Almost all of the BSD releases have been well preserved. If you want to find 1BSD, or 2BSD or 4.3-TAHOE BSD you can find them online with little fuss. However, if you search for 2.11BSD, you’ll find it easily enough, but it won’t be the original. You’ll find either the latest patched version (2.11BSD pl 469), or one of the earlier popular version (pl 430 is popular). You can even find the RetroBSD project which used 2.11BSD as a starting point to create systems for tiny mips-based PIC controllers. You’ll find every single patch that’s been issued for the system. What you will not find, however, is the original 2.11BSD release tapes. You won’t find the original sources. With some digging, you can find is 2.11BSD pl 195. This was released about 30 months after the original was released, and is the oldest one that’s known to exist. And so starts the search for the original code.
The EU has enacted new regulations to protect developers operating in the App Store and Play Store from Apple and Google (let’s be real here – that’s who this is aimed at). Platforms will have to provide 30 days notice to publishers before removing content from stores, allowing them time to appeal or make changes to their software. So no immediate and opaque bans (article 4). The regulations (in article 5) will force stores to be more transparent in how their ranking systems work, letting publishers understand how ‘trending’ apps are being chosen for instance. Article 7 follows similar themes, with storefronts having to disclose any ‘differentiated treatment’ it may give one seller of goods over another, which should put paid to any real (or imagined) preferential treatment for larger publishers – or at least make it clear to everyone how and when the playing field isn’t even. The rules also demand access to third party mediation in case of disputes. This seems like a set of reasonable rules that should’ve been in place ages ago.
SoftBank is reportedly assessing spin-off options for its semiconductor firm, Arm Holdings. The Wall Street Journal reports from its sources that those options include having an initial public offering or a sale. The Japanese tech conglomerate picked up Arm back in 2016 for $32 billion and currently shares some ownership with investors in the SoftBank Vision Fund. The moves are being considered as SoftBank fends off challenges from activist investment house Elliott Management over major losses for its Vision Fund, including WeWork’s attempted IPO. SoftBank is supposedly targeting $41 billion in immediate fundraising through share buybacks and divestitures. Depending on Arm’s current prospectus, a sale could be more likely to happen than an IPO. I’m linking to the AndroidPolice item since the original article is stuck behind a paywall. Whoever intends to acquire ARM better have a very good story to tell antitrust regulators, because I doubt Intel, Apple, Google, or any of the other major technology companies will be allowed to acquire it. I wonder who else could be a potential buyer – maybe another investment fund?
Terry Davis may not be as well-known as Linus Torvalds, but his open source operating system may be a legacy that will live on forever. What is it, and how do you use it? I honestly never expected something like TempleOS and Terry Davis to make its way onto a popular YouTube channel like Linus Tech Tips (and OSNews even makes a small cameo). Linus and Anthony do a good job of providing an overview of TempleOS and its creator. Davis used to frequent OSNews, even during the harsher spells of his illness, and it wasn’t easy to deal with someone like him, even in a small community like OSNews. He didn’t just post religious ramblings, but also deeply racist ramblings. It’s sad that, like so many others, he wasn’t able to get the medical help he clearly needed.
Software on a computing platform such as Haiku is typically distributed as a package. Without a packaging system it would be hard for users to install software and because software often depends on other software, the chain of dependencies would be difficult for a user to resolve themselves. To orchestrate the distribution and management of the packages, Haiku has a packaging system which consists of applications, online tools, on-host tools and software libraries. One aspect of the packaging system is the coordination and identification of repositories. An overview of the inner workings of package management on Haiku.
We’re glad to announce a new collaboration between Microsoft and Google for the benefit of the web developer community. Microsoft’s PWABuilder and Google’s Bubblewrap are now working together to help developers publish PWAs in the Google Play Store. PWABuilder.com is Microsoft’s open source developer tool that helps you build high quality PWAs and publish them in app stores. Bubblewrap is Google’s command line utility and library to generate and sign Google Play Store packages from Progressive Web Apps. I hope this further improves PWAs, since they are a godsend for smaller operating systems and even bigger ones that are not macOS or Windows. Sure, nothing beats a proper native application, but if the choice is no application or a reasonably integrated PWA – I’ll take the PWA.
Did you ever wonder what BeIA really was? A lot of people talked about BeIA back in the days Be, Inc. was still developing its OS for internet appliances, but after Be, Inc. closed its doors, BeIA vanished as well. A thread over on the Haiku discussion forums – which began as a talking point for how Haiku could recreate a BeIA style concept – turned in to a treasure trove of BeIA information, including examples of BeIA running and an overview of some of the process of building BeIA distributions. This video shows it all in action, including BeIA running under emulation. There’s also a wonderful video shot in Be, Inc’s offices where a Hungarian UG member gets a tour and shown BeIA hardware, with terrible framerate and resolution, but well worth checking out.
