.Muen as a representative of separation kernels is special in two ways. First, whereas most separation kernels are proprietary software solutions, Muen is an open-source project. Second, the kernel is implemented in the safe SPARK programming language, which is able to formally verify the absence of implementation bugs such as buffer overflows, integer-range violations, and exceptions. Thanks to the close collaboration between the Muen developers and the Genode community, the assurance of the Muen separation kernel can now be combined with the rich component infrastructure provided by Genode. From Genode's perspective, Muen is another architecture for their custom base-hw kernel. In fact, with Genode on Muen, a microkernel-based system is running within the static boundaries of one Muen partition. This way, the component isolation enforced by the base-hw kernel and the static isolation boundaries enforced by Muen form two lines of defense for protecting security-critical system functions from untrusted code sandboxed within a Genode subsystem.The second major theme of the current release is the use of Genode as the day-to-day operating system by its developers. Since the beginning of June, one of the core developers is exclusively working with a Genode/NOVA-based system. The key element is VirtualBox with its powerful guest-host integration features. It allows for an evolutionary transition from Linux-centric work flows to the use of native Genode applications. Network connectivity is provided by the Intel wireless stack ported from the Linux kernel. File-system access is based on NetBSD's rump kernels. For using command-line based GNU software directly on Genode, the Noux runtime environment comes in handy. The daily use of Genode as general-purpose OS motivated many recent developments, ranging from the management of kernel memory in NOVA, over new system monitoring facilities, SMP guest support in VirtualBox, to user-facing improvements of the GUI stack. These and many more topics are covered by the comprehensive release documentation.

This new release - one of the final 1.x released before 2.0 and the tablet hit, I suppose - integrates a whole bunch of options and settings related to the Android application support into the Sailfish settings applications, such as stopping/restarting Alien Dalvik, blocking Android applications from accessing your Sailfish contacts, allowing Android applications to keep running properly in the background, and so on.There's more, so be sure to update.

I have been using Windows 10 off and on since October of 2014, and as the operating system on my main computer since January 22nd of this year. I honestly could not see me moving back to an older version ever. The improvements to Windows 10 are both dramatic and subtle, and the improvements keep occurring even this shortly after launch. Better for the desktop, better for the tablet, and a platform than runs on practically any computer system. Windows 10 is here, and Microsoft has made a bold statement with it. It is the return of the old, plus the addition of the new, all in a package that works very well on a huge variety of devices.Just be sure to ignore all the crappy Metro applications, and you'll be fine with Windows 10.

That's right: beginning today, a select set of Android Wear smartwatches (and all future watches) will work with the iPhone. The app should be rolling out worldwide soon. Itâs been a long time coming - and it means that Google will be challenging the Apple Watch on its home turf. Those Android Wear watches will be both cheaper and more varied than the Apple Watch - just like Android itself.Despite Google's claims to the contrary, though, older Wear devices seem to work just fine - reports are coming in for the Moto 360 and LG G Watch also working with the iPhone application just fine.

Some very smart people I've been talking to suggest that, by building a platform, Apple is generating leverage that it can use to great effect in these negotiations. A mid-market breakout box offering is one thing, but a huge, rumbling platform with an upward trajectory of living-room dominating apps and third-party content is another beast. If, obviously if, Apple is successful with the Apple TV, it could be in a position to dominate content in a way that no other 'smart' TV platform has before it.If Apple did indeed 'delay' the Apple TV from being released at WWDC, then it probably had a reason. And, if my sources are correct, that reason could well be polish, polish, polish. The experience of using it is said to blow away the types of junky smart TV interfaces we've had to deal with so far. This is the first real Apple TV product.If you see another annoying settopbox, they blew it.

