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I’ve found myself agreeing wholeheartedly with the recent pushes to get people to switch from Chrome to Firefox. Google keeps pulling dumb trick after dumb trick in an attempt to have more control over the web. It’s hard not to think that this kind of behavior warrants quitting Chrome and other Google products. But taking a look at Firefox usage statistics, it’s pretty obvious that the trend (looking at Monthly Active Users) is going in the wrong direction. This raises some questions: why is Firefox usage going down, and what does Mozilla need to do to bring it back up? Harsh, but fair. Firefox’s out-of-the-box defaults are very counter-intuitive to its privacy-focused marketing. Nonsense like recommended articles littering the new tab page, forced Pocket integration that you can only disable through about:config, recommended themes and extensions based on your usage, Google being the default browser, and so on, all seem to fly in the face of claims that using Firefox allows you to take control of your privacy. Sure, I disable the Pocket integration, set DDG as my default search engine, and do other things to decrapify Mozilla’s terrible defaults (Firefox is my browser on all my computers and mobile devices), but regular users shouldn’t have to.

Version 8.6 of the popular Debian-derived Linux distribution Knoppix was released on Sunday, rebasing the distribution on Debian 10 (Buster)—released on July 9—with select packages from Debian’s testing and unstable branches to enable support for newer graphics hardware. Knoppix is among the first Linux distributions that can be run live from a DVD, and continues to enjoy a great deal of popularity among Linux enthusiasts. Knoppix 8.6 is notable for being the first publicly-released version of the distribution to abandon systemd, an init system built by Red Hat’s Lennart Poettering intended to replace sysvinit. While adoption of systemd was the subject of considerable controversy and criticism, it is the mainstream default, used by Knoppix’s upstream Debian, as well as other Debian forks such as Ubuntu and Mint; RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora; openSUSE and SLES, as well as Mageia, and by default in Arch. I stay far away from the systemd debate – mostly because I honestly have no clue – but I was actually kind of surprised Knoppix was still around. It’s one of the oldest Linux live CDs around, and somehow I find it comforting that it’s still seeing development.

As I’ve been exploring iOS 13 to write the just-released Take Control of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13, I’ve become concerned about what seems to be an increasingly frequent pattern in iOS software design. What finally pushed me over the edge into writing this article was documenting Apple Card’s user interface in Wallet, because I found myself typing the same character over and over and over… That’s right, I’m talking about the increasingly ever-present ellipsis ••• buttons in iOS (technically, we generally render a user-interface ellipsis in running text as three bullets to make them more easily seen). At WWDC 2014, Apple railed against the hamburger menu, and ever since it’s very vogue in Apple developer circles to make fun of the hamburger menu. I guess Apple’s major, magical innovation of replacing the three lines with three dots was enough for the company to adopt the concept completely. Of course, Apple has no taste and has no clue how to design good user interfaces these days, so they made it worse by using the button all over the place in weird locations and have it do different things in different places, but we’ll let that slide.

Android 10 is expected to begin rolling out sometime next month to all Pixel phones. According to Canadian carrier Rogers today, the Android 10 launch date is Tuesday, September 3rd. For the past several years, Google has released Android versions at the start of the month alongside security patches. Given that the first Monday of September is Labor Day in the United States, Google looks to be targeting the day after. Now the waiting game begins for the 99.9% of Android users who do not have a Pixel.

Maybe its pervasiveness has long obscured its origins. But Unix, the operating system that in one derivative or another powers nearly all smartphones sold worldwide, was born 50 years ago from the failure of an ambitious project that involved titans like Bell Labs, GE, and MIT. Largely the brainchild of a few programmers at Bell Labs, the unlikely story of Unix begins with a meeting on the top floor of an otherwise unremarkable annex at the sprawling Bell Labs complex in Murray Hill, New Jersey. I acknowledge the importance of UNIX – who doesn’t – but I hate how it has become a huge roadblock to any meaningful rethinking and improvement in lower-level operating system design. The best we can do seems to be to hide the ’60s guts underneath ever more layers, instead of addressing the actual shortcomings of such an old design. But hey, I’ve learned over the years that criticizing UNIX is akin to drowning kittens, so maybe I should just fall in line and parrot the party line – UNIX is great, UNIX is perfect, and UNIX needs zero modernisation because it was instantly perfect.

