OSnews

Photographer James Ball (aka Docubyte) knows what a computer is. He's spent part of career lovingly photographing the machines of yesteryear, from the giant mainframes of the '50s and '60s to the first wave of personal computers in the late '70s and '80s. When he saw Apple's iPad pro advertisement that ended with a young girl asking "What's a computer?" as she typed away on her tablet, it provoked him."I'm not some old technophobe, and I get the whole post-computing cloud/device blah blah thing," Ball told Motherboard via email. "But I wanted to pick up an old Mac and say 'Hey! Remember this? This is a computer. The era of crazy shaped beige boxes and clunky clicking keyboards, for me and a lot of other people, that is a computer."To honor those machines, Ball has created a series of high resolution animated gifs honoring 16 machines from the era of the birth of the personal computer. He calls the project 'I Am a Computer: Icons of Beige.'These are gorgeous.

PlayStation 4 is entering the final phase of its life cycle, Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO John (Tsuyoshi) Kodera said at Sony Investor Relations Day 2018 in Tokyo today.The platform first launched in North America and Europe in November 2013, followed by Japan in February 2014. It has shipped 79 million units as of March 31, 2018.Didn't I just buy a PS4 Pro? Am I the only one to whom this seems... A little premature?

Up until recently, Haiku builds for ARM have targetted individual ARM boards. The compile process for ARM images required two things: an architecture, and a target board (such as the Raspberry Pi 2). This board setting adjusted a large number of defines throughout Haiku at compile time to set the operating system up for the target ARM device. The board selection also handled placing all the propriety bits (a lot of which have sketchy licensing) into the Haiku image during compile. Haiku would then have to distribute these files. (sketchy licensing and all)Over the past few years, François Revol, Ithamar R. Adema, and others have worked to add Flat Device Tree (FDT) support to Haiku. FDTâs enable operating systems to obtain core knowledge of the devices they run on by simply swapping one or more compiled binary files. These files describe critical things the operating system needs to know about the hardware they run on. Really important things such as what devices exist at what memory locations. (Think video frame buffers, serial ports, etc)In a series of cryptic commits in July 2017, I removed these board-centric build steps with grand plans of making testing (and running) Haiku on ARM devices easier.No, this does not mean Haiku now runs on ARM, as it has been able to do that for a while now. The goal of these changes and improvements is to speed up development of Haiku's ARM build, and to simplify the distribution of ARM builds into a single, generic ARMv7 image.

Because a typeface is not just its pixels, but also its spacing, I wanted to look at the authentic source material for Chicago. That required some technical archaeology: the original Macintosh, released in 1984, was the first widely available computer that used proportional typography on screen and it had an entirely unique way of storing and managing fonts. (Standards like TrueType didnât appear until later.)I have some software background in typography, so I managed to extract the genuine 1984 font data using my 2018 computer. (The details of that part are a bit beside the point but are in the footnote at the bottom if you're interested). Having got the font, bitmap and spacing data for Chicago, I used the same little program to extract all the other Macintosh bitmap fonts.Fun little bit of typography archeology on the old Macintosh.

In the wake of the recent Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, it's worth spending some time looking at root causes. Both of these vulnerabilities involved processors speculatively executing instructions past some kind of access check and allowing the attacker to observe the results via a side channel. The features that led to these vulnerabilities, along with several others, were added to let C programmers continue to believe they were programming in a low-level language, when this hasn't been the case for decades.Processor vendors are not alone in this. Those of us working on C/C++ compilers have also participated.

The tower form factor may be a thing of the past, at least until the new Mac Pro shows up next year, but for years, if you needed the most powerful and flexible machine money could buy, the Power Mac was the only way to go.For almost five years, the heart of the Power Mac was the PowerPC G4 chip. Starting in 1999 it clocked at just 350 MHz, but by the time the Power Mac G4 line was retired, a tower with dual 1.42 GHz CPUs could be ordered. In that time frame, things like Gigabit Ethernet, SuperDrives, and Wi-Fi became mainstream.I have a soft spot for all Macs from the PowerPC G4 era - back when Apple wasn't boring - and the various models of Power Mac G4 aren't exceptions. I can't really explain why I find PowerPC G4 Macs so appealing, even to this day - all I know is that I am dead-set on collecting a number of them, especially those I couldn't ever afford when they were new.

