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Update: Google's Project Zero disclosed details about the vulnerability a week ahead of schedule due to growing concerns, and they indeed confirm AMD and ARM processors are also affected:The Project Zero researcher, Jann Horn, demonstrated that malicious actors could take advantage of speculative execution to read system memory that should have been inaccessible. For example, an unauthorized party may read sensitive information in the systemâs memory such as passwords, encryption keys, or sensitive information open in applications. Testing also showed that an attack running on one virtual machine was able to access the physical memory of the host machine, and through that, gain read-access to the memory of a different virtual machine on the same host.These vulnerabilities affect many CPUs, including those from AMD, ARM, and Intel, as well as the devices and operating systems running them.Intel just published a PR statement about the processor flaw, and in it, it basically throws AMD and ARM under the bus. According to Intel, reports that only its own processors are affected are inaccurate, namedropping specifically AMD and ARM just to make it very clear who we're talking about here. From the statement:Recent reports that these exploits are caused by a "bug" or a "flaw" and are unique to Intel products are incorrect. Based on the analysis to date, many types of computing devices - with many different vendors' processors and operating systems - are susceptible to these exploits.Intel is committed to product and customer security and is working closely with many other technology companies, including AMD, ARM Holdings and several operating system vendors, to develop an industry-wide approach to resolve this issue promptly and constructively. Intel has begun providing software and firmware updates to mitigate these exploits. Contrary to some reports, any performance impacts are workload-dependent, and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time.More to surely come.

A fundamental design flaw in Intel's processor chips has forced a significant redesign of the Linux and Windows kernels to defang the chip-level security bug.Programmers are scrambling to overhaul the open-source Linux kernel's virtual memory system. Meanwhile, Microsoft is expected to publicly introduce the necessary changes to its Windows operating system in an upcoming Patch Tuesday: these changes were seeded to beta testers running fast-ring Windows Insider builds in November and December.Crucially, these updates to both Linux and Windows will incur a performance hit on Intel products. The effects are still being benchmarked, however we're looking at a ballpark figure of five to 30 per cent slow down, depending on the task and the processor model. More recent Intel chips have features - such as PCID - to reduce the performance hit.That's one hell of a bug.

We've been talking about Google's mysterious Fuchsia operating system for a while now, and today, we have a new piece of the puzzle. It's a small piece, for sure, but with Google being so incredibly secretive about the whole thing, we take what we can get. As it turns out, Google has added support for its Pixelbook to Fuchsia, and added a page on how to prepare the Pixelbook for Fuchsia installation, and you can check the how-to commit for information about the installation itself.Still a far cry from anything even remotely tangible about where Fuchsia is going, but even a slow drip can eventually fill a bucket.

Ending the year a new release of the "desktop engine" Arcan and its reference desktop environment, Durden.Arcan is a different take on how to glue the user-experience side of operating systems together. It has been in development for well over a decade, with the modest goals of providing a more secure, faster, safer and flexible alternative to both Xorg and terminal emulators, as well as encouraging research.The latest release improves on areas such as crash resilience, wayland client support, VR devices, OpenBSD support and visual goodies. You can read through the full release post, with some of the more technical bits in the related articles about crash-resilient Wayland compositing and "AWK" for multimedia.

First post of the new year - I hope y'all had a good one - and we're talking Amiga.In October of 2017 I found a really nice accelerator card on Ebay for my stock Amiga 1000 - the Blizzard Turbo Memory Board. My original thought was I would install it into my 1000 and lose the side-car RAM expansions to regain some valuable desk space. Plus - 8MB? Thatâs gobs for the work I personally do on my Amigas. It was originally designed for the Amiga 500 or 2000 and additionally gave a modest speed boost of 14 Mhz. From my personal experience, 7 Mhz is plenty for the vast majority of Amiga games and software. However in some rare cases 14, 25 or even 40 Mhz can greatly improve the user experience with some math-intensive games and software. This little board seemed the perfect fit for my 1000âs needs. I then got to talking to the seller on Ebay who was based in Australia. After a short amount of time I came to learn that he had in his possession an ultra-rare Phoenix board, too. Within a few days, money was exchanged and the Phoenix began its long journey from Australia to Seattle, Washington.This is one of those stories where you just sit back, grab a warm drink, and just enjoy.

Android applications, running on either Android itself or on Chrome OS, pause whenever they're not in focus. While this makes sense on a phone, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense on desktop machines such as Chromebooks. As such, Google is addressing this shortcoming with Parallel Tasks.With that in mind, the expected behavior of an open app is that it would remain active and running even when the user clicks to another window. Coming from Windows, Linux, or Mac OS, this is what users expect and it is a bit confusing unless you understand what is happening.Parallel tasks on Android allow the OS to keep everything running and open until you pause the activity or close the app down. Again, with Chrome OS, this is much easier to manage. Just click the "X" on the app and it is closed. Simple.Nothing groundbreaking in and of itself, obviously, but a hugely important 'feature' to have on a laptop or desktop.