It has long been our vision for Flutter to power platforms. We’ve seen this manifest already at Google with products like the Assistant so now we’re thrilled to see others harnessing Flutter to power more platforms. Today we are happy to jointly announce the availability of the Linux alpha for Flutter alongside Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, the world’s most popular desktop Linux distribution. I welcome any additional investment in Linux or other operating systems that aren’t the macOS or Windows, but this one has a major downside: it’s all tied to Canonical’s snaps and Snap Store. In case you are unaware – snaps are quite controversial in the Linux world, and Linux Mint, one of the most popular Linux distributions, has taken a very proactive approach in removing them. Their reasoning makes it very clear why snap is so problematic: Applications in this store cannot be patched, or pinned. You can’t audit them, hold them, modify them or even point snap to a different store. You’ve as much empowerment with this as if you were using proprietary software, i.e. none. This is in effect similar to a commercial proprietary solution, but with two major differences: It runs as root, and it installs itself without asking you. On top of all this, the snap server is closed source. Snap is simply a no-go, and I’m saddened Google decided to opt for using it. Then again, Google has never shown any interest whatsoever in desktop Linux – preferring to simply take, but not give. None of their applications – other than Chrome – are available on Linux, and opting for snap further demonstrates Google doesn’t really seem to understand the Linux ecosystem at all. All they had to do was release a source tarball, and for a few extra brownie points, maybe a .deb and/or .rpm, but that isn’t even necessary. If your tool is good enough, it will be picked up by distributions and third parties who will make those packages for you. Google opting for snap instead indicates they have little faith in their own product being good and valuable enough to be embraced by the Linux distribution community. And if they don’t have any faith, why should I?
Microsoft and Zoom have said they will not process data requests made by the Hong Kong authorities while they take stock of a new security law. They follow Facebook, Google, Twitter and the chat app Telegram, which had already announced similar “pauses” in compliance over the past two days. China passed the law on 30 June, criminalising acts that support independence, making it easier to punish protesters. This feels more like a “let’s get some good press in the west while we resume normal operation in aiding the genocidal Chinese regime when people stop caring” than a real principled stand, but with how everybody just rolls over for China, I’ll take any element of resistance – no matter how weak sauce – I can get. It doesn’t get much weaker than “pausing”, though. Apple says it is “assessing” the rules. Oh turns out I was wrong. It does get weaker.
A question I got repeatedly the last couple days was, now that AARM (Apple ARM) is a thing, is the ultimate ARM-Intel-PowerPC Universal Binary possible? You bet it is! In fact, Apple already documents that you could have a five-way binary, i.e., ARM64, 32-bit PowerPC, 64-bit PowerPC, i386 and x86_64. Just build them separately and lipo them together. You’ll be able to eventually build a binary that contains code for every Mac hardware and software platform starting from Classic all the way up to macOS Big Sur, and from m68k all the way up to ARM. I doubt anyone will use it, but that doesn’t make it any less cool.
Finland’s Nokia on Tuesday became the first major telecom equipment maker to commit to adding open interfaces in its products that will allow mobile operators to build networks that are not tied to a vendor. The new technology, dubbed Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN), aims to reduce reliance on any one vendor by making every part of a telecom network interoperable and allowing operators to choose different suppliers for different components. I’m definitely not versed enough in low-level networking equipment to understand just how significant it is, but on the face of it, it does sound like a good move.
Due to draft and development work in the area of branding and product naming, some speculation, in particular related to the “Personal Edition” tag shown in a LibreOffice 7.0 RC (Release Candidate), has started on several communication channels. So let us, as The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors, please provide further clarifications: 1. None of the changes being evaluated will affect the license, the availability, the permitted uses and/or the functionality. LibreOffice will always be free software and nothing is changing for end users, developers and Community members. Basically, The Document Foundation intends to offer – through partners – professional paid-for support for LibreOffice to enterprise customers, and hence the tentative name to differentiate the LibreOffice we all know from the supported one.
Since I wanted to see how Linux would detect the drive that meant I needed to find a way to boot Linux. After a bit of googling I discovered the make tinyconfig option which makes a very small (but useless) kernel, small enough to fit on a floppy. I enabled a couple of other options, found a small enough initramfs, and was able to get it to boot on the 486. And as expected Linux has no problem with seeing that the drive is connected and the drive’s full capacity. Next step is to actually get Linux installed to the hard drive. I’d rather not roll my own distro but maybe I’ll have to. Another possibility is to boot Linux from floppy and then download a kernel and initrd from a current distro and kexec over to it. But that feels to me like reinventing iPXE. That’s version 5.8 of the Linux kernel running on a 486. I shouldn’t be surprised that this is possible, yet I’m still surprised this is possible.
Sixteen marketing associations, some of which are backed by Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google, faulted Apple for not adhering to an ad-industry system for seeking user consent under European privacy rules. Apps will now need to ask for permission twice, increasing the risk users will refuse, the associations argued. Cry me a river. There’s an interesting note later in the linked article: Apple engineers also said last week the company will bolster a free Apple-made tool that uses anonymous, aggregated data to measure whether advertising campaigns are working and that will not trigger the pop-up. But of course it doesn’t. It’s made by Apple, after all, and we all trust Apple, right? It’s not like Apple rushed to sell out everything privacy-related to a regime committing genocide, so we clearly have nothing to worry about when Apple forces itself into the advertising business by leveraging its iOS platform.