Microsoft and Google are jointly disclosing a new CPU security vulnerability that's similar to the Meltdown and Spectre flaws that were revealed earlier this year. Labelled Speculative Store Bypass (variant 4), the latest vulnerability is a similar exploit to Spectre and exploits speculative execution "that modern CPUs use. Browsers like Safari, Edge, and Chrome were all patched for Meltdown earlier this year, and Intel says these mitigations are also applicable to variant 4 and available for consumers to use today."However, unlike Meltdown (and more similar to Spectre) this new vulnerability will also include firmware updates for CPUs that could affect performance. Intel has already delivered microcode updates for Speculative Store Bypass in beta form to OEMs, and the company expects them to be more broadly available in the coming weeks. The firmware updates will set the Speculative Store Bypass protection to off-by-default, ensuring that most people wonât see negative performance impacts.This cat ain't going back in no bag anytime soon.

And the second The Old New Thing story, about adding a Windows 3.1 virtual machine to Windows 95.As the Windows 95 project started to come together, I was approached to undertake a special project: Run Windows 3.1 in an MS-DOS virtual machine inside Windows 95.This was the ultimate in backward compatibility, along multiple axes.First of all, it was a demonstration of Windows 95's backward compatibility by showing that it could even use an emulated MS-DOS virtual machine to run the operating system it was designed to replace.Second, it was the ultimate backward compatibility ripcord. If you had a program that simply wouldn't work with Windows 95 for whatever reason, you could fire up a copy of Windows 3.1 in a virtual machine and run the program there.To use it, you installed Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 into separate directories, and then made a few edits to the Windows 3.1 SYSTEM.INI file to replace the mouse and serial drivers with special versions. There were some other preparatory steps that had to be done, but eventually you got to the point where you could double-click the Windows 3.1 icon, and up came Windows 3.1 in an MS-DOS virtual machine.This is quite similar to how Windows 3.x worked in OS/2 at the time.

I've got two fun The Old New Thing stories for you today, starting with a story about Windows' ZIP file support.Every so often, a customer will ask whether Windows Compressed Folders (Zip folders) supports something fancy like AES encryption, and we have to shake our head and apologize. "Sorry, no."Why this sad state of affairs?The compression and decompression code for Zip folders was licensed from a third party. This happened during the development of Windows XP. This means that the feature set of Zip folders was locked to whatever features were hip and cool as of around the year 2000.You'd think Windows would eventually start supporting other archive formats as well, but no.

What do Photoshop, Matlab, Panic Transmit, and Eclipse have in common? They are among the 299 apps for which macOS applies compatibility fixes.Here's the full list of bundle IDs, along with the functions that checks for them, and the first caller to those functions. It's also available in CSV format.Note that this is just a list of apps Apple has developed compatibility tweaks to make them run on newer macOS versions. As the list demonstrates, even the best apps often needs some tweaks on newer macOS. In addition, most of these patches are only applied to older versions of apps.Here's how I extracted the list, and some interesting things I found in it.This is absolutely fascinating, and provides some amazing insight into which applications Apple considers crucial to the macOS user experience and platform. We all know Windows performs various tricks to maintain backwards compatibility, but I had no idea Apple went to decent lengths too for the same reasons.

We go through this every time a new version comes to Google's own phones while we wait for it to come to the rest. And the outcome is always the same - Pixel phones (and previous Nexus phones) look the way Google wants them to look and the rest of the phones look however the company that made them want them to look. That's because you can't see Android - it's simply software that supports the things you're looking at.It's confusing. And tech bloggers (myself included) don't help ease the confusion very well when we write about the things we see on a software update for the Pixel. It's too difficult to try and break everything down every time we write something, and while we are good at a lot of things, we tend to shy away from "difficult". To compound it all, when we do try to break "Android" down, we usually make it worse. I'm going to try here because I'm feeling courageous and want to face "difficult" head on today. If I don't come back, tell my wife I love her.Android is quite a complicated term, entity, and operating system.