As soon as I saw iPhone X home indicator replacing the physical button, I got interested in its behavior: it has to be visible both on the lock screen with an arbitrary wallpaper as a background and in any 3rd-party app showing arbitrary content, which in case of videos or games can also change quite quickly.Obviously, UIKit doesn't expose anything remotely similar, so let's figure out how it is built!Cool look at how the home indicator on the iPhone X works.

Apple will be releasing the code of the operating system and applications of the Apple Lisa.Just wanted to let everyone know the sources to the OS and applications were recovered, I converted them to Unix end of line conventions and space for Pascal tabs after the files using Disk Image Chef, and they are with Apple for review. After that's done, the Computer History Museum will do a CHM blog post about the historical significance of the software and the code that is cleared for release by Apple will be made available in 2018. The only thing I saw that probably won't be able to be released is the American Heritage dictionary for the spell checker in LisaWrite.Merry Christmas everybody.

Mark Gurman:Starting as early as next year, software developers will be able to design a single application that works with a touchscreen or mouse and trackpad depending on whether it's running on the iPhone and iPad operating system or on Mac hardware, according to people familiar with the matter. Developers currently must design two different apps - one for iOS, the operating system of Apple's mobile devices, and one for macOS, the system that runs Macs. That's a lot more work. What's more, Apple customers have long complained that some Mac apps get short shrift. For example, while the iPhone and iPad Twitter app is regularly updated with the social network's latest features, the Mac version hasn't been refreshed recently and is widely considered substandard. With a single app for all machines, Mac, iPad and iPhone users will get new features and updates at the same time.Apple currently plans to begin rolling out the change as part of next fall's major iOS and macOS updates, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal matter. The secret project, codenamed "Marzipan", is one of the tentpole additions for next year's Apple software road map. Theoretically, the plan could be announced as early as the summer at the company's annual developers conference if the late 2018 release plan remains on track. Apple's plans are still fluid, the people said, so the implementation could change or the project could still be canceled.This is a massive change in Apple's direction. The company and its supporters have always held fast to the concept that there should be two distinct and different operating systems with two distinct and different user interfaces, very much the opposite of what Microsoft is still trying to do with Windows Metro applications and their Surface line-up. This change is basically a complete embrace of Microsoft's vision for the future of computing.This will have tremendous consequences for both iOS and macOS. For iOS, it probably means we get more advanced, fuller-featured applications, and I think this also pretty much confirms we're going to see a mouse pointer and trackpad/mouse support on iOS in the very near future - just as I predicted earlier this year. For macOS, it might mean a broader base of applications to choose from, but also possibly a dumbing-down of existing applications. A number of Apple applications already work very much like the article states, and they certainly lost functionality on the macOS side of things.On the more speculative side, this could be the next step in deprecating macOS, which is, in my unfounded opinion, still Apple's ultimate goal here. Note how Apple isn't bringing macOS applications to iOS, but vice versa. Make of that what you will, but I wouldn't have too much faith in the long term viability of macOS as a platform distinct and separate from iOS.

If you've noticed a disruption in the time-space continuum recently, it is likely because I have finally been able to compile and install the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) in a current and actively-developed operating system (OpenBSD 6.2 in this case).Since it's been a while - I love CDE.

A Reddit post from last week has sparked a discussion regarding iPhone performance as a function of battery age. While we expect battery capacity to decrease as batteries age, we expect processor performance to stay the same. However, users with older iPhones with lower-than-expected Geekbench 4 scores have reported that replacing the battery increases their score (as well as the performance of the phone). What's going on here? How many phones are experiencing decreased Geekbench 4 score?To answer these questions I've plotted the kernel density of Geekbench 4 single-core scores for the iPhone 6s and the iPhone 7 running different versions of iOS. Scores obtained in low-power mode are not included in the distribution.Evidence seems to be mounting that Apple is decreasing the clock speed of iPhones with decreased battery capacity to maintain the advertised battery life.