After going in depth with iOS 14 earlier this week, today we focus on macOS Big Sur. The biggest takeaway from my hands-on time with the follow up to macOS Catalina is that Apple’s latest OS is clearly being designed with the future in mind. Although it’s unmistakably Mac, Big Sur is a departure from previous versions of macOS in terms of aesthetics. Everything, from the dock, to the menu bar, to window chrome, icons, and even sounds have been updated. A good overview of the many, many changes in Big Sur. Interesting sidenote: with both Windows and macOS now heavily catering towards touch use, this leaves Linux – and most of the smaller platforms, like the Amiga or Haiku – as one of the last remaining places with graphical user interfaces designed 100% towards mouse input. Big buttons, lots spacing, lots of wasted space – it’s coming to your Mac.
The first Android version to support 64-bit architecture was Android 5.0 Lollipop, introduced back in November 2014. Since then, more and more 64-bit processors shipped, and today, virtually all Android devices are capable of running 64-bit software (excluding one or two or more oddballs). However, Google Chrome has never made the jump and is only available in a 32-bit flavor, potentially leading to some unnecessary security and performance degradations. That’s finally changing: Starting with Chrome 85, phones running Android 10 and higher will automatically receive a 64-bit version. It seems odd to me that it took them this long to move one of the most important applications in Android to 64 bit.
If I told you that my entire computer screen just got taken over by a new app that I’d never installed or asked for — it just magically appeared on my desktop, my taskbar, and preempted my next website launch — you’d probably tell me to run a virus scanner and stay away from shady websites, no? But the insanely intrusive app I’m talking about isn’t a piece of ransomware. It’s Microsoft’s new Chromium Edge browser, which the company is now force-feeding users via an automatic update to Windows. People should run whatever the hell they damn well please, but the last few years it has become increasingly clear that Windows is deteriorating fast. Oddly enough, it’s not the operating system itself that’s deteriorating – in fact, Windows is probably in a better technical state than it’s ever been – but the policies and anti-user ‘features’ draped around it. If you read OSNews, you are most likely technically inclined. People who read OSNews don’t need Windows, and shouldn’t be running it. It’s actively hostile towards its users, and you deserve better.
Through a fair bit of digging, we were able to obtain a copy of Borealis, which turned out to be another full Linux distribution. Unlike Crostini, which is based on Debian, Borealis is based on Ubuntu, another popular variety of Linux. Just like the existing Linux apps support, we believe Borealis will integrate itself with Chrome OS rather than being a full desktop experience. However, we found one key difference between Borealis and a normal installation of Ubuntu, as Borealis includes a pre-installed copy of Steam. This lines up with what we learned at CES 2020, when Kan Liu, Google’s director of product management for Chrome OS, shared that the upcoming Steam gaming support would be based on Linux. I am very curious to see how this will perform. My gut feeling is that they will position this more as an endpoint for Steam’s in-home streaming feature than as a way to play games locally on-device, since I don’t know of any ChromeBook with more graphical power than whatever integrated GPU Intel stuffs in their low-end processors.
If you’re a Linux user on the hunt for a new laptop, there’s quite a bit of preparation and research you must do on top of the regular research buying such an expensive piece of equipment already entails. Reading forum posts from other Linux users with the laptop you’re interested in, hunting for detailed specifications to make sure that specific chip version or that exact piece of exotic hardware is fully supported, checking to see if your favourite distribution has adequate support for it, and so on. There is, however, another way. While vastly outnumbered, there are laptops sold with Linux preinstalled. Even some of the big manufacturers, such as Dell, sell laptops with Linux preinstalled, but often only on older models that have been out for a while, or while not fully supporting all hardware (the fingerprint reader and infrared camera on my XPS 13 were not supported by Linux, for instance). For the likes of Dell, Linux in the consumer space is an afterthought, a minor diversion, and it shows. If you want the best possible out-of-the-box Linux experience, you’ll have to go to one of the smaller, more boutique Linux-only OEMs. One of the more prominent Linux OEMs is System76, who have been selling various laptops and desktops with Linux preinstalled for more than decade now. Recently, they launched their new ultraportable, the Lemur Pro, and they kindly loaned one to us for review. Full disclosure: System76 sent us the laptop as a loan, and it will be returned to them after publication of this review. They did not read this review before publication, and placed zero restrictions on anything I could write about. Specifications The Lemur Pro configuration System76 sent to us comes in at $1492, and packs a 4C/8T 10th Gen Intel Core i7-10510U, with frequencies of 1.8 up to 4.9 GHz and 8MB Cache. It came with 16GB of RAM, of which 8 is soldered onto the motherboard, and 8 is seated in the single RAM expansion slot. Storage-wise, it is equipped with a 500GB SSD in one of its two user-accessible M.2 slots – a Samsung 970 Evo Plus. The 14.1″ display has a resolution of 1920×1080 with a matte finish, with a maximum refresh rate of 60Hz. The display is powered