When contemplating whoâd be a major player in the Android smartphone business, the gaming hardware giant Razer probably doesnât come to mind. While they have yet to establish themselves as a reliable smartphone provider, Razerâs first attempt did not at all seem like it was their first time dabbling into Android, likely because much of their engineering team came from Nextbit. Razer leveraged their status in gaming hardware to appeal to those who game, and those who game hold high refresh rate monitors in high regard. So Razer put one on a smartphone.This article takes a close look at the Razor phone's display, which is rather unique among Android phones for its 120Hz refresh rate (iPhones have 120Hz displays as well).

Bold efforts to push academic publishing towards an open-access model are gaining steam. Negotiators from libraries and university consortia across Europe are sharing tactics on how to broker new kinds of contracts that could see more articles appear outside paywalls. And inspired by the results of a stand-off in Germany, they increasingly declare that if they donât like what publishers offer, they will refuse to pay for journal access at all. On 16 May, a Swedish consortium became the latest to say that it wouldn't renew its contract, with publishing giant Elsevier.A lot of this research in partially or fully tax-funded, and as such, published articles must be freely available to the public. Good development.

We just got a look at the upcoming RED Hydrogen One smartphone at an event meant for "RED Pioneers" (read: superfans). It is, without a doubt, one of the most ambitious smartphones in years from a company not named Apple, Google, or Samsung. It's an Android phone with a 5.7-inch display and top-tier phone specs, but that description doesn't do justice to what RED is trying to accomplish here.The company better known for high-end 4K cameras with names like "Weapon" and "Epic-w" isn't entering the smartphone game simply to sell you a better Android phone (though it does have both Verizon and AT&T signed on to support it). No, this phone is meant to be one piece of a modular system of cameras and other media creation equipment - the company claims it will be "the foundation of a future multi-dimensional media system".I doubt this phone will ever have any mass-market success, but that's not really the point anyway. I like that RED is trying something new, something different, and takes it to the extreme with this industrial design. The module system here is different from previous failed attempts at doing so in that it's designed to tie in with RED's popular and expensive camera's and lenses from other big camera brands, instead of trying to appeal to the mass market.This might actually work out.

The 76477 Complex Sound Generation chip (1978) provided sound effects for Space Invaders and many other video games. It was also a popular hobbyist chip, easy to experiment with and available at Radio Shack. I reverse-engineered the chip from die photos and found some interesting digital circuitry inside. Perhaps the most interesting is a shift register based white noise generator, useful for drums, gunshots, explosions and other similar sound effects. The chip also uses a digital mixer to combine the chip's different sound generators. An unusual feature of the chip is that it uses Integrated Injection Logic (I2L), a type of digital logic developed in the 1970s with the goal of high-density, high-speed chips.

A number of prominent third-party iOS developers have formed a union to put pressure on Apple to change several App Store policies.We believe that people who create great software should be able to make a living doing it. So we created The Developers Union to advocate for sustainability in the App Store.Today, we are asking Apple to publicly commit - by the tenth anniversary of the App Store this July - to allowing free trials for all apps in the App Stores before July 2019. After that, we'll start advocating for a more reasonable revenue cut and other community-driven, developer-friendly changes.I've railed against the long-term sustainability of the application store model for years now, long before it became en vogue in wider developer circles. I absolutely love the idea of independent developers forming a union - even if it's not a literal union - as a means to put pressure on Apple, Google, and other owners of application stores to take better care of developers.At the same time, I fear that they are too late - the vast majority of the App Store's revenue comes from crappy pay-to-win mobile games, not from well-made, lovingly crafted applications. I simply don't think these developers are important enough to a bean-counting bottom-liner like Tim Cook.

Since Google revealed a robo-caller that sounds eerily human earlier this month, the company has faced plenty of questions about how it works. Employees got some answers this week.On Thursday, the Alphabet Inc. unit shared more details on how the Duplex robot-calling feature will operate when it's released publicly, according to people familiar with the discussion. Duplex is an extension of the company's voice-based digital assistant that automatically phones local businesses and speaks with workers there to book appointments.At Googleâs weekly TGIF staff meeting on Thursday, executives gave employees their first full Duplex demo and told them the bot would identify itself as the Google assistant. It will also inform people on the phone that the line is being recorded in certain jurisdictions, the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing private matters. A Google spokesman declined to comment.This is a good step, and while the technology is awesome, I'm still quite reluctant about whether or not we really need this. Aside from the very legitimate use cases for people with disabilities, to whom this technology could be life-changing, I'm wondering just what regular users get out of it.