Support for the unix socket has existed both in BSD and Linux for the longest time, but, not on Windows. On Windows, there were some alternatives for local IPC, such as named pipes. But, calling conventions are different between the named pipes and sockets, making writing low-maintenance cross-platform applications difficult. For example, one such place where these two constructs differ (other than the API) is terminating the connection. BSD Socket API provides a bidirectional close semantics using 'shutdown'. There is no direct equivalent of that in named pipes. Such differences make it difficult to port unix socket applications from Linux to Windows and vice versa; up until now! Build 17063 brings native support for the unix socket to Windows. Starting this build, two Win32 processes can use the AF_UNIX address family over Winsock API (which is very similar to the BSD socket API) to communicate with each other. Currently, the support only exists for the stream (SOCK_STREAM) socket type, which is a connection-oriented protocol for one-to-one communication. Support for the datagram (SOCK_DGRAM) can be considered in future depending on the adoption, feedback and scenarios.Another step to make Windows friendlier to UNIX/Linux users and developers.

Today, we are excited to announce Quick Boot for the Android Emulator. With Quick Boot, you can launch the Android Emulator in under 6 seconds. Quick Boot works by snapshotting an emulator session so you can reload in seconds. Quick Boot was first released with Android Studio 3.0 in the canary update channel and we are excited to release the feature as a stable update today.There's a quite a few other improvements and new features, as well.

Facebook just loosened the leash a little on its facial-recognition algorithms. Starting Tuesday, any time someone uploads a photo that includes what Facebook thinks is your face, youâll be notified even if you weren't tagged.The new feature rolled out to most of Facebook's more than 2 billion global users this morning. It applies only to newly posted photos, and only those with privacy settings that make an image visible to you. Facebook users in Canada and the European Union are excluded. The social network doesn't use facial-recognition technology in those regions, due to wariness from privacy regulators.Just a heads up.

For a long time, it was just setting the default search provider to Google in exchange for a beefy stipend. Later, paid links in your new tab page were added. Then, a proprietary service, Pocket, was bundled into the browser - not as an addon, but a hardcoded feature. In the past few days, weâve discovered an advertisement in the form of browser extension was sideloaded into user browsers. Whoever is leading these decisions at Mozilla needs to be stopped.Mozilla garnered a lot of fully deserved goodwill with the most recent Firefox release, and here they are, jeopardising all that hard work. People expect this kind of nonsense from Google, Apple, or Microsoft - not Mozilla. Is it unfair to judge Mozilla much more harshly than those others? Perhaps, but that's a consequence of appealing to more demanding users when it comes to privacy and open source.

While we are pleased to announce continuing support for BB10 and BBOS users for at least another two years, current device owners should be aware that we will be closing some ancillary services such as the BlackBerry World app store (12/31/2019), the BlackBerry Travel site (February 2018), and the Playbook video calling service (March 2018). Customers who upgrade to a new KeyOne or Motion won't miss a beat as they'll have immediate access to the rich universe of apps in the Google Play store without compromising on either security or their desire for a physical keyboard.The platform was clearly winding down for a number of years now, ever since BlackBerry moved to Android, but it's still yet another casualty on the road towards the iOS-Android duopoly. I know a surprising number of people here on OSNews absolutely adored their BB10 devices, and I'm sad I never managed to purchase a Passport, the most enticing BB10 device to me.I'm still keeping an eye out for an affordable used Passport, because I definitely want to write about BB10 in more detail in the near future.

Back in the 90s, if you had mentioned the names Nintendo and Sega to a kid in America, Japan or Europe, their face would have likely lit up. They'd instantly know what these words represented; the colour and excitement of a game on the TV screen in their front room, and a sense of fun. But if you said these words to a child in Russia, they'd have looked at you blankly. These companies were not present in the region at the time. Say 'Dendy', however, and you'd invoke that same kind of magic.This was a counterfeit NES console that was released in December 1992 by a Russian technology company called Steepler. It all began when Victor Savyuk, then working at another tech firm called Paragraph, first learnt of 'TV games'; machines that plugged into your TV at home, were controlled with joysticks and let people enjoy video games.There were no IP protections for games on consoles in Russia at the time, making this entire endeavor possible.

Back in the 90s, if you had mentioned the names Nintendo and Sega to a kid in America, Japan or Europe, their face would have likely lit up. They'd instantly know what these words represented; the colour and excitement of a game on the TV screen in their front room, and a sense of fun. But if you said these words to a child in Russia, they'd have looked at you blankly. These companies were not present in the region at the time. Say 'Dendy', however, and you'd invoke that same kind of magic.This was a counterfeit NES console that was released in December 1992 by a Russian technology company called Steepler. It all began when Victor Savyuk, then working at another tech firm called Paragraph, first learnt of 'TV games'; machines that plugged into your TV at home, were controlled with joysticks and let people enjoy video games.There were no IP protections for games on consoles in Russia at the time, making this entire endeavor possible.