This hit the news yesterday.Microsoft released Windows 10 four weeks ago today, and now the company is providing a fresh update on its upgrade figures. 14 million machines had been upgraded to Windows 10 within 24 hours of the operating system release last month, and that figure has now risen to more than 75 million in just four weeks.As somebody who uses Windows every day, and who upgraded to Windows 10 a few weeks before it was released, let me make a statement about all the positive Windows 10 reviews that not everyone is going to like. There are only two reasons Windows 10 is getting positive reviews. First, because it's free. This one's a given. Second, and more importantly: Windows 10 is getting positive reviews because none of the reviewers have forced themselves to use nothing but Metro applications.Here's the cold and harsh truth as I see it: despite all the promises, Metro applications are still complete and utter garbage. Let me explain why. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

While Google remains committed to industry-wide adoption of HTTPS, there isn't always full compliance on third party ad networks and custom creative code served via our systems. To ensure ads continue to serve on iOS9 devices for developers transitioning to HTTPS, the recommended short term fix is to add an exception that allows HTTP requests to succeed and non-secure content to load successfully.Confirmed: Google wants me to switch to iOS.Disgusting.

Jordan Hubbard spoke recently at the Bay Area FreeBSD Users Group to discuss NextBSD, a "spork" of FreeBSD. He "covers why mach ports are extremely useful in some cases and no UNIX IPC primitive is an adequate substitute." There's a video of the BAFUG talk and copies of the original slide deck that goes into some detail about NextBSD.

This year's Galaxy Note 5 is an outstanding device - combining power with grace, and utility with handsome looks - but it also has a pretty major design flaw. The phone's stylus can be inserted into its silo in both orientations, which is a change from previous S Pen designs, and one of those orientations can result in permanent damage to the Note's functionality. If you are unfortunate enough to slide your S Pen in the wrong way, you'll have a hard time unjamming it from the slot (though eventually you should be able to pry it away), but more importantly, you might disable the Note's stylus detection feature. It's a big problem that can result from a very small mistake. Samsung has now issued a response, and well, the answer is that you should read and adhere to the manual.Grab the pitchforks everyone, we got ourselves 'nother -gate!I can't believe they shipped this thing with this design flaw, especially since it's so easy to fix: just make the 'wrong' end of the stylus a little bit wider so you can't stick it in the wrong way et voilà, problem fixed.Samsung's response is silly. They should've said "we're replacing all Note 5 styluses with a newer model that can't be inserted the wrong way around, and all damaged devices will be replaced free of charge".And done.

Today the Contiki team announced the release of Contiki 3.0, the latest version of the open source IoT operating system! The 3.0 release is a huge step up from the 2.x branch and brings support for new and exciting hardware, a set of new network protocols, a bunch of improvements in the low-power mesh networking protocols, along with a large number of general stability improvements.

This release of Plasma brings many nice touches for our users such as much improved high DPI support, KRunner auto-completion and many new beautiful Breeze icons. It also lays the ground for the future with a tech preview of Wayland session available. We're shipping a few new components such as an Audio Volume Plasma Widget, monitor calibration tool and the User Manager tool comes out beta.There's a video too.

Over the last few days I've been testing an experimental content blocker called Crystal, which promises to speed up browsing on iOS. I've been particularly impressed by the results and taken aback by how much removing trackers, ads and other scripts makes a difference over a cellular connection.The content blocker is a major selling point for iOS, in my opinion. On Android, this will always be a hack - third party tools, root, that sort of thing - and never properly integrated into the operating system, even though it should be.Good move by Apple, and together with a lack of a decent Android headset out right now, it's pushing me towards an iPhone when my contract renewal is up in October.

The level of Windows 10 paranoia reached new heights this week when reports suggested that Microsoft would wipe torrents and pirated software from people's hard drives. Nonsense, of course, but all the recent privacy concerns were enough to have the operating system banned from several torrent trackers.Another creepy story here. Windows 10's privacy is turning into a headache for Microsoft. It won't be long now until prime time and daytime news shows start picking this stuff up, and blow it out of proportion - deserved or no.