Today (May 15, 2018) is the 30 year anniversary of CHI'88 (May 15-19, 1988), where Jack Callahan, Ben Shneiderman, Mark Weiser and I (Don Hopkins) presented our paper "An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus". We found pie menus to be about 15% faster and with a significantly lower error rate than linear menus!This article will discuss the history of what's happened with pie menus over the last 30 years (and more), present both good and bad examples, including ideas half baked, experiments performed, problems discovered, solutions attempted, alternatives explored, progress made, software freed, products shipped, as well as setbacks and impediments to their widespread adoption.Fantastic read with fantastic examples. Set some time aside for this one - you won't regret it.

In another week the GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulation will become enforceable and it appears that unlike any other law to date this particular one has the interesting side effect of causing mass hysteria in the otherwise rational tech sector.This post is an attempt to calm the nerves of those that feel that the(ir) world is about to come to an end, the important first principle when it comes to dealing with any laws, including this one is Donât Panic. Iâm aiming this post squarely at the owners of SMEâs that are active on the world wide web and that feel overwhelmed by this development. A bit of background about myself: Iâve been involved in the M&A scene for about a decade, do technical due diligence for a living (together with a team of 8). This practice and my feeling that the battle for privacy on the web is one worth winning which has led me to study online privacy in some detail puts me in an excellent position to see the impact of this legislation first hand as well as how companies tend to deal with it.The GDRP is not nearly as draconian or complex as people are scared into believing (mostly by people who conveniently also sell GDRP compliance services). Over the past few weeks and months, I've translated countless internal and external corporate documents about the GDPR from companies both big and small, for all kinds of sectors, many of which you know, and none of them are freaking out and none of them find this particularly difficult or complicated. Even a legal simpleton like me understands it just fine, and all I need to do is translate texts about it.

Embedded systems have started to become extremely complex. The big push to connect every device to the internet to create the IoT is causing a demand for embedded software engineers that has not yet been seen in recent history. This big push is causing a vacuum in which companies can't find enough embedded software engineers. Instead of training new engineers, they are starting to rely on application developers, who have experience with Windows applications or mobile devices, to develop their real-time embedded software. The problem, of course, is that these engineers don't understand the low-level hardware, but only high-level application frameworks that do all the work for them.Is this actually true? It's very difficult to gauge this, since most focus when it comes to development is on "sexy" development, such as smartphone applications or websites - there's very little media visibility for lower-level engineering such as embedded developers, kernel engineers, and so on. Since I know how easy it is to fall into the trap of believing that everything was better in the past, I genuinely wonder if this is really actually a problem, or that we just perceive it as such.

The bitcoin network is run by miners, computers that maintain the shared transaction ledger called the blockchain. A new study estimates that this process consumes at least 2.6GW of power - almost as much electric power as Ireland consumes. This figure could rise to 7.7GW before the end of 2018 - accounting for almost half a percent of the world's electricity consumption.Bitcoin is - quite literally - destroying our environment. It's erasing the meagre progress we've made on reducing our overal energy consumption, for a glorified Tulipmania.

Google has built a multibillion-dollar business out of knowing everything about its users. Now, a video produced within Google and obtained by The Verge offers a stunningly ambitious and unsettling look at how some at the company envision using that information in the future.The video was made in late 2016 by Nick Foster, the head of design at X (formerly Google X), and shared internally within Google. It imagines a future of total data collection, where Google helps nudge users into alignment with their goals, custom-prints personalized devices to collect more data, and even guides the behavior of entire populations to solve global problems like poverty and disease.This is exactly as dystopian and deeply creepy as you think it is. My biggest concern is not that this video exists or that companies such as Google are thinking about this - my biggest concern is that a whole generation of people already seem to accept this as the new normal even before it's a reality.

Previously, HTTP usage was too high to mark all HTTP pages with a strong red warning, but in October 2018 (Chrome 70), we'll start showing the red "not secure" warning when users enter data on HTTP pages.Seemingly small change, but still hugely significant. Right now, HTTPS pages are marked as secure, and HTTP pages are not marked at all. In the future, HTTPS pages will not be marked, while HTTP pages will be marked as insecure.