As of December 15, 2017, AOL Instant Messenger products and services will be shut down and will no longer work.If you are an AOL member, AOL products and servicesâ âlike AOââL Mail, AOL Desktop Gold anâd Memberâ Subscriptions will not be affected.âMany Americans have memories of AOL Instant Messenger I'm sure - probably memories of talking to your crush late at night, or planning evenings out drinking with friends. Here in The Netherlands we used MSN Messenger - I have those same memories, just from a different client. AOL, ICQ and MSN have long been replaced by WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage, but I'm sure teens of today still use them for the same thing.

Net neutrality is dead - at least for now. In a 3-2 vote today, the Federal Communications Commission approved a measure to remove the tough net neutrality rules it put in place just two years ago. Those rules prevented internet providers from blocking and throttling traffic and offering paid fast lanes. They also classified internet providers as Title II common carriers in order to give the measure strong legal backing.Today's vote undoes all of that. It removes the Title II designation, preventing the FCC from putting tough net neutrality rules in place even if it wanted to. And, it turns out, the Republicans now in charge of the FCC really donât want to. The new rules largely donât prevent internet providers from doing anything. They can block, throttle, and prioritize content if they wish to. The only real rule is that they have to publicly state that theyâre going to do it.Nobody wanted the FCC to vote like this. Public support for net neutrality is massive. The only reason this is happening is pure, unbridled corruption at the very root of the American political system.

I've now turned my attention to preparation for beta1. Already talk has resumed on the mailing list of a tentative schedule; there still remains too much to do to expect it before the new year, but with the list of blockers now reduced effectively to two (one relating to installing source packages on the actual release image, which I intend to look into solving soon; the other is about clashing mime supertype declaration and may prove trickier to solve), the actual "release branch" is hopefully not more than a month away.I've already begun drafting release notes and making build system cleanups as part of preparation. There is finally light at the end of the tunnel - don't give up hope yet. :)I'm just putting it out there that if all goes according to plan, I'll be spending lots of time in a nice Haiku virtual machine over the coming weeks to get a really good look at the state of the continuation of the best operating system ever made.It's time.

Remember Android Wear? Google's struggling smartwatch OS is getting updated to Android 8.0 Oreo, just like the rest of the Android lineup. Google announced the update on the "Android Wear Developers" Google Plus group. It seems like the only supported watch right now is the flagship LG Watch Sport, which makes sense since that was the only watch to get an Android O beta in the beginning of October.Wear's last big update was Android Wear 2.0, which was released with the LG Watch Sport the beginning of the year. Most users won't notice the move to Oreo. Like Android TV, Android Wear has its own interface and set of features that are developed separately from the base OS version. This update to Oreo changes the under-the-hood OS, but the user-facing features will mostly remain unchanged.It feels like Android Wear is stuck in limbo - not exactly dead, but it doesn't seem like there's much activity or forward momentum either. Also I keep forgetting Google Plus is even a thing.

Ahead of the Vulkan 1.0 debut nearly two years ago, we heard that for AMD's Vulkan Linux driver it was initially going to be closed-source and would then be open-sourced once ready. At the time it sounded like something that would be opened up six months or so, but finally that milestone is being reached! Ahead of Christmas, AMD is publishing the source code to their official Vulkan Linux driver.There's some minor caveats noted in the linked article, but this is looking like great news.

Apple has made the iMac Pro available to order, but since we already know all the details about its specifications, there's one particular aspect I'd like to focus on: the iMac Pro contains new Apple-developed silicon. It's called the T2, and as described by Cabel Sasser:The iMac Pro features new apple custom silicon: the T2 chip. It integrates previously discrete components, like the SMC, ISP for the camera, audio control, SSD control... plus a secure enclave, and a hardware encryption engine. This new chip means storage encryption keys pass from the secure enclave to the hardware encryption engine in-chip - your key never leaves the chip. And, they it allows for hardware verification of OS, kernel, boot loader, firmware, etc. (This can be disabled...)The screenshot he posted shows what the hardware verification dialog for things like the operating system and bootloader looks like. As long as we can turn security measures like this off - as we can on, e.g., Chromebooks - this is a good development. Now all we have to do is hope these companies don't abuse this kind of technology.We can hope.

Ask just about any *NIX admin using a Windows laptop and they will have come across Putty. For years, Apple MacBooks have been the go-to choice for many admins partly because getting to a ssh shell is so easy. The newly re-invigorated Microsoft is changing how easy it is to interface with Linux (and other *NIX flavors) significantly with features like Ubuntu on Windows. There is a new beta feature in Windows 10 that may just see the retirement of Putty from many users: an OpenSSH client and OpenSSH server application for Windows.