by the integrated GPU, and there’s no option for a discrete GPU. The battery is a 73 Wh unit, and is entirely user-replacable. Bucking a trend in the industry, the Lemur Pro is reasonably equipped when it comes to ports: one USB 3.1 Type-C Gen 2 port, two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, a MicroSD Card Reader, a full-size HDMI port, a barrel connector for the included charger (USB-C charging is also supported), a combined headphone/microphone jack, and the usual Kensington lock. The USB-C port can also be used as a display port with DisplayPort 1.2. Hardware The design of the Lemur Pro is unassuming, mostly black, and free of the kind of design frivolities other laptops tend to suffer from. There’s no RGB here, no flames painted on the lid to make it go faster, no screaming logos or gamer accents – just a black laptop with a System76 logo on the lid. That’s it. It is incredibly light, weighing a mere 0.99 kg – for comparison, a MacBook Air weighs 1.29 kg, so the Lemur Pro is considerably lighter. This does come at a price, however, and the Lemur Pro just doesn’t feel as strong and sturdy as similar laptops with a bit more heft to it. There’s an amount of flex in the display lid, bottom cover, and keyboard cover that you just won’t see in a MacBook Air or an XPS 13. It’s a trade-off you have to make – if you really value the extreme kind of portability the Lemur Pro provides, it means giving in somewhere else. I’m disappointed System76 does not provide a high refresh rate display on the Lemur Pro, in the very least as an option. Once you’ve gotten used to 144Hz (or even higher) on your computer displays, using a 60Hz display feels like a major step back. I understand the battery life concerns, but I’m definitely more than willing to give up a little bit of battery life if it meant a buttery-smooth 144Hz UI. Aside from the lack of a high refresh rate option, the display is excellent – it’s bright and the colours look normal, but note that I’m not a colour expert, so I can’t make any claims about colour accuracy. For my general use, however, I didn’t run into any issues. Speaking of battery life – this is one of the major strong points of the Lemur Pro. System76 advertises a maximum battery life of 14 hours, and while these kind of figures are usually complete nonsense, I think they’re not far off the mark here. Since we do not (yet) have a long history of laptop reviews, we do not have any consistent methodology for measuring battery life, so anything I say here is very subjective and difficult for you as a reader to parse. That being said, with casual use – meaning, browsing, writing, Twitter and e-mailing while watching YouTube videos – I could definitely hit the 10 hour mark at the balanced power setting. Switching to the power saver setting yielded me even more hours of battery life, but it did cause a notable hit in performance, especially for video. Simple 1080p YouTube video – either played in Firefox or locally – would stutter and lag, but everything else seemed to perform just fine. My guess is that the power saver setting targets the integrated Intel GPU quite aggressively, but honestly, for several hours of additional battery life, I think it’s worth it. The battery life is especially remarkable since getting proper battery life out of laptops designed for Windows running Linux is often a major hassle, and no matter what you do, Linux battery life on laptops not designed for Linux always lags
In Android 11 we continue to increase the security of the Android platform. We have moved to safer default settings, migrated to a hardened memory allocator, and expanded the use of compiler mitigations that defend against classes of vulnerabilities and frustrate exploitation techniques. An overview of the security-related changes in Android 11.
With the advent of higher performance Arm based cloud computing, a lot of focus is being put on what the various competitors can do in this space. We’ve covered Ampere Computing’s previous eMag products, which actually came from the acquisition of Applied Micro, but the next generation hardware is called Altra, and after a few months of teasing some high performance compute, the company is finally announcing its product list, as well as an upcoming product due for sampling this year. Ampere’s Altra is a realized version of Arm’s Neoverse N1 enterprise core, much like Amazon’s Graviton2, but this time in an 80-core arrangement. Where Graviton2 is designed to suit Amazon’s needs for Arm-based instances, Ampere’s goal is essentially to supply a better-than-Graviton2 solution to the rest of the big cloud service providers (CSPs). Of the companies that have committed to an N1 based design, so far on paper Ampere is publically the biggest and fastest on the books. Can we have these in workstations please? I know they’re not designed for my kinds of uses, but damn if these aren’t awesome.
We have a dark mode now. That’s the news. You can click the link in the sidebar to switch between dark mode and the regular version of the site. You can thank our webmaster Adam for OSNews no longer burning your retinas at night.
After the release of the second beta a few weeks ago, Haiku continues its steady pace of improvements and fixes. A few highlights from the work done since the beta release: Korli also worked on improving support for modern x86 CPUs, including the xsave instruction, and enabling use of AVX which requires saving more CPU registers during context switches. A new version of HaikuWebKit has finally been released after help from KapiX and X512 to fix the remaining bugs. It uses a lot less memory, crashes less often, and has better support for modern website. There is ongoing work for further updates and improvements. There’s a lot more in there, so if you have beta 2 running, be sure to update it.