The operative word is "adaptive". XAC's potential truly begins with its back-side strip. There, you'll find a whopping 19 ports, all 3.5mm jacks. No, this isn't a giant middle finger to the headphone-jack haters at Apple and Google. Rather, these ports see Microsoft connecting with, and loudly celebrating, what has long been an open secret in the world of gaming peripherals: the community of add-on devices designed for limited-mobility gamers.Oversized buttons, finger switches, blowing tubes, foot pedals, and other specialized inputs have long been built for gamers who can't hold onto or efficiently use average controllers (gamepads, keyboards, mice). Recent speeches from company heads like CEO Satya Nadella and Xbox chief Phil Spencer have paid lip service to "inclusivity" in computing and gaming, but this device, the XAC, aims to do the trick by connecting niche add-ons to standard Microsoft hardware.This is a hugely important device for gamers with limited mobility. Nothing but praise for Microsoft for developing a device like this.

The Senate has voted to save net neutrality, but donât get your hopes up: thereâs still a long, likely impossible journey ahead if the policy is to be saved in the immediate future.In a 52-47 vote today, senators voted to overturn the Federal Communication Commissionâs Restoring Internet Freedom Order, which took net neutrality rules off the books. They were able to do so using the Congressional Review Act, or CRA, which allows Congress to reverse recent decisions by government agencies. Republican control of Congress means that such a measure wouldnât normally even make it up for a vote; but the CRA allows senators to force a vote by obtaining 30 signatures.All 49 Democrats voted in favor, as well as Republican Senators Susan Collins, of Maine; John Kennedy, of Louisiana; and Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska.This is a step in the right direction for the US, but corruption runs deep, so this fight is far, far from over. Still, a victory is a victory.

This doesnât have to be forever. Maybe in the future, developers will start using React Native to build desktop applications. Or perhaps Flutter! Electron apps have a bad reputation for using too much RAM, have potential security issues, canât (yet) match the speed of C++, and they often lack the polish and familiarity of a great native app.But it seems clear to me that OS-specific SDKs are becoming a liability for desktop OS vendors. Developers want to use the technologies they know, and they want maximum reach for the products they build. And theyâre smart enough to get what they want. A lack of cooperation on the part of Apple, Google, and Microsoft will only hurt users.Say hello to your new Electron overlord.At 33, I'm perhaps staring to show signs of becoming an old man, but I really don't like Electron applications. I use Discord every day, and it just feels slow, cumbersome, and out of place on my virtually 100% Modern/Fluent Design Windows desktop, Surface, and my iPhone X. I greatly prefer proper, platform-specific native applications, but I feel that ship may have sailed with things like Electron and Progressive Web Apps.I'm not looking forward to this future.

Twitter has long had a strange disdain for third-party Twitter apps, but it's allowed many of them to pass under the radar for the last several years. That's starting to change this summer, when Twitter will revoke a key piece of access that developers currently have to the service, replacing it with a new access system that limits what they can do. The changes aren't going to make third-party Twitter clients useless, but they are going to make the apps somewhat worse.The changes, which go into effect August 16th, do two main things: first, they prevent new tweets from streaming into an app in real time; and second, they prevent and delay some push notifications. Neither of these are going to break Twitter apps completely, but they could be very annoying depending on how and where you use it.As good a moment as any to stop using Twitter altogether. Twitter is actively making Twitter worse for those that use Twitter the most and since the longest time, which seems like a terrible business decision. They want us to use their crappy non-chronological, advertisement-ridden first party clients, which in my case simply isn't going to happen. I use Twitter for fun, and these needless changes suck that fun out of it.Meanwhile, the Nazis are still on Twitter. Just so you know where the company's priorities lie.

Four years ago, I envisioned an open-source operating system for smartwatches that would eventually become known as AsteroidOS. This project has steadily grown and gathered contributions from about 100 contributors from all around the world, all united behind the idea of an open wearable platform. When I first started, I never imagined how big this project would become and the quantity of work required to reach a stable version for daily usage.Today, it is my great pleasure to finally announce the availability of AsteroidOS 1.0, the first stable release of this project!This is a remarkable achievement. AsteroidOS is a Linux-based operating system using Wayland, Qt5, and various other open source technologies. It is quite full-featured, and currently works on seven Android Wear smartwatches. Sadly, I don't own one of the supported devices, because I'm incredibly curious to try this out.