For those who haven’t encountered it before, xlogo is a trivial X11 application that pops up a window showing the X Window System logo. It’s close to being the X equivalent of a ‘hello, world’ program, which makes it a good lightweight initial test case. Whenever I need to do a quick check of my X11 connectivity (which in my case usually means I’m checking that SSH X forwarding is basically alive), xlogo is a good choice of program to run: it won’t spend ages setting itself up, and unlike text-only alternatives like xdpyinfo, it’ll pop up a window on the target display, which makes it easy to check that my connection has gone to the right display. But that’s not all xlogo is good for. There are several other things I use it for. I remember xlogo from the very first few times I used Linux – somewhere in 2002 or 2003. Together with stuff like xeyes, it was a fun little toy to experiment with after installing Linux for the first time. I had no idea it could actually be useful.

Microsoft is planning to redesign the tablet experience for Windows 10. The software giant has started testing a new design for 2-in-1 convertible PCs that will keep the user interface more similar to the existing desktop design. Currently, Windows 10 throws you into a more tablet-optimized UI that removes task bar icons and puts the Start menu full-screen when a device automatically switches into “tablet mode.” Microsoft is now walking back some of those changes, while keeping some touch-optimized elements for 2-in-1 PCs. In the new tablet experience, the desktop will remain in full view, with the task bar icons visible and increased spacing between them. If enabled, the search box will collapse into an icon, and the touch keyboard will appear when you tap on a text field. File Explorer will also switch to a touch-optimized layout. Windows’ tablet modes have simply never really taken off, so it makes sense for Microsoft to try and come up with better ways to align Windows with what users actually want. I’ve had several Surface devices with detachable keyboards, and not once have I liked the tablet mode. I always prefer to just use the regular desktop environment, with the slightly enlarged and more spaced-out touch targets Windows already supports. This seems like Microsoft embracing this particular way of using Windows and touch, and I’m all for it.

Microsoft ♥ Linux – we say that a lot, and we mean it! Today we’re pleased to announce that Microsoft is supporting the addition of Microsoft’s exFAT technology to the Linux kernel. It’s important to us that the Linux community can make use of exFAT included in the Linux kernel with confidence. To this end, we will be making Microsoft’s technical specification for exFAT publicly available to facilitate development of conformant, interoperable implementations. We also support the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network’s Linux System Definition, where, once accepted, the code will benefit from the defensive patent commitments of OIN’s 3040+ members and licensees. Microsoft has been using its exFAT patents to bat Linux companies over the head with for close to two decades, and it was an important pillar of Microsoft’s strategy of extracting patent licensing fees from all kinds of entities using Linux. Seeing this finally come to a complete and non-negotiable end is a sight to behold, but it does make me wonder – was it really all necessary? Was it worth it? It seems like to me it really wasn’t – in fact, it’s been a catastrophic failure. Linux is now the single most popular operating system in the world, shipping on more devices and hardware than any other. No amount of silly troll patents were going to stop that.

Our ability to continuously shrink the features of our silicon-based processors appears to be a thing of the past, which has materials scientists considering ways to move beyond silicon. The top candidate is the carbon nanotube, which naturally comes in semiconducting forms, has fantastic electrical properties, and is extremely small. Unfortunately, it has proven extremely hard to grow the nanotubes where they’re needed and just as difficult to manipulate them to place them in the right location. There has been some progress in working around these challenges, but the results have typically been shown in rather limited demonstrations. Now, researchers have used carbon nanotubes to make a general purpose, RISC-V-compliant processor that handles 32-bit instructions and does 16-bit memory addressing. Performance is nothing to write home about, but the processor successfully executed a variation of the traditional programming demo, “Hello world!” It’s an impressive bit of work, but not all of the researchers’ solutions are likely to lead to high-performance processors. The rate of progress on this particular technology is astounding.

Apple announced today that it will offer genuine parts, diagnostic tools, and repair manuals to independent repair shops. It’s a bold move from a company that has lobbied against Right to Repair bills, and a concession to the reality of iPhone owners’ needs. But we still have questions. There’s some ‘scorpion and the frog’-ness to Apple’s major concession here, and I’d be incredibly wary of the fine print. On top of that, this seems like a classic case of Apple trying to prevent proper right to repair legislation from gaining even more steam by offering a stripped down version of what said legislation would demand of them, so they can point at this news and claim legislation isn’t needed.