What follows is a list of the 25 most ingenious and influential Java apps ever written, from Wikipedia Search to the US National Security Agency’s Ghidra. The scope of these applications runs the gamut: space exploration, video games, machine learning, genomics, automotive, cybersecurity, and more. It’s posted by Oracle and thus it makes me feel dirty to link to it, but I guess it’s still an interesting list – albeit with one obvious, huge, giant, inescapable elephant of an mission.
Microsoft is removing the ability for business users to defer manually Windows 10 feature updates using Windows Update settings starting with the Windows 10 2004/May Update. Microsoft seemingly made this change public with a change in its Windows 10 2004 for IT Pros documentation on June 23. I’ve read the article three times and I still don’t quite understand what’s going on.
I was working in the mobile phone industry just as smartphones were taking off. I saw the Palm Pilot rise and fall. I witnessed NEC and Sagem and a host of companies launch smartphones and then disappear. But the greatest tragedy of them all was Nokia and their Symbian Operating System. Symbian was, for its time, a brilliant OS. It ran 3D games smoothly, had terrific hardware support, a decent ecosystem for developers. And it was bloody annoying for users. Every few minutes, Symbian would interrupt you to ask “Are you sure you want this app to connect to the Internet?” His final paragraph has a point.
To meet our customers where they are and relieve customer challenges in managing multiple security solutions to protect their unique range of platforms and products, we have been working to extend the richness of Microsoft Defender ATP to non-Windows platforms. Today we are excited to announce general availability of Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for Linux! Adding Linux into the existing selection of natively supported platforms by Microsoft Defender ATP marks an important moment for all our customers. It makes Microsoft Defender Security Center a truly unified surface for monitoring and managing security of the full spectrum of desktop and server platforms that are common across enterprise environments (Windows, Windows Server, macOS, and Linux). Defender ATP is an enterprise product, so this news doesn’t mean the end-user program that ships with Windows is coming to Linux. Still, seeing Microsoft embracing Linux left, right, and centre is still a weird sight for someone who still hasn’t forgiven Microsoft for their role in killing any chances of BeOS catching on. I’m still bitter over that one.
At this point, saying Android has a serious problem when it comes to phones receiving reliable Android upgrades is getting old. We’ve written about it a lot — even I, specifically, have written about it a lot. You’ve told us your thoughts. We all get it. Even with all that, though, the latest announcement of iOS 14 really sends the message home. This week, Apple officially confirmed that the 2020 iteration of iOS will land on every iPhone since the iPhone 6S. That’s a phone that came out in September 2015, which is nearly five years ago. Meanwhile, the flagship Android device from 2015 was the Samsung Galaxy S6. The most recent official version of Android that phone received was Android 7 Nougat, which dropped in 2016. Of course, it was well into 2017 before the Galaxy S6 actually got it. Since then: nothing. Apple deserves praise for being pretty much the only smartphone manufacturer supporting its devices for this long. Despite years of attempts and failed promises, Android devices still barely get two years of updates, and even if, they arrive with major delays.
If you have used tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, you probably have run into a suggestion to use “next-gen image formats”, namely Google’s WebP image format. Google claims that their WebP format is 25 – 34% smaller than JPEG at equivalent quality. I think Google’s result of 25-34% smaller files is mostly caused by the fact that they compared their WebP encoder to the JPEG reference implementation, Independent JPEG Group’s cjpeg, not Mozilla’s improved MozJPEG encoder. I decided to run some tests to see how cjpeg, MozJPEG and WebP compare. I also tested the new AVIF format, based on the open AV1 video codec. AVIF support is already in Firefox behind a flag and should be coming soon to Chrome if this ticket is to be believed. Spoiler alert: WebP doesn’t really provide any benefits, and since websites generally use JPEG as a fallback anyway, you end up with having to store two images at the same time, defeating the purpose entirely.
Rosetta is a translation process that allows users to run apps that contain x86_64 instructions on Apple silicon. Rosetta is meant to ease the transition to Apple silicon, giving you time to create a universal binary for your app. It is not a substitute for creating a native version of your app. To the user, Rosetta is mostly transparent. If an executable contains only Intel instructions, macOS automatically launches Rosetta and begins the translation process. When translation finishes, the system launches the translated executable in place of the original. However, the translation process takes time, so users might perceive that translated apps launch or run more slowly at times. A short overview of Rosetta 2, the translation layer that allows 64bit x86 applications to run on the upcoming ARM-based Macs.