This is a little exploration into applying '90s-era design & principles into a modern platform with some primitive components. The assets and design metrics were (for the most part) taken from an actual installation of Windows 95. These are pixel-accurate renditions of the original design.There's something refreshing about seeing Windows 95's controls and widgets running on a modern smartphone.

Four of the largest cell giants in the US are selling your real-time location data to a company that you've probably never heard about before.In case you missed it, a senator last week sent a letter demanding the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigate why Securus, a prison technology company, can track any phone "within seconds" by using data obtained from the country's largest cell giants, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, through an intermediary, LocationSmart.Well, at least your messaging app is end-to-end encrypted, right?

I've been trying to make my computers quieter for nearly three decades. Custom liquid cooling loops, magnetically-stabilised fluid-dynamic bearings, acoustic dampeners, silicone shock absorbers, you name it. Well, last week I finally managed to build a completely silent computer. Without further ado...The Streacom DB4 is an amazing chassis and case, which I am considering for one of my next computer builds. This article provides great insight into building such a fanless PC, with links to additional articles about the system later in its lifespan.

Surface Hub 2 was designed from the ground up to be used by teams - to get people out of their seats, to connect and ideate, regardless of location. The new Surface Hub 2 is sleeker, more agile and more affordable to fit any workspace or work style. The gorgeous 4K+ 50.5" multi-touch display creates an inviting canvas to co-create, harnessing the power of Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Whiteboard, Office 365, Windows 10 and the intelligent cloud. The 4K cameras that rotate with the device, integrated speakers and far field mic arrays allow everyone in the meeting to feel as if they are right in the room with the rest of the group, while our standard Surface 3×2 aspect ratio means everyone has more usable space to create and collaborate.Do I need this? Nope. Can I afford this? Probably not. Do I still want it? Yes!I love the fact that Microsoft is making products like this. It'll probably be a niche product few of us ever get to experience, but whatever the company develops for and learns from this product will surely benefit the rest of their hardware and software offerings.

This is just a slightly modified version of the standard DOSBOX emulator. I have just hacked in my own shader which emulates some aspects of old CRT monitors, as I prefer to play emulated games with such a filter, and the built-in dosbox filters are not to my taste. I made this because I wanted it myself, but since I have it I thought I'd share it. There's probably lots of things which could be done better, but it's good enough for my needs right now, so leaving it like this for now.Not a major news item, obviously, and just one among countless contributions to open source that pass by unnoticed every day, but every now and then, it seems only prudent to highlight one.

The first Ryzen Pros had a major omission, however: they didn't include integrated GPUs. Corporate desktops and laptops, typically used for Office, Web browsing, and other low-intensity tasks, overwhelmingly use integrated GPUs rather than discrete ones; they simply don't need anything more powerful. The need for separate GPUs meant that the first-generation Ryzen Pros had only very limited appeal in their target corporate market.The new processors, however, follow in the footsteps of the Ryzens with integrated Vega graphics launched in February, pairing a single core complex (CCX; a bundle of four cores/eight threads and a shared level 3 cache) with a Vega GPU. This makes them a complete solution for the corporate desktop.These Ryzen processors with built-in Vega graphics are great for relatively affordable computer builds designed for simple office work, such as my translation work. Right now, I work and play games on the same machine, but I intend to move work to a separate, lighter computer so I can be a bit more aggressive in updating the hardware in my gaming PC. Ryzen processors with built-in Vega graphics are great for this.