It’s 2019, and Windows 10 has too many useless and annoying features. Don’t get me wrong: Windows 10 has gotten better and, overall, I love it compared to Windows 8. But some things just need to go. Like any operating system, Windows 10 is full of junk that we’d all love to remove, and this is a decent list. Personally, I’d much rather more and more of the ancient things in Windows 10 get replaced by modern equivalents, such as Explorer, various outdated settings panels, applications like Notepad, and so on.

Understandably, given Fairphone’s focus on making a phone that’s sustainable rather than a portable powerhouse, the Fairphone 3’s specs aren’t competitive with other flagships we’ve seen this year. It’s got a 5.7-inch Full HD display, a 12-megapixel rear camera, and an 8-megapixel front-facing camera. Internally the phone is built around a Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 processor, and features 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. Its 3000 mAh battery might not be the biggest around, but it’s removable, allowing you to easily replace it if its capacity starts to degrade. The entire phone is made form recycled, conflict-free, and fair trade materials, and is remarkably repairable. Sustainability and repairability from a small company comes with a price tag, however – but at €450, it’s actually not that bad.

On paper, the reason for installing Aurora on the tablets is for carrying out Russia’s population consensus in 2020. A Huawei spokesperson confirmed that the company is currently holding talks with the Russian Ministry of Communications. Two sources at Reuters specified, “Huawei is interested in the project. It showed samples of tablets that could be used,” and, “This is a pilot project. We see it as the first stage of launching the Russian OS on Huawei devices.” Aurora is a Russia-specific version of Sailfish OS.

We recently restored an Apollo Guidance Computer, the revolutionary computer that helped navigate to the Moon and land on its surface. At a time when most computers filled rooms, the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) took up just a cubic foot. This blog post discusses the small but complex switching power supplies that helped make the AGC compact enough to fit onboard the spacecraft. The Apollo project is one of the greatest scientific and engineering achievements in human history, and apparently that goes down to the details. Amazing.

Today, we’re introducing a new shell, written in Rust. It draws inspiration from the classic Unix philosophy of pipelines, the structured data approach of PowerShell, functional programming, systems programming, and more. It’s called Nushell, or just Nu for short. We have a book (¡también se habla Español!). We have a repo.

Blocking cookies is bad for privacy. That’s the new disingenuous argument from Google, trying to justify why Chrome is so far behind Safari and Firefox in offering privacy protections. As researchers who have spent over a decade studying web tracking and online advertising, we want to set the record straight. Google’s refusal to join Firefox’ and WebKit’s strong privacy positions is both entirely unsurprising and wholly sad. Chrome is the most popular browser in the world, and while I have no doubt Chrome engineers themselves would love to make their browser and engine more privacy-conscious, Google itself obviously has no incentive to do so.

First, we’re changing the way we name our releases. Our engineering team has always used internal code names for each version, based off of tasty treats, or desserts, in alphabetical order. This naming tradition has become a fun part of the release each year externally, too. But we’ve heard feedback over the years that the names weren’t always understood by everyone in the global community. As a global operating system, it’s important that these names are clear and relatable for everyone in the world. So, this next release of Android will simply use the version number and be called Android 10. We think this change helps make release names simpler and more intuitive for our global community. And while there were many tempting “Q” desserts out there, we think that at version 10 and 2.5 billion active devices, it was time to make this change. Not exactly a hugely important bit of news or anything, but there you have it – the dessert names are no more.

This is a port of the QtBase module of the Qt software development framework version 5 to the OS/2 operating system (and its derivants). This port is carefully crafted and maintained by bww bitwise works GmbH (also referred as bitwiseworks). The current version of the port implements all major parts of the QtBase module and is suitable to compile and run a large amount of Qt 5 applications on OS/2. An impressive effort, but I do have to wonder – what is the benefit of running OS/2 when all of the applications you’re using are better served running on, I don’t know, KDE or Windows? Doesn’t it make more sense to direct effort towards native applications?

Overall, the launch of Comet Lake comes at a tricky time for Intel. The company is still trying to right itself from the fumbled development of its 10nm process node. While Intel finally has 10nm production increasingly back on track, the company is not yet in a position to completely shift its production of leading-generation processors to 10nm. As a result, Intel’s low-power processors for this generation are going to be a mix of both 14nm parts based on their venerable Skylake CPU architecture, as well as 10nm Ice Lake parts incorporating Intel’s new Sunny Cove CPU architecture, with the 14nm Comet Lake parts filling in the gaps that Ice Lake alone can’t meet. Another year, another Skylake spec bump. Intel sure is doing great.