The era of macOS 10 is over, and we’re entering the next era of macOS’s life cycle. This is going to be a massive update, and aside from the transition to ARM, it can be summed up as “macOS: iOS Edition”: the entire graphical user interface has been redesigned to resemble iOS, including massive amounts of whitespace, touch-friendly design, and very white roundrect icons. The new operating system brings the biggest redesign since the introduction of macOS 10, according to Apple. Big Sur borrows a number of elements from Apple’s iOS, including a customizable Control Center, where you can change brightness and toggle Do Not Disturb, and a new notification center, which groups related notifications together. Both interfaces are translucent, like their iOS counterparts. A number of apps have received streamlined new redesigns, including Mail, Photos, Notes, and iWork. Apple has introduced a new search feature to Messages (which organizes results into links, photos, and matching terms), as well as inline replies for group chats, a new photo-selection interface, and Memoji stickers. There’s a new version of Maps for Mac that borrows features from the iOS app, including custom Guides, 360-degree location views, cycling and electric vehicle directions (which you can send directly to an iPhone), and indoor maps. Apple introduced a number of new Catalyst apps as well. I’m not entirely sure about the look, especially since it feels very much like a touch UI that won’t work and feel as well when using a mouse of a trackpad – it looks like a 1:1 copy of the iPad Pro’s iPadOS user interface, for better or worse. Still, judging a GUI by mere screenshots and short videos is a folly, so let’s reserve final judgment until we get to use it. That being said, if you want to try the new GUI now, you can just load up any GNOME-based distribution and apply any of the countless iOS-inspired themes found on Gnome-Look.org. An additional massively important feature is that the upcoming ARM-based Macs will be able to run iOS and iPadOS application unmodified, as-is, much like how Chrome OS can run Android applications. This further underlines how despite years of Apple and its advocates poo-pooing Windows for combining cursor and touch-based interfaces, Apple is now pretty much past any idea of combining the two, and has instead just opted to make everything touch-first, whether you use a mouse or not. Lastly, macOS 11 will come with Rosetta 2, which will allow x86 applications to run unmodified on ARM-based Macs. That’s definitely good news for early adopters, but performance will obviously be a concern with emulation technology such as this.
Building on its industry-leading A-series chips for iPhones and iPads, Apple wants Macs with its custom silicon to have the highest performance with lower power usage. Apple says the vast majority of Mac apps can be quickly updated to be “universal” with support for both Intel-based Macs and those with Apple’s custom silicon. Starting today, developers will be able to apply for a Mac mini with an A12Z chip inside to help prepare their apps for Apple’s custom silicon. The special Mac mini will be running the macOS Big Sur beta and the latest version of Xcode. The news everyone knew was coming. The transition will take roughly two years, and the first consumer device will become available later this year.
Apple has announced iOS 14 onstage at WWDC 2020, giving the first (official) look at the latest version of its software for the iPhone, and it’s bringing the biggest change to the iOS home screen in years: widgets. Widgets come in a variety of sizes and can still be viewed in the Today view, but in iOS 14, Apple allows widgets to be added to the main Home screen to live right alongside your apps. To add them, there’s a new “widget gallery” where users can easily add and customize widgets. There’s also a new “Smart Stack” widget that automatically shows relevant apps based on the time of day. iOS 14 will be a big update, but a lot of it is catching up to features other platforms have had for a decade now, such as the above-mentioned widgets, which look virtually identical to live tiles on Windows Phone. It also comes with an application drawer (like Android), divided into various application categories (like the Palm OS launcher), and the ability to set your own default browser and email application (like every other operating system since the dawn of time). There’s more, of course, such as picture-in-picture support, something called App Clips where parts of applications can be displayed for quick access (Android has had a similar features for a few years now), and a number of other, smaller things. All in all, it seems like a decent update, bringing a number of features to iOS that most of the world’s smartphone users have been enjoying for a decade or more now. Good news for iOS users, I suppose, but nothing groundbreaking.
As a society, we need an open source device for reading. Books are among the most important documents of our culture, yet the most popular and widespread devices we have for reading — the Kobo, the Nook, the Kindle and even the iPad — are closed devices, operating as small moving parts in a set of giant closed platforms whose owners’ interests are not always aligned with readers’. The Open Book aims to be a simple device that anyone with a soldering iron can build for themselves. The Open Book should be comprehensible: the reader should be able to look at it and understand, at least in broad strokes, how it works. It should be extensible, so that a reader with different needs can write code and add accessories that make the book work for them. It should be global, supporting readers of books in all the languages of the world. Most of all, it should be open, so that anyone can take this design as a starting point and use it to build a better book. Whenever someone asks what “putting your money where your mouth is” means, just link them to the Open Book.
Thousands of users across the internet are reporting severe issues with their Samsung Blu-ray players, home theater, and home cinema systems. A more realistic explanation is that the issues are being caused by an expired SSL certificate that the Samsung Blu-ray players were using to connect to Samsung servers via HTTPS. I kept thinking about smart locks stuck in reboot loops.
For the past two years, modern CPUs—particularly those made by Intel—have been under siege by an unending series of attacks that make it possible for highly skilled attackers to pluck passwords, encryption keys, and other secrets out of silicon-resident memory. On Tuesday, two separate academic teams disclosed two new and distinctive exploits that pierce Intel’s Software Guard eXtension, by far the most sensitive region of the company’s processors. The new SGX attacks are known as SGAxe and CrossTalk. Both break into the fortified CPU region using separate side-channel attacks, a class of hack that infers sensitive data by measuring timing differences, power consumption, electromagnetic radiation, sound, or other information from the systems that store it. The assumptions for both attacks are roughly the same. An attacker has already broken the security of the target machine through a software exploit or a malicious virtual machine that compromises the integrity of the system. While that’s a tall bar, it’s precisely the scenario that SGX is supposed to defend against. Is this ever going to stop?