Microsoft is releasing a free preview version of its Quantum Development Kit, which includes the Q# programming language, a quantum computing simulator and other resources for people who want to start writing applications for a quantum computer. The Q# programming language was built from the ground up specifically for quantum computing.Read the announcement blog post for more information.

From the comments on the previous story:Connor Krukosky is an 18-year-old college student with a hobby of collecting vintage computers. One day, he decided to buy his own mainframe... An IBM z890. This is his story.Grab a warm drink, and enjoy. This is great.

I recently came across a challenge to print a holiday greeting card on a vintage computer, so I decided to make a card on a 1960s IBM 1401 mainframe. The IBM 1401 computer was a low-end business mainframe announced in 1959, and went on to become the most popular computer of the mid-1960s, with more than 10,000 systems in use. The 1401's rental price started at $2500 a month (about $20,000 in current dollars), a low price that made it possible for even a medium-sized business to have a computer for payroll, accounting, inventory, and many other tasks. Although the 1401 was an early all-transistorized computer, these weren't silicon transistors - the 1401 used germanium transistors, the technology before silicon. It used magnetic core memory for storage, holding 16,000 characters.Some people have access to the coolest stuff.

Everyone has childhood dreams. Mine was to make a game for my fist console: the Nintendo Game Boy. Today, I fulfilled this dream, by releasing my first Game Boy game on a actual cartridge: Sheep It Up!In this article, I'll present the tools I used, and some pitfalls a newcomer like me had to overcome to make this project a reality!This isn't simply a ROM you run in an emulator - no, this is a real Game Boy cartridge. Amazing work.

Great new things are coming with the latest Qt release. From image based styling of the Qt Quick Controls, new shape types in Qt Quick through to Vulkan enablers as well as additional languages and handwriting recognition in Virtual Keyboard. But wait, there is more. We fully support both OAuth1 & 2, text to speech and we also have a tech preview of the Qt WebGL Streaming Plugin.The blog post about the release has more information.

Today marks a major milestone in the processor industry - we've launched Qualcomm Centriq 2400, the world's first and only 10nm server processor. While this is the culmination of an intensive five-year journey for the Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies (QDT) team, it also marks the beginning of an era that will see a step function in the economics and energy efficiency of operating a datacenter.

ReactOS 0.4.7 has been released, and it contains a ton of fixes, improvements, and new features. Judging by the screenshots, ReactOS 0.4.7 can run Opera, Firefox, and Mozilla all at once, which is good news for those among us who want to use ReactOS on a more daily basis. There's also a new application manager which, as the name implies, makes it easier to install and uninstall applications, similar to how package managers on Linux work. On a lower level, ReactOS can now deal with Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, BtrFS, ReiserFS, FFS, and NFS partitions.There's more, so head on over to the announcement page.

The total energy use of this web of hardware is huge - an estimated 31 terawatt-hours per year. More than 150 individual countries in the world consume less energy annually. And that power-hungry network is currently increasing its energy use every day by about 450 gigawatt-hours, roughly the same amount of electricity the entire country of Haiti uses in a year.[...]In just a few months from now, at bitcoin's current growth rate, the electricity demanded by the cryptocurrency network will start to outstrip what's available, requiring new energy-generating plants. And with the climate conscious racing to replace fossil fuel-base plants with renewable energy sources, new stress on the grid means more facilities using dirty technologies. By July 2019, the bitcoin network will require more electricity than the entire United States currently uses. By February 2020, it will use as much electricity as the entire world does today.This is an unsustainable trajectory. It simply can't continue.Not only is bitcoin tulips, but it's also incredibly bad for our planet. These energy numbers are insanity.

The problem with the tech world is, from an operating system provider's point of view, that the goalposts keep moving. These perambulating pieces of wood killed Symbian, killed Blackberry, have almost killed Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile, and, one day, may even kill iOS as we know it today. With hindsight, it's all too clear, but at the time OS coders were making sensible choices.Operating systems come, and operating systems go.