Ever since I wrote on Thursday about the Ashley Madison hack and resulting reactions and consequences, I've heard from dozens of people who used the site. They offer a remarkably wide range of reasons for having done so. I'm posting below one email I received that I find particularly illuminating, which I very lightly edited to correct a few obvious typographical errors.It gets even worse than this email. There are gay men and women in countries where being gay is punishable by death, who were using this site to meet other gay men and women, in secret. This hack will out them, possibly leading to their death.This hack and spreading of private information is just as bad as any other, similar hacks. Despicable as it is, cheating is not a crime, and even if it were, do we really want to live in a world with mob justice? And yes, the parent company in this particular case isn't exactly of clear conscience, but that's no reason to throw its users under the bus - or have them murdered by barbaric, mediaeval governments.I know a lot of people like the world to be black and white, because it's simple, easy to understand, and doesn't strain the brain. Sadly for them, that's not how the world works.

What went unannounced was that most of the original team that built Now had departed, many of them just before I/O, according to multiple sources. Some had grown frustrated that the product, born within Android, was shuttered into search inside of Google, they said. And Sundar Pichai, Google's SVP and incoming CEO, did not prioritize the product as much as Page.The exits reveal the hiccups Google has incubating new products that reach across multiple units of the tech giant. They also expose some key traits of Pichai's leadership style - and some of the many hurdles he has ahead as he marshals Googleâs core business.

I didn't believe it would be possible at first, but after spending the better part of a week on Chrome 46 I'm blown away. Memory consumption seems to have halved, groggy slow tabs are snappier than ever and my battery life isn't shamefully bad anymore - also, my laptop's fans aren't constantly blowing.It's going to take a lot of convincing to get me to switch from Safari back to Chrome on my MacBook Pro.

For those who haven't kept up with bcache, the bcache codebase has been evolving/metastasizing into a full blown, general purpose posix filesystem - a modern COW filesystem with checksumming, compression, multiple devices, caching, and eventually snapshots and all kinds of other nifty features.I'll admit I had to do a bit of reading to educate myself on what bcache actually is. Fascinating to see that it has evolved into a full-blown file system.

Twenty years ago, on August 21, 1995, Nintendo released the Virtual Boy in North America. The stilt-legged tabletop gaming console, which offered a unique red stereoscopic 3D display, attempted to ride a wave of popular interest in virtual reality. It was a risky, innovative gamble for Nintendo that didn't pay off, leaving many to wonder why it existed in the first place.I vaguely recall the magazine talk of this thing (I was 9 at the time), but I never actually got to see one, let alone play one.

Today we are announcing some major upcoming changes to Firefox add-ons. Our add-on ecosystem has evolved through incremental, organic growth over the years, but there are some modernizations to Firefox that require some foundational changes to support.Extensions play a central role in Firefox' appeal, so they have to be very careful with how they implement these changes.

I spent a lot of time as a kid playing (generally, pretty terrible) games on my Game Boy. Having never written code for anything other than 'regular' general purpose computers before, I've been wondering recently: how easy is it to write a Game Boy (Advance) game?

Microsoft released the third cumulative update to Windows 10 last week. But surprisingly, the supporting document associated with the patch - known as KB3081438 - was devoid of any information pertaining to what the update contained, except that "it includes improvements to enhance the functionality of Windows 10". This surprised many users of the OS, keeping in mind that Microsoft was forthcoming about the fixes in the previous two cumulative patches. The company has now offered an explanation regarding its policy of change logs regarding Windows 10 patches.It seems like nobody is taking the time anymore to write proper changelogs. Application and even operating system updates are void of any accompanying info, so you have no idea what's new, changed, fixed, or improved.A unwelcome development.

An ill-timed Spotify privacy policy update has generated an online backlash against the music streaming service just days after the messy Ashley Madison leak. With privacy firmly in the minds of internet users this week, Wired jumped straight on Spotify's new policy to brand it an "eerie" agreement "you can't do squat about."My CDs never ask me to agree to a privacy policy.