AquilaOS is a UNIX-like Operating System that started in 2016. Based on another OS I developed and many trials and failures since 2012, it finally came to light.The goal behind AquilaOS is to make a UNIX-like OS adhering to a quote by K. Thompson in UNIX Implementation.The kernel is the only UNIX code that cannot be substituted by a user to his own liking. For this reason, the kernel should make as few real decisions as possible. This does not mean to allow the user a million options to do the same thing. Rather, it means to allow only one way to do one thing, but have that way be the least-common divisor of all the options that might have been provided.From the start, AquilaOS focused on being as transparent and architecture-agnostic as possible. To even raise the challenge, strict compliance with C standard (C99) is a must which allows compiling with "-O3" (strict optimization in GCC) and "-Wall -Wextra -Werror". Currently AquilaOS v0.0.1a is released and awaiting testers and contributors.FeaturesAquilaOS is mostly written in C with a few assembly parts when absolutely needed. It consists of a monolithic kernel and a set of user utilities.Kernel Features: Monolithic kernel Supports x86 archticture (all arch dependent code is seperate from the kernel) Multitasking and Multithreading using POSIX threads Supports ELF format Signals Blocking and Non-blocking I/O Sessions, process groups and job control Virtual file system (VFS) with support for initramfs, tmpfs, devfs, devpts, procfs and ext2 Devices subsystem using devices files with major/minor numbers Supported devices include: PS/2 Keyboard, IDE/ATA Harddisk, Framebuffer device (fbdev, Linux API) with VESA 3.0, 8250 UART Memory management subsystem (with demand paging and copy-on-write)System Utilities: aqbox: several UNIX/POSIX utilities in one binary (similar to BusyBox) fbterm: Framebuffer based terminal (with wallpaper) with VT100 emulation using libvterm lua: Lightweight, multi-paradigm programming language kilo: Simple text editor for ANSI/VT100 terminal tcc: Tiny C Compiler by Fabrice Bellard (Who made Qemu and FFmpeg) nuklear: Immediate mode graphics library - experimentalThe source code is released under GPLv3 licence and hosted on Github, https://github.com/mohamed-anwar/Aquila. Make sure to check it out and follow up with suggestions, or better yet, contributions. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

"Sunrise day" for the GDPR is 25 May. That's when the EU can start smacking fines on violators.Simply put, your site or service is a violator if it extracts or processes personal data without personal permission. Real permission, that is. You know, where you specifically say "Hell yeah, I wanna be tracked everywhere."Of course what I just said greatly simplifies what the GDPR actually utters, in bureaucratic legalese. The GDPR is also full of loopholes only snakes can thread; but the spirit of the law is clear, and the snakes will be easy to shame, even if they don't get fined. (And legitimate interest - an actual loophole in the GDPR, may prove hard to claim.)Toward the aftermath, the main question is What will be left of advertising - and what it supports - after the adtech bubble pops?I'm skeptical of the GDPR actually changing anything, but who knows.

Google is rolling out new changes to its storage plans that include a new, low-cost storage plan and half off the price of its 2TB storage option, the company announced today. It's also converting all Google Drive paid storage plans to Google One, perhaps in part because youâll now have one-tap access to Googleâs live customer service.Google One will get a new $2.99 a month option that gets you 200GB of storage. The 2TB plan, which usually costs $19.99 per month, will now cost $9.99 a month. Finally, the 1TB plan that costs $9.99 a month is getting removed. The other plans for 10, 20, or 30TB wonât see any changes.This makes Apple's paltry iCloud offerings look even worse than they already did.

After the release of the Iyonix PC in 2002, RISC OS started moving from 26-bit architecture towards 32-bit. Nowadays all modern RISC OS machines are 32-bit, but an awful lot of older applications are still not compatible with modern 32-bit RISC OS.Aemulor, originally a commercial application but now free to download, is a software emulator that allows RISC OS applications which were written for a 26-bit ARM systems to be used on more recent CPUs that provide only 32-bit addressing modes. RISC OS itself is unaware that there is anything unusual about the 26-bit applications that are running under Aemulor, to RISC OS they appear as normal applications - they appear on the icon bar and can communicate fully with other 26 or 32-bit applications.I've bought a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ just for RISC OS, so hopefully, I can start posting more about this old but venerable operating system in the future. Any tips or interesting things for me to investigate are welcome.

Among all the new additions to Android P including new navigation gestures, Slices API, and new biometrics API, there are some other changes which may also be impactful in a more subtle way. One of these is the removal of App Not Responding (ANR) dialogue boxes for foreground apps. The ANR dialogue appears when something is preventing the main UI thread from responding. When this happens in Android Oreo or below, the ANR dialogue is shown to the user to let them know. Now, in Android P, the application will just crash without any kind of notification for the user.You know how some people will insist that iOS applications are more stable than Android applications? That's because on iOS, when applications crash, they just... Vanish. No dialog, no notification, nothing. Android will now be adopting the same behaviour, which, while less informative, does remove a silly dialog that you couldn't really do anything useful with anyway.Good move. Dialogs you can't take any actions with are useless.