I am a programmer. I do not deal with digital painting, photo processing, video editing. I don’t really care for wide gamut or even proper color reproduction. I spend most of my days in a text browser, text editor and text terminal, looking at barely moving letters. So I optimize my setup to showing really, really good letters. A good monitor is essential for that. Not nice to have. A MUST. And in “good” I mean, as good as you can get. These are my thoughts, based on my own experience, on what monitors work best for programming. There’s a lot of good advice in here. We all know higher pixel densities make our user interfaces and text crisper, but a surprising number of people still don’t seem to know just how much of a gamechanger high refresh rates can be. If you’re shopping around for a new monitor, and you have to choose between higher pixel count or a high refresh rate, you should 100% without a doubt go for the higher refresh rate. The difference 120Hz or 144Hz will make in just how smooth and responsive a UI can be is astonishing. I think the sweet spot is 1440p at 144Hz, preferably with FreeSync or Gsync. Both Windows and Linux support high refresh rates out of the box, but as the linked article notes, macOS basically has no clue anything above 60Hz exists, and you’ll have to be very careful about what display you buy, and be willing to jump through annoying hoops every time you load up macOS just to enable high refresh rates.
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 11.4-RELEASE. This is the fifth and final release of the stable/11 branch. Read the announcement for more information.
Hidden deep in a blog post full of PR speak, Google has announced that it’s bringing Microsoft Office to Chrome OS through a partnership with Parallels. At Google, we recognize the modern way of working as being a cloud worker—on a browser and browser-based apps for the vast majority of the work day (you’re reading this in one, right?), untethered because the devices you use are mobile-friendly and cloud-native. We’ve long been saying that almost any business role can be a cloud worker, and COVID-19 has dramatically made this point. As a result, the Chrome OS team is working on new ways to make sure every company can benefit from the velocity created by supporting a cloud workforce. For example, our new partnership with Parallels brings legacy application support—which includes Microsoft Office desktop apps—to Chromebooks. More to come on this over the coming months. The Verge has more details on how, exactly, this is going to work, and the gist is that Parallels will be integrated with Chrome OS to allow Microsoft Office to run locally on the device. While Chrome OS has long supported Windows desktop apps that are streamed via the cloud through a Parallels Remote Application Server, this new partnership means the apps will run virtualized on Chromebooks instead. The new feature is set to be available this fall for Chrome Enterprise customers. Parallels Desktop will be integrated natively into Chrome OS, improving performance and enabling offline access for these applications on Chromebooks. It’s a surprising, but welcome move that will mean Chrome OS will be able to support both Android apps and Windows apps in the future. This is an interesting move, and I hope it will become available to regular, non-enterprise consumers, too.
The European Commission has opened two formal antitrust investigations into Apple. The first investigation concerns “the mandatory use of Apple’s own proprietary in-app purchase system and restrictions on the ability of developers to inform iPhone and iPad users of alternative cheaper purchasing possibilities outside of apps.” The second investigation concerns “Apple’s terms, conditions and other measures for integrating Apple Pay in merchant apps and websites on iPhones and iPads, Apple’s limitation of access to the Near Field Communication (NFC) functionality (‘tap and go’) on iPhones for payments in stores, and alleged refusals of access to Apple Pay.”
Twenty years ago, Microsoft released Windows 2000. A rock-solid, 32-bit business-oriented alternative to Windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition, it paved the way for future consumer versions, including Windows 10. Here’s why we remember it so fondly. Windows 2000 was definitely an important release, and many people seem to have good memories of it. I personally never used it back when it was new, and I never liked Windows XP. The only Windows release I truly have fond memories of – other than 95 and 3.11, which I used as a kid and can be attributed to pure nostalgia – is Windows Server 2003. I used it as my regular desktop operating system, and it always felt more stable, safer, and faster than XP. Regardless, like Server 2003, Windows 2000 defaulted to the utilitarian beauty that is the Windows Classic theme, something Microsoft really ought to bring back to modern releases of Windows.
The Windows team is changing the way it labels and distributes its beta and preview releases. Later this month, the Fast ring will become the Dev Channel, the Slow ring will become the Beta Channel, and the Release Preview ring will become the Release Preview Channel. This brings Windows beta and preview releases in line with Office, the new Microsoft Edge, and the industry at large. Even if it were just a name change, this makes a lot more sense than the weird ring names they used up until now.