It has been a long time coming, and it might have been better if this had been done a decade ago. But with a big injection of open source spirit from its acquisition of Red Hat, IBM is finally taking the next step and open sourcing the instruction set architecture of its Power family of processors. Opening up architectures that have fallen out of favour seems to be all the rage these days. Good news, of course, but a tad late.

Standard Telephone & Cable made quite a few phones for British Telecom in the 70s/80s that most people will recognise instantly even though they didn’t actually know who made them. Probably like me they thought that BT made all their own stuff which I later found out was completely wrong but hey. In the early 80s they branched out into computerised telephones with this lovely looking beast, the Executel 3910. Fellow collector Tony brought this one to my attention and on seeing the pictures I said ‘what the hells is THAT!’ and bought it. It’s a desk phone, pure and simple, but massively computerised with an AMD8085 processor and 32K RAM plus a 5″ monitor for displaying diary and phonebook entries AND, and it’s a big AND, PRESTEL access! A recent video by Techmoan – who bought a working model – brought this device to my attention, and I instantly fell in love with it. This is an incredible piece of engineering and forward-thinking.

This post recaps some of the C64 coding tricks used in my little Commodore 64 coding competition. The competition rules were simple: make a C64 executable (PRG) that draws two lines to form the below image. The objective was to do this in as few bytes as possible. These people are wizards.

Most folks at Microsoft don’t realize that Encarta exists and is used TODAY all over the developing world on disconnected or occasionally connected computers. (Perhaps Microsoft could make the final version of Encarta available for a free final download so that we might avoid downloading illegal or malware infested versions?) What are your fond memories of Encarta? If you’re not of the Encarta generation, what’s your impression of it? Had you heard or thought of it? I have vague memories of using Encarta back in the early ’90s, but I was much more interested in technology and games as a young kid. These days I tend to read a lot of Wikipedia pages every day, so had I been my current age 25 years ago, I can definitely see myself using Encarta a lot. In any event, definitely neat that the final version of Encarta – from 2009 – runs just fine on Windows 10.

With Huawei’s P20 Pro last year and this year’s P30 Pro, the company pulled off some incredible camera innovations, at least in the photo department. In terms of recording video, it hasn’t done as much. Part of the reason for this is because the Kirin 970 and Kirin 980 chipsets don’t support recording video at 4K 60fps, a feature that you’d expect from such camera-centric smartphones. Luckily, that’s about to change with the next generation. While I was in Shenzhen for the past week, Huawei confirmed that the Kirin 990 will indeed support recording video at 4K 60fps. Starting with the Mate 30 series, you’ll no longer have to choose between a high resolution and a high frame rate. It’s incredible how fast Chinese companies manage to improve. If you ever wonder why the United States government is trying to hit Huawei so hard, it’s because of things like this. Aside from the possibly valid spying concerns, Huawei is simply also a major competitor to Silicon Valley, and this is a great way for American corporations/government to strike back. There aren’t many companies who can make every part of a device. Huawei is one of them.

A small collection of cool Unix tools for the X Window System. For cool terminal tools, see Kristof Kovacs’ list. All applications have been tested on FreeBSD but should run on other Unix-like operating systems as well.

Windows CE supported the Hitachi SuperH-3 and SuperH-4 processors. These were commonly abbreviated SH-3 and SH-4, or just SH3 and SH4, and the architecture series was known as SHx. I’ll cover the SH-3 processor in this series, with some nods to the SH-4 as they arise. But the only binaries I have available for reverse-engineering are SH-3 binaries, so that’s where my focus will be. Another architecture series by Raymond Chen, diving into some deep details about the SHx architecture.

To many, the (UEFI-based) boot process is like voodoo; interesting in that it’s something that most of us use extensively but is – in a technical-understanding sense – generally avoided by all but those that work in this space. In this article, I hope to present a technical overview of how modern PCs boot using UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface). I won’t be mentioning every detail – honestly my knowledge in this space isn’t fully comprehensive (and hence the impetus for this article-as-a-primer). A rather detailed overview of the UEFI boot process.