Recent changes to the rules phone makers need to follow to get a Google approved version of Android have allowed for certain apps to no longer be mandatory. Google Play Games, Google Play Books, Google+ and Google Newsstand now join the ranks with Google Earth and Google Keep as apps that aren't a required part of the Google applications package. They are still in the Play Store, are still regularly updated and will work just as well for those of us who want them. And this is how things ought to be. In fact, we'd like to see even more Google apps get sent packing, but still be there in the Play store for those who want them.Good. The less crapware - even stock crapware - on our phones, the better. I hope Apple follows in Google's footsteps, because iOS is accumulating a seizable amount of crapware too.

It turns out that when you make an unconventional phone that lets you swap out its core components, it can be hard to make that same phone stay put together - at least compared to today's smartphones. Google's Project Ara team has tweeted an explanation for why its pilot test plans were reworked and delayed: the current model wasn't faring well when dropped. "No more electropermanent magnets," the team tweeted.That's what you get when you push the envelope.

This release includes significant changes to the implementation. The compiler tool chain was translated from C to Go, removing the last vestiges of C code from the Go code base. The garbage collector was completely redesigned, yielding a dramatic reduction in garbage collection pause times. Related improvements to the scheduler allowed us to change the default GOMAXPROCS value (the number of concurrently executing goroutines) from 1 to the number of logical CPUs. Changes to the linker enable distributing Go packages as shared libraries to link into Go programs, and building Go packages into archives or shared libraries that may be linked into or loaded by C programs (design doc).

Out of all the BlackBerry 'Venice' slider leaks thus far, none have really given us a full look at the keyboard on the upcoming device and that, of course, has left some folks skeptical of everything we've seen recently. Looking to end some of those doubts, @evleaks, has now posted up a follow-up to the first leaked render of the device that clearly shows off that glorious BlackBerry keyboard.Instant buy if this comes out in time for my contract renewal in October. Finally a modern Android device with a hardware keyboard.

So let's do that summary again: Samsung disappointed stylus fans in Europe and wasn't upfront about it; it frustrated power users who look to the Note series to push into ever-higher specs; and it introduced a second Edge device before it could come up with a solid reason to have even one. All of this, along with the erroneous web listings, muddled the launch and anticipation for a pair of technically impressive devices that give everyone more choice and not less.At this point, I have no idea what Samsung is thinking. Not releasing the Note 5 in Europe, opting to only offer the Edge Plus, is pure insanity.

What does it mean to use a flagship smartphone in 2015? It likely means that you're using a phone with a great display, fast performance, good battery life, good build quality, and a great camera. If I'm being honest, I have to say that the OnePlus 2 doesn't hit all of those marks, but it hits most of them and does so at a price that's just over half that of a comparable iPhone. It's not a flagship killer by any means - this year or next - but it's a really solid smartphone that does most everything you need it to do really well. It's easily the best deal on the market right now if you want a high-end smartphone.AndroidCentral has another review of the OnePlus 2. Looks like a great phone for the price, but with some small issues.

While we count on Wi-Fi more than ever to be entertained, productive, and stay connected, we're streaming and sharing in new ways our old routers were never built to handle. So today, with our partner TP-LINK, we're launching OnHub, a different kind of router for a new way to Wi-Fi. Instead of headaches and spotty connections, OnHub gives you Wi-Fi that's fast, secure, and easy to use.Over the years, I've had a lot of routers, and all of them were bad products. No ifs and buts. They had connection problems, terrible user interfaces, they were ugly, and a pain to use. Once I finally had enough, I decided to splurge and get an Apple AirPort Extreme. I can assure you - it's one of the best purchases I've ever made. Great UI, zero problems, it looks nice, and it always works.This new Google product is effectively Google's AirPort Extreme, and as such, I'm pretty sure this will be a great product too. Sure, like the AirPort Extreme, it's a lot more expensive than the crappy â¬35 routers you can buy, but they're totally worth it.There's also quite a beefy computer in there, and I wonder if you could get to it and do cool stuff with it.