Oh, snap! Just because some packages are available to install directly from the Ubuntu Software Center doesn't make them safe. This is proved by a recent discovery of malware in some snap packages from the Ubuntu Snaps Store.At least two of the snap packages, 2048buntu and Hextris, uploaded to the Ubuntu Snaps Store by user Nicolas Tomb, contained malware. All packages by Nicolas have since been removed from the Ubuntu Snaps Store, "pending further investigations".I honestly did not expect anyone to care enough to upload malware to the Ubuntu Software Center. Good thing it got caught.

I bring this up because when Google introduced its new pill-shaped gesture area on Android P's first public beta, it was immediately apparent that Google was not aiming to recreate the simplicity, or even the convenience, of its decade-old three-button navigation scheme. Swiping up does not, in fact, go to the home screen but to the multitasking menu. Swiping up again, and only from that in-between state, reaches the app drawer. Indeed, reaching the home screen requires tapping the pill, something that's not at all obvious from its shape, or from precedent set by Apple and the rest of the industry.I don't have a Pixel or one of the other supported devices to test the new navigation scheme on, but it only makes sense that people are weary whenever big changes to core parts of a UI like these are made. People were up in arms over the removal of the home button on the iPhone X, but it took me less than hour to get used to, and Android P will be no different.

We know that our smartphones are making us unhappy. At its annual developer's conference this week, Google revealed that 70% of its users actually want help balancing their digital lives. What's not so clear is what the smartphone manufacturers of the world should do about it. After all, it's in their business interests to make their phones as engaging - or addictive - as possible.Yet at I/O, Google introduced a clever and aggressive response to its own habit-forming products. It's a broad initiative called Digital Wellbeing that CEO Sundar Pichai says will ultimately affect every Google product. "It's clear that technology can be a powerful force, but it's equally clear that we can't just be wide-eyed about [it]," said Pichai on stage at Google's I/O conference. "We feel a deep sense of responsibility to get this right."My cinical read on this is that since these are all optional features that will most likely be turned off by default, people will simply never turn them on, unless they themselves have a desire to lessen their smartphone use.

Updates are easily the biggest problem facing the Android ecosystem, and Google is working hard to fix that. Project Treble has proven that it's capable of making updates easier, and now Google is stepping up requirements for OEMs when it comes to security patches.Every little step in this department is a welcome one. It's not yet clear what, exactly, the requirements entail, but hopefully, it's a strict and hard requirement to publish every monthly security update.

There's another Haiku monthly activity report, for April, and as always, there's some interesting changes, bugfixes, and improvements in there. The biggest improvement?Let's start with the most exciting developments this month: Korli started work on a 32/64 bit hybrid. The idea is to run a 64bit system, but allow 32bit applications to run on it. While we are just at the very first steps, it is a good thing that this is being worked on, as it will allow us to move more smoothly towards 64bit support.In addition, the first three Google Summer of Code progress reports have been posted, for the SDHCI MMC driver, the TrackGit project, and XFS support.

Continuing our past work, Firefox 60 brings further important improvements to security sandboxing on Linux, making it harder for attackers that find security bugs in the browser to escalate those into attacks against the rest of the system.The most important change is that content processes - which render Web pages and execute JavaScript - are no longer allowed to directly connect to the Internet, or connect to most local services accessed with Unix-domain sockets (for example, PulseAudio).This means that content processes have to follow any network access restrictions Firefox imposes - for example, if the browser has been set up to use a proxy server, connecting directly to the internet is no longer possible. But more important are the restrictions on connections to local services: they often assume that anything connecting to them has the full authority of the user running it, and either allow it to ask for arbitrary code to run, or aren't careful about preventing that. Normally that's not a security problem because the client could just run that code itself, but if it's a sandboxed Firefox process, that could have meant a sandbox escape.

Last year, we outlined Google's commitment to comply with Europe's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), across all of the services we provide in the European Union. We've been working on our compliance efforts for over eighteen months, and ahead of the new law coming into effect, here's an update on some of the key steps we've taken.A few insights into how Google will handle the data of EU citizens.

Duarte, along with seven other designers at Google, was speaking to about a dozen reporters about what's next for Material Design, Google's system for creating software design. Maybe it