The Visible Lisp Computer is a Lisp interpreter that displays the contents of the Lisp workspace on an OLED display, so you can see program execution and garbage collection in real time. It’s a special version of my uLisp interpreter for ARM boards, designed to run on an Adafruit ItsyBitsy M0, or an ATSAMD21E on a prototyping board, interfaced to an I2C OLED display. If I knew what any of this meant, you’d find a few words about this here. Sadly, I don’t know what any of this means.

Responding to criticism that it’s trying to steer consumers toward more expensive battery replacements, Apple today claimed that the “important battery message” added to iOS is there in the name of customer safety. It was recently discovered that when an iPhone’s battery is swapped out by a third-party repair shop that isn’t one of Apple’s authorized partners, the device’s battery health menu will show an ominous warning about being “unable to verify this iPhone has a genuine iPhone battery.” This can happen even if a genuine Apple battery is used; the warning stems from a micro-controller that only authorized technicians can properly configure. If iOS doesn’t detect the right micro-controller, it hides the usual battery health stats and displays the warning. Apple is fighting the right to repair movement and associated proposed laws tooth and nail, and this is just another salvo in the war the company is waging on its own customers.

When Windows tries to “check for a solution” after a program crashes, what is it actually doing and why does it never seem to work? We’ve all seen the dialog, but what actually happens? Mark Phaedrus, developer at Microsoft, gives the answer.

In this 4.14 cycle the main goal was to port all core components to Gtk3 (over Gtk2) and GDBus (over D-Bus GLib). Most components also received GObject Introspection support. Along the way we ended up polishing our user experience, introducing quite a few new features and improvements (read below) and fixings a boatload of bugs (read changelog). A lot of focus seems to have been on HiDPI support, which, in 2019, is probably a good thing. Multimonitor support received quite a bit of love, too, as did other display-related things like colour profiles, display scaling, and so on. That’s just a selection though, so be sure to read through all the changes.

Commodore built this prototype UNIX workstation/server computer in the same time frame as the Amiga and their PC-Clone and then decided that they only had production capacity for two out of three, and the CBM900 lost. All the approx 300-500 prototypes were recalled for destruction, but due to some kind of “mistake” this particular machine, which was on loan to a favored customer in Denmark, never made it back. The machine resurfaced when this company cleaned up their basement, and sent 3 euro-pallets of Commodore artifacts our way. I never knew Commodore tried to build a UNIX workstation. I shouldn’t be surprised though; virtually everyone dabbled in UNIX workstations in the ’80s. This page has more information about the CBM900.

Kyle Orland at Ars: When it comes to emulator design, there’s something to be said for trying to capture the workings of the original system as accurately as possible, warts and all. But there’s also something to the idea that emulators can improve on the original hardware, smoothing problems like frame rate slowdown that plagued the underpowered processors of the day. That brings us to the latest update for storied, accuracy-obsessed SNES emulator bsnes, which adds the ability to overclock the virtual SNES processor. While bsnes is far from the first SNES emulator to allow for simulated overclocking, it does seem to be the first that does so “without any framerate or pitch distortion, and without harming compatibility in 99% of games,” as bsnes programmer byuu puts it.

Apple started adding user consent alerts way back in High Sierra. The first time an app would try to access your location, contacts, calendar, reminders or photos a system alert would prompt the user for consent. Mojave expanded these prompts to automation, camera and microphone. And now Catalina adds screen recording, keyboard input monitoring, access to folders such as Desktop, Documents and Downloads, user notifications and Safari downloads… These alerts are just another step on a long path Apple has been taking to protect user’s data. Previous steps include code signing, sandbox, gatekeeper, the “curated” Mac App Store and notarization. But security features are most useful when they’re invisible. All previous steps were mostly invisible. This last one… Not so much. There’s a lot of complaining going around in Apple circles regarding the latest Catalina betas and the excessive amount of permission alerts and associated user access problems. On his latest podcast, for instance, John Gruber detailed how it took him ages to figure out why the Terminal wouldn’t show him any directory listings, until he realised the Terminal needed disk access permission, but didn’t ask for it. This is, of course, all quite reminiscent of Windows Vista, and the goal here seems to be to turn macOS into iOS, with similarly harsh restrictions on what users can do on their computers.