The story of the Amiga family of microcomputers is akin to that of a musical band that breaks up after one incandescent, groundbreaking album: the band may be forgotten by many, but the cognoscenti can discern its impact on work produced decades later.So the Amiga 30 event held at Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum in late July was more than a commemoration of some interesting technology of the past. It was also a celebration of the Amiga's persistent influence on personal computing.The Amiga was easily 10 years ahead of its time. Too bad the good ones rarely win. This is also a good moment to repost the 8-part series on the Amiga at Ars.

Whether you like them straight out of the bag, roasted to a golden brown exterior with a molten center, or in fluff form, who doesn't like marshmallows? We definitely like them! Since the launch of the M Developer Preview at Google I/O in May, we've enjoyed all of your participation and feedback. Today with the final Developer Preview update, we're introducing the official Android 6.0 SDK and opening Google Play for publishing your apps that target the new API level 23 in Android Marshmallow.Think twice before flashing this third Android 6.0 developer preview - you'll need to reflash to a factory image once the final version is released.

Whether you like them straight out of the bag, roasted to a golden brown exterior with a molten center, or in fluff form, who doesn't like marshmallows? We definitely like them! Since the launch of the M Developer Preview at Google I/O in May, we've enjoyed all of your participation and feedback. Today with the final Developer Preview update, we're introducing the official Android 6.0 SDK and opening Google Play for publishing your apps that target the new API level 23 in Android Marshmallow.Think twice before flashing this third Android 6.0 developer preview - you'll need to reflash to a factory image once the final version is released.

Interesting analysis of the tablet market by Neil Cybart.A quick look at iPad and tablet shipment data would show that things have gotten bad in recent quarters. However, in reality, things are much worse than quarterly shipment data would suggest. The seasonality found in the tablet segment makes it difficult to see these long-term problems. A much better way at understanding what has been taking place is to look at the year-over-year change in shipments on a trailing 12-month (TTM) basis, highlighted in Exhibit 1. This smoothing effect highlights that the iPad and tablet have been on the decline for years and things continue to worsen with the overall tablet market hitting negative territory for the first time. All momentum has been lost.It's a pretty grim picture, but it's not surprising. After modern tablets burst onto the scene - led by the iPad - we were pummelled by hyperbole after hyperbole about the post-PC revolution and how the tablet would destroy the PC; and indeed, for a short while, the staggering sales numbers of the iPad (later overtaken by Android tablets) seemed to lend credence to these hyperboles.And then things kind of... Well, stagnated. Google has never really taken tablets seriously, and with hindsight we can now say that was probably a good idea. Apple, too, has completely ignored and squandered the potential it saw for the iPad. Little to no tablet-specific work has been done on the iPad side of iOS, and as such, the iPad has never managed to grow beyond its status as a consumption-only device.Speaking of consumption, I found this sentiment in Sybart's article quite puzzling.Many didn't see it, but tablets were quickly turning into content consumption devices where price was a leading purchase decision."Many didn't see it"? "Turning into"? Really? I don't know about you, but since the iPad's introduction, there've been only two groups of people claiming that the iPad was not strictly a consumption device: Apple employees and Apple bloggers/reporters. Everybody else has been fully aware of the iPad's (and other tablets') main use case from day one.Lukas Mathis has written a great reply to Sybart's article, hitting the nail on the head so hard, the nail's probably saying hello to New Horizons by now:Better hardware would help, but I think it's very important to acknowledge that the thing standing in the way of productive work on the iPad is not its hardware. It's iOS.iOS is a cumbersome system for even reasonably complex productive tasks. Apple has started fixing the window management problem, but there's still the document management problem (most real-world tasks involve multiple documents from multiple sources - there's pretty much no way to organize and manage document from different applications in iOS), and the workflow problem (many real-world tasks involve putting the same document through multiple apps, which iOS is still not great at, albeit getting better).And then there's the fact that few developers are willing to invest a lot of money into productive apps on the iPad. They are expensive to create, the market is small, and Apple's handling of how apps are sold on its devices does not instill confidence.The thing that's preventing people from using the iPad productively is not the small screen, it's the operating system.All this is further made worse by how hard iPads are to deploy and manage in educational and corporate settings (compared to Windows laptops and Chromebooks).The question now is this: will Apple ripping off Windows 8's Metro environment be enough to regain the squandered potential? Do we need a larger iPad, as has been rumoured for so long now? Or do we just have to accept that no, tablets and touch just aren't going to work for anything but simple, consumption-focused computing tasks?I think I know the answer.