Google has tried on and off for years to hide full URLs in Chrome’s address bar, because apparently long web addresses are scary and evil. Despite the public backlash that came after every previous attempt, Google is pressing on with new plans to hide all parts of web addresses except the domain name. A few new feature flags have appeared in Chrome’s Dev and Canary channels (V85), which modify the appearance and behavior of web addresses in the address bar. The main flag is called “Omnibox UI Hide Steady-State URL Path, Query, and Ref” which hides everything in the current web address except the domain name. For example, “https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/lenovo-ideapad-flex-5-chromebook-review/” is simply displayed as “androidpolice.com.” As I’ve said numerous times before, I like the idea of seeing if we can improve the way browsers how browsers display addresses – if we don’t try to improve because “that’s just how things are, we end up with garbage like the UNIX/Linux directory naming conventions. However, I don’t think Google doing this singlehandedly and one its own is a good idea; this should be a standards-based process, open to comments from everyone.
What I haven’t seen is side-by-side comparisons of specific pieces of the Windows GUI, and while that makes sense, since it’s a deeply tedious and largely pointless exercise, it’s still been on my mind because I keep running old versions of Windows and finding out that minor elements of the interface are different than I remember. As an example, Notepad prior to – I think – Windows 2000 will not save if you press Ctrl+S. Little things like that that are somehow fascinating to follow through the years. Recently I discovered there are subtle (but occasionally quite significant) differences between revisions of Windows Explorer (the actual file browser, not the entire shell) that I had never realized were there – Windows 3.0’s File Manager, for instance, is a completely different beast than 3.1’s. Anyway, I checked every major release and compiled screenshots of each, so you can check them out yourself. A fascinating trip down memory lane.
Apple Inc. removed podcast apps Pocket Casts and Castro from its App Store in China at the request of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the apps’ developers said this week. “We believe podcasting is and should remain an open medium, free of government censorship,” Pocket Casts wrote on Twitter. “As such we won’t be censoring podcast content at their request.” The developers said that Apple contacted them on behalf of the Chinese regulator and that the app was removed two days later. The developer wrote that Apple said Pocket Casts includes “content that is illegal in China as determined by the CAC.” It turns out the developers behind these two small podcast applications have a stronger and bigger backbone than Apple – because Apple censored its own podcasts application when the Chinese government ordered them to.
The U.S. video-conferencing company Zoom closed the account of a group of prominent U.S.-based Chinese activists after they held a Zoom event commemorating the 31st anniversary of the June 4 Tiananmen Square Massacre, Axios has learned. Big or small, Apple or Zoom, everyone bows to China.
Over the past 12 months, Intel has slowly started to disclose information about its first hybrid x86 platform, Lakefield. This new processor combines one ‘big’ CPU core with four ‘small’ CPU cores, along with a hefty chunk of graphics, with Intel setting out to deliver a new computing form factor. Highlights for this processor include its small footprint, due to new 3D stacking ‘Foveros’ technology, as well as its low standby SoC power, as low as 2.5 mW, which Intel states is 91% lower than previous low power Intel processors. This is Intel’s latest attempt to take on ARM in very thin laptops and tablets and other low-power devices.
The second beta for Haiku R1 marks twenty months of hard work to improve Haiku’s hardware support and its overall stability. Since Beta 1, there have been 101 contributors with over 2800 code commits in total. More than 900 bugs and enhancement tickets have been resolved for this release. There’s so many improvements in this new release that it’s hard to pick favourites. Since many Haiku users basically use the operating system on a rolling release basis through online updates, it’s easy to lose track of what’s new between beta and 2. I have a VM for Haiku that I regularly update and use, and it’s remarkable just how stable and fast Haiku has become over the years.
Plasma 5.19 is out! If we gave alliterative names to Plasma releases, this one could be “Polished Plasma”. The effort developers have put into squashing bugs and removing annoying papercuts has been immense. In this release, we have prioritized making Plasma more consistent, correcting and unifying designs of widgets and desktop elements; worked on giving you more control over your desktop by adding configuration options to the System Settings; and improved usability, making Plasma and its components easier to use and an overall more pleasurable experience. It’s been a joy to follow the focus on fixing papercuts in KDE and its applications, and now’s the time to give it a go through something like KDE Neon.
Apple will announce that it’s shifting from using Intel processors to its own ARM-based chips this month at WWDC 2020, Bloomberg reports. The developer conference is due to take place starting on June 22nd with an online-only format due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Bloomberg notes that the timing of the announcement could change due to the health crisis. Rumors of Apple switching to using its own ARM-based processors in its Macs have been around for years, but a recent report from Bloomberg claimed that the shift was imminent, and that the first Mac powered by an ARM-based processor would arrive in 2021. The company reportedly has at least three ARM-based Mac processors in development based on the next iPhone’s A14 chip as part of Apple’s “Kalamata” project. While I like ARM bringing the competition to x86, Apple is not the right company to get excited over. ARM in and of itself is already more fragmented and locked-in than x86, and Apple cranks this up a notch. A lot of people are excited over ARM Macs, but I have a feeling they may be in for a very rude awakening. No more Steam. No more Bootcamp. No more Linux or other alternative operating systems. Far more Electron apps and shoddy iOS ports (developers barely wanted to make native x86 Mac apps, even fewer will make ARM Mac apps). No Adobe applications for the coming years. iOS-like restrictions for ARM macOS. Rude awakening indeed.
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