In the city of Dongguan, China, Huawei finally took the wraps off its long-rumored, first-party operating system. The OS, called Harmony OS, has been in development for several years, but it’s recently taken on a role as a key player in Huawei’s contingency plan since the U.S. enacted a trade ban on the Chinese technology company. At the Huawei Developer Conference, Huawei finally shared the first details about its in-house OS, but the company wasn’t ready to show off Harmony on smartphones just yet. Tomorrow, the company will show off Harmony OS on the Honor Vision TV. For now, Android remains the go-to mobile OS for Huawei and Honor smartphones and tablets. The operating system runs on a custom microkernel architecture that’s been developed in-house, which makes sense considering Huawei has been holding talks about microkernels at FOSDEM for a few years now (2018, 2019). They claim it’s faster than the competition, more secure, and more flexible – so much so that they say they can switch over from Android in a matter of days. Other details about HarmonyOS include no root access, because Huawei considers it a security risk. Huawei will be supplying an IDE for the operating system, capable of building applications for various device types. Huawei also intends to release HarmonyOS as open source. There’s a lot of skepticism about Huawei’s ability to build an operating system out there, but I do not share that at all. Huawei is one of the largest, most successful technology companies in the world, for both enterprise networking technology as well as consumer technology, and there’s no doubt in my mind that they are more than capable of developing a good, solid operating system. That being said, the real issue is of course that between iOS and Android, there isn’t really much room left for a viable third option. HarmonyOS could certainly work in China – especially since it boasts Android compatibility and Chinese Android phones are Google-free anyway – but in the rest of the world people expect their smartphones to be either iOS or Google Android. I highly doubt any non-Android smartphone, with or without Android application compatibility, has any serious chance in the market. Which is obviously sad, but that’s the way it is.

So has AMD done the unthinkable? Beaten Intel by such a large margin that there is no contest? For now, based on our preliminary testing, that is the case. The launch of AMD’s second generation EPYC processors is nothing short of historic, beating the competition by a large margin in almost every metric: performance, performance per watt and performance per dollar. Analysts in the industry have stated that AMD expects to double their share in the server market by Q2 2020, and there is every reason to believe that AMD will succeed. The AMD EPYC is an extremely attractive server platform with an unbeatable performance per dollar ratio. This is one stunning processor family.

7 years ago, Qt 5 was released. Since then, a lot of things have changed in the world around us, and it is now time to define a vision for a new major version. This blog post captures the most important points that can and should define Qt 6.

Apple’s iOS Security Research Device program will be available to researchers with a track record of high-quality security research on any platform, so not every regular developer will be able to access these devices. The handsets will come with ssh, a root shell, and advanced debug capabilities, all designed to make it easier for security researchers to spot bugs. Nice initiative, I guess, but obviously anybody should be able to turn their iPhone into a device like this.

Then they heard about a working model of the ELEA 9003, Olivetti’s first commercial mainframe, introduced in 1959. They lost no time tracking it down. This 9003 had originally belonged to a bank in Siena, where it was used for payroll, managing accounts, calculating interest rates, and the like. In 1972, the bank donated the computer to a high school in the Tuscan hill town of Bibbiena. And there it’s been ever since. Today, former Olivetti employees periodically travel to the ISIS High School Enrico Fermi to tend to the machine. A unique piece of computing history that must be saved at all costs.

Now that Haiku has entered the beta phase, and after the work over the past year or so spent fixing the majority of known kernel crashes and other general instabilities, it is high time we start paying more attention to the whole system’s performance. Despite how “snappy” Haiku seems, most of its internals are really not so well optimized. This shows when running operations of any real intensity (disk, memory, or CPU.) While the new thread scheduler a few years ago removed some of the thread-related bottlenecks, in practice this just shifted the load to other bottlenecks. So, let’s take an overview of this past month’s (and some earlier month’s) changes, to see how one optimizes an operating system. Haiku always feels very fast and snappy, but in reality, many of us have that perception because we tend to not really use Haiku as much as we use Windows or Linux. I’m really glad the Haiku team acknowledges this, and is looking to address low-level performance issues that may not look sexy in a changelog, but that are oh so crucial for the overall feel of the operating system.

With Chrome 76, Google has once again started to strip the “www” subdomain and “https://” identifier from URLs shown in the address bar. In a Chrome bug post regarding this issue, product manager Emily Schechter stated that after testing for several months in the Canary, Dev, and Beta channels, they are going to start hiding “https” and “www” in the Chrome omnibox starting in version 76 on desktop and Android. Surely we can all agree that URLs aren’t exactly as userfriendly as they once were – the kinds of garbage strings you often get these days are entirely pointless to users – but just flat-out removing parts of the URL for simplicity’s sake seems rather pointless.