The ongoing legal saga known as the Oracle-Google copyright battle took a huge leap Wednesday when Oracle claimed the last six Android operating systems are "infringing Oracle's copyrights in the Java platform."That's according to the latest paperwork Oracle filed in the five-year-old closely watched case that so far has resulted in the determination that Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are, indeed, copyrightable.Oracle is the cesspit of the industry. What a horrible, horrible company.

Many people have resisted the idea that Chromebooks really were growing in popularity. Now, less five years after the first commercial Chromebook, the Samsung Series 5 and Acer Chromebook went on sale, NPD, the global retail research group, is reporting that Chromebook sales in June and early July had exceeded "sales of Windows notebooks ... passing the 50 percent market share threshold."I found this hard to believe, and as it turns out, the author is being clickbaity by burying an important little fact further down in the story: this only applies to B2B channels. I changed the OSNews headline (which is usually just copied) accordingly.Still, it's evident that Chromebooks are here to stay, and are, indeed, a huge success.

This is follow up to a previously posted challenge to virtualize VenturComm Venix/86 so that it can be run on a modern machine under an emulator. The competition was a huge success and the rest of this post is an entry by the winner - Jim Carpenter. Enjoy!

From a consumer's perspective, Google's Android operating system has been an exceedingly good thing. It's the only viable competitor to have kept pace with Apple's iPhone, and in its time it has stimulated grand battles between device manufacturers - first competing on specs, and now on price. All this competition has driven smartphone development forward at a blistering pace, and we're all profiting from it now, but it has its downsides, too. Today is a fitting day to take a closer look at those.Odd article. It argues that cheaper, low-cost Android devices are hurting consumers, which I find peculiar. People have a choice. Nobody is forcing you to buy any phone - you actively choose to get something cheap, risks included. These cheaper manufacturers - from shady ones all the way to by-now proven companies like OnePlus and OPPO - provide more choice, not less. Thanks to these companies, I get to choose between sending 40-50% free money profit margins to Apple or Samsung, or get a similarly specced phone of equal quality for a fraction of the price.This is good. This is choice. I know a lot of people ascribe to the idea that you should not give people too much choice because their dainty, fragile little minds can't comprehend it, but I disagree with that vehemently. More choice in the market is always better than less choice - and if that means companies like HTC have to crumble because they can't keep up... Well, I just don't care. They'll make way for a dozen others.That's business.

At an event in Beijing, Xiaomi unveiled MIUI 7, the manufacturer's latest OS. Based on Android 5.1 Lollipop, MIUI 7 brings a host of UI changes, themes, features and a whole new way to receive calls.Laugh about Xiaomi all you want, but they will bring their Android 5.1 (MIUI 7) to virtually all of its phones - only a phone form 2011 is not getting it.This is how you do it.

Apple updated its Boot Camp software to include support for Windows 10. In other words, you can now officially run Windows 10 on your Mac - assuming you have a Mac from 2012 or later (roughly - don't pin me down on this one).

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

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

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

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

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

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