HP and Asus have announced the first Windows 10 PCs running on ARM - Snapdragon 835 - and they're boasting about instant-on, 22 hour battery life, and gigabit LTE. These machines run full Windows 10 - so not some crippled Windows RT nonsense - and support 32bit x86 applications. Microsoft hasn't unveiled a whole lot just yet about their x86-on-ARM emulation, but Ars did compile some information:The emulator runs in a just-in-time basis, converting blocks of x86 code to equivalent blocks of ARM code. This conversion is cached both in memory (so each given part of a program only has to be translated once per run) and on disk (so subsequent uses of the program should be faster, as they can skip the translation). Moreover, system libraries - the various DLLs that applications load to make use of operating system feature - are all native ARM code, including the libraries loaded by x86 programs. Calling them "Compiled Hybrid Portable Executables" (or "chippie" for short), these libraries are ARM native code, compiled in such a way as to let them respond to x86 function calls.While processor-intensive applications are liable to suffer a significant performance hit from this emulation - Photoshop will work in the emulator, but it won't be very fast - applications that spend a substantial amount of time waiting around for the user - such as Word - should perform with adequate performance. As one might expect, this emulation isn't available in the kernel, so x86 device drivers won't work on these systems. It's also exclusively 32-bit; software that's available only in a 64-bit x86 version won't be compatible.I'm very curious about the eventual performance figures for this emulation, since the idea of running my garbage Win32 translation management software on a fast, energy-efficient laptop and external monitor seem quite appealing to me.

Reading headlines from the World Internet Conference in China, the casual reader might have come away a little confused. China was opening its doors to the global Internet, some media outlets optimistically declared, while others said Beijing was defending its system of censorship and state control.And perhaps most confusing of all, Appleâs CEO Tim Cook stood up and celebrated Chinaâs vision of an open Internet.Say what?Hardly surprising. This may come as a shock, but with publicly traded companies, you're not the customer; you're the product.Shareholders are their real customers.

People involved with the payoffs are extremely reluctant to discuss them, but four contributing writers to prominent publications including Mashable, Inc, Business Insider, and Entrepreneur told me they have personally accepted payments in exchange for weaving promotional references to brands into their work on those sites. Two of the writers acknowledged they have taken part in the scheme for years, on behalf of many brands.One of them, a contributor to Fast Company and other outlets who asked not to be identified by name, described how he had inserted references to a well-known startup that offers email marketing software into multiple online articles, in Fast Company and elsewhere, on behalf of a marketing agency he declined to name. To make the references seem natural, he said, he often links to case studies and how-to guides published by the startup on its own site. Other times, heâll just praise a certain aspect of the companyâs business to support a point in an otherwise unrelated story. (As of press time, Fast Company had not responded to a request for comment.)This is hardly surprising to anyone who has spent a decent amount of time on the web. I can confirm, however, that I've never partaken in anything like this, and the occasional request of this nature goes straight into my spam folder.

With me being so down on Android, it's only fair to also offer insight into the other side of the coin - a longtime iPhone user making the switch to the new Pixel 2 XL, and loving it:This phone is extremely my shit. Google has taken the original Pixel, which was interesting but not enough to tempt me into switching, and made it into something that's near perfect. In a year where the iPhone X, which Apple touts as the future phone, only has a single interesting feature (Face ID) Google has embraced the opportunity to show a different future with arms wide open. It's the first time I can confidently say an Android device is great coming from the iPhone without constantly saying but there's this one thing.Different strokes for different folks, but that's why we're all here debating things that are, in the grand scheme of things, irrelevant.

On Monday, Facebook announced Messenger Kids, a stand-alone mobile app that allows children age 13 and under to use the service. The point of the new app, the company said, was to provide a more controlled environment for the types of activity that are already occurring across smartphones and tablets among families.There's only one possible response here.

For me the Surface Book 2 was the MacBook Pro that we had all wanted/expected from Apple, it just wears a different logo. While other reviews will read off the spec sheets and talk about the 17 hour battery life and GX yadda yadda yadda processor, they sometimes forget that we (the creative professionals) use these as tools. What Microsoft has done with the Surface Book 2 is make a system void of gimmicks, because gimmicks don't hold up in the working world. Our jobs will not benefit from being able to tap an emoji on a scroll bar, they will benefit from the ability to get work done. As a photographer, it feels extremely odd to say this, but I sincerely feel that the Surface Book 2 is not only a strong contender for the laptop to own, but actually the clear cut choice of the computer to have on set.There seems to be a lot of interest in Surface from people disappointed with the recent MacBook Pros.

Ars Technica once again provides us with an in-depth Ubuntu review:If you've been following the Linux world at all, you know this has been an entire year for spring cleaning. Early in 2017, Canonical stopped work on its homegrown Unity desktop, Mir display server, and its larger vision of 'convergence' - a unified interface for Ubuntu for phones, tablets, and desktops.And now almost exactly six years after Ubuntu first switched from GNOME 2 to the Unity desktop, that has been dropped, too. The distro is back to GNOME, and Canonical recently released Ubuntu 17.10, a major update with some significant changes coming to the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system.In light of the GNOME switch, this release seems like more of a homecoming than an entirely new voyage. But that said, Ubuntu 17.10 simultaneously feels very much like the start of a new voyage for Ubuntu.