Japan’s Fair Trade Commission is investigating Apple Inc over its pressure on Japanese parts makers and whether it abused its power in violation of antimonopoly rules, the Mainichi newspaper reported on Tuesday. The investigation is the latest by the country’s regulators against the tech giant after they found last year that the company may have breached antitrust rules on the way it sold its iPhones in Japan. Apple illegally pressuring smaller companies into doing its bidding? Surely such is preposterous.

Not the most exciting or noteworthy piece of news, but still a fun little bit of nostalgia. Today at their 24th annual DevCon, FileMaker, Inc., maker of the world’s leading Workplace Innovation Platform, unveiled the start of a new chapter in the company’s history as Claris International Inc. Claris was created a spin-off from Apple in 1987, set up to own and developed MacPaint and MacWrite, which Apple had allowed to wither. The company eventually acquired FileMaker, and in 1990 Apple decided to keep Claris as a wholly-owned subsidiary. It’s been that way ever since, with the company renaming itself to FileMaker in 1998, after divesting everything else from the company. Since it has acquired a company called Stamplay, it’s no longer just shipping FileMaker, hence the rename back to Claris.

I had spent some time several years ago trying to get Linux running on this machine via the (defunct) JLime project, so I had some of the pieces available to actually get this little “pocket computer” going again – mainly compatible CompactFlash cards and an external card reader. But I was mostly joking. Then I starting thinking how funny it would be to actually sit in a talk and take notes at DEF CON on an ancient “laptop”… These things are a thing of beauty.

Companies that embed Facebook’s “Like” button on their websites must seek users’ consent to transfer their personal data to the U.S. social network, in line with the bloc’s data privacy laws, Europe’s top court said on Monday. According to the European Court of Justice ruling, a site that embeds the Facebook “like” icon and link on its pages also sends user data to the US web giant. Hopefully this will lead to the systematic removal of Facebook buttons from websites that serve the EU. Facebook’s buttons are trackers, and should be treated as such.

Like many things that starts out as a mere annoyance, though eventually growing into somewhat of an affliction. One particularly dark and insidious thing has more than reared its ugly head in recent years, and now far more accurately described as an epidemic disease. I’m talking about the filth that is reCAPTCHA. Yes that seemingly harmless question of “Are you a human?” Truly I wish all this called for were sarcastic puns of ‘The Matrix’ variety but the matter is far more serious. I hate reCAPTCHA with a deep-rooted passion. It’s insidious, annoying, probably doesn’t work, and all you’re doing is helping Google by playing the role of a dumb bot. It’s dreadfully dystopian.

From the community to the 3rd party libraries, it looks Flutter is lot closer to Javascript than Android. Javascript, however, isn’t shy of moving faster while Flutter is still deciding what they want to be. Keep compatibility even if it creates confusion? Check. A lot of libraries with dubious quality that are just created and dropped? Check. I want to like it, but Flutter currently doesn’t want to like me. Maybe they are are short in personnel and needs to double their team? Maybe they need to just re-organize and prioritise better? Only they know. Not being a programmer in any way, shape, or form, articles such as these are always difficult to gauge – are they truthful? Factual? Emotional? My-way-or-the-highway? I’m posting it anyway since I’m sure many of you have a far better grasp on this than I do.

Jupiter is an open source and education-oriented RISC-V assembler and runtime simulator. It is written in Java 11 and capable of simulate all the instructions of the base integer ISA (I extension) plus the M and F extensions (RV32IMF), including all the pseudo-instructions described in the user-level instruction set manual. It was developed taking into account that it could be used in various courses such as: Computer Architecture, Compilers and Assembly Programming.

Killing processes in a Unix-like system can be trickier than expected. Last week I was debugging an odd issue related to job stopping on Semaphore. More specifically, an issue related to the killing of a running process in a job. Here are the highlights of what I learned. Interesting technical dive.

Spitfire on the Channel F is like the plane mode in Atari’s Combat, except with the option to play it alone against the machine. Also, I found an easter egg in it, which might (might) be the world’s first easter egg in a videogame (maybe idk). That’s one hard to find easter egg.