If the tech industry wants another wave of innovation to match the PC or the internet, Google and Facebook must be broken up, journalist and film producer Jonathan Taplin told an audience at University College London's Faculty of Law this week.He was speaking at an event titled Crisis in Copyright Policy: How the digital monopolies have cornered culture and what it means for all of us, where he credited the clampers put on Bell then IBM for helping to create the PC industry and the internet.There's quite a few other companies I'd add to those two.

So there's been a big security flaw in Apple's macOS that the company fixed in 24 hours. I rarely cover security issues because where do you draw the line, right? Anyhow, the manner of disclosure of this specific flaw is drawing some ire.Obviously, this isn't great, and the manner of disclosure didn't help much either. Usually it's advisable to disclose these vulnerabilities privately to the vendor, so that it can patch any holes before malicious parties attempt to use them for their own gains. But that ship has sailed.I've never quite understood this concept of "responsible disclosure", where you give a multi-billion dollar company a few months to fix a severe security flaw before you go public. First, unless you're on that company's payroll, you have zero legal or moral responsibility to help that company protect its products or good name. Second, if the software I'm using has a severe security flaw, I'd rather very damn well please would like to know so I can do whatever I can to temporarily fix the issue, stop using the software, or take other mitigating steps.I readily admit I'm not hugely experienced with this particular aspect of the technology sector, so I'm open to arguments to the contrary.

One of the most popular feature requests (more than 20,000 votes) for Windows 10 is tabs in File Explorer. Microsoft has resisted adding tabs to File Explorer and apps in general for years, after originally introducing tabs in Internet Explorer 6 with a toolbar extension back in 2005. That resistance is about to change, in a big way. Microsoft is planning to add tabs to apps in Windows 10, allowing you to group together apps in a better way.Windows 10 testers will first start testing what Microsoft calls âSetsâ in the coming weeks, and the tab integration will be initially limited to Windows 10âs special Universal Windows Apps. Microsoft is planning to get as much feedback on the new feature as possible, before tweaking it and making it available to everyone. The software giant isnât committing to a specific timeline for tabs.This is an incredibly neat idea, and I can't wait to try and see if this feature makes any sense in my workflow.

Let's have a look at the Apple Power Macintosh G5, a weighty space heater that can also perform computing tasks. Apple launched the G5 in 2003 with great fanfare, but nowadays it has a decidedly mixed legacy. In 2003 it was a desktop supercomputer that was supposed to form the basis of Apple's product range for years to come, but within three years it had been discontinued, along with the entire PowerPC range, in favour of a completely new computing architecture. The G5 puts me in mind of an ageing footballer who finally has a chance to play a World Cup match; he is called up from the substitute's bench, entertains the crowd for twenty minutes, but the team loses, and by the time of the next World Cup the uniform is the same but the players are all different. Our time in the sun is brief, the G5's time especially so.I've long been a PC person, and from my point of view the G5 came and went in the blink of an eye. I knew that it had a striking case and a reputation for high power consumption and heat output, and for being 64-bit at a time when that was rare in the PC world, but that's about it. Almost fifteen years later G5s are available on the used market for almost nothing - postage is incredibly awkward - so I decided to try one out. Mine is a 2.0ghz dual-processor model, the flagship of the first wave of G5s. Back in 2003 this very machine was, in Apple's words, "the world's fastest, most powerful personal computer".Once I move into a bigger house (hopefully soon), the PowerMac G5 (and its successor, the tower Mac Pro) are definitely high on the list of computers I want to own just for the sake of owning them. These things are beautiful, and thermally speaking, incredibly well designed. I plan on building my own dual-Xeon machine somewhere next year, and I find it incredibly frustrating that nobody seems to sell computer cases with proper thermal channels, or "wind tunnels" if you will, that physically seperate the CPU airflow from the GPU airflow, PSU airflow, and possibly even hard drive air flow. Proper workstations do this - things like the PowerMac G5, tower Mac Pro, HP Z workstations, and so on - but cases for self-built PCs just do not offer this kind of functionality.

The closure of two major Cydia repositories is arguably the result of a declining interest in jailbreaking, which provides root filesystem access and allows users to modify iOS and install unapproved apps on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.Out of all the things jailbreaking makes possible, two are big issues for me that I would love Apple to implement: custom launchers (Springboard hasn't been changed since the original iPhone and is woefully outdated and restrictive) and the ability to change default applications. However, neither of these are reason enough to jailbreak iOS for me. I do wonder - do any of you still jailbreak? If so, why?

It's time to address a longstanding issue with Google, and as these things often go, it has to do with Silicon Valley not knowing multilingual people are a thing.A long, long time ago, searching for stuff on Google in different languages was a breeze. If you typed www.google.nl in your address bar, you went to Dutch Google. If you typed www.google.com, you went to English Google. If you typed www.google.de, you went to German Google. You may notice a pattern here - the country code determined your Google Search language. Crude, but effective.Years ago, however, Google, ever on the lookout to make its users' lives easier, determined, in its endless wisdom, that it would be a great idea to automatically determine your search language based on your location. Slightly more recently, Google seems to have started using not your location, but the information it has on you in your Google account to determine the language you wish to search in when you load Google Search, and on top of that, it tries to guess your search language based on the query you entered.Regardless of whether I go to www.google.nl or to www.google.com, Google standardises to Dutch. The language menu in Tools is entirely useless, since it only gives me the option to search in "Every language" or "Only pages written in Dutch". When I type in a longer, clearly English query, it will switch to showing English results for said query. However, with shorter queries, single-word queries, brands, or other terms that might transcend a specific language, Google simply doesn't know what to do, and it becomes a game of Guess What Language This Query Is Parsed As.As I've detailed before, Silicon Valley doesn't get out much, so they don't realise hundreds of millions of people around the world lead multilingual lives, speaking and searching in several different languages on a daily basis. Many Americans speak both Spanish and English on a daily basis, for instance, and dozens of millions of Europeans speak both their native language as well as English. Especially younger European generations have friends from all over the world, and it's likely they converse in today's lingua franca.Of course, for me personally, the situation is even more dire. I am a translator, and especially when working on more complex translations, I need to alternate between English and Dutch searches several times a minute. I may need to check how often a term is used, what it means exactly, if a technical term is perhaps left untranslated in Dutch, and so on. I need to be able to explicitly tell Google which language to search in.In its blind, unfettered devotion to machine learning and artificial intelligence, Google has made it pretty much impossible for me to use, you know, Google.Meanwhile, DuckDuckGo has a really neat little switch right at the top of its search results, which I can click to switch between English and Dutch - I don't even have to retype the query or reload the site from the address bar. The dropdown menu next to it gives me access to every single other language DuckDuckGo is available in. It's difficult to overstate how this feature has turned web search from a deeply frustrating experience into the frictionless effort it's always supposed to have been.This tiny, simple, elegant little feature is what has drawn me towards using DuckDuckGo. I'm willing to accept slightly less accurate search results if it means I don't have to fight with my search engine every single day to get it to search in the language I want it to.I will continue to harp on Silicon Valley for barely even paying lip service to multilingual users, because it frustrates our entire user experience on a daily basis. To make matters worse, virtually all popular tech media consist of Americans who only speak English, assuring that this issue will never get the attention it needs. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

Always after ways to push the trusty Amiga 500 to new limits, I discovered a post on the German A1k.org website about someone who had fitted a graphics card to his A500. This was a feat I felt I should replicate. I'm almost, but not quite, there. However, there were lots of hoops which needed jumping through first...It's Amiga weekend, apparently! This story is a bit more hardware-focuseed, obviously.

It was a long, long time ago. A quite younger myself (Paolo Besser) presented AROS to some hundreds of people visiting Pianeta Amiga 2007, a still popular italian fair about Amiga products. While showing it at the event, I realized that the best way to advertise the open-source Amiga "clone" among the Amiga community was to prove it was already able to do things: AROS, in fact, was being developed for 12 years, but very little was known about its applications outside of its little community of developers and hackers. Most people believed it was simply too far, feature-wise, from AmigaOS and MorphOS to be actually useful for anything. This was, sadly, partially true. AROS hardware support was tiny, it didn't talk with USB devices, it had not hardware acceleration, it could barely do networking but it hadn't even a browser. There were many software pieces already in place, but almost nobody knew how to chain and take advantage of them. Moreover, most AROS applications were difficult to find and configure, so the best most people did with AROS builds was just downloading them from time to time, test the graphic demos, and forget about it 10 minutes later. A real pity: people poking with Lunapaint at Pianeta Amiga 2007 showed amusement and were impressed to see a common PC running an Amiga-ish operating system so nicely. Something more had to be done!Icaros is probably the best and easiest way to experience AROS - and thus, an AmigaOS-like operating system - today. Great work, and here's to another ten years!

The FCC has released the final draft of its proposal to destroy net neutrality. The order removes nearly every net neutrality rule on the books - internet providers will be free to experiment with fast and slow lanes, prioritize their own traffic, and block apps and services. There's really only one rule left here: that ISPs have to publicly disclose when they're doing these things.The US already has absolutely terrible internet compared to most developed nations, and this will only make it worse. What an absolutely and utterly bad proposal - clearly the result of deep-rooted corruption and bribery among US carriers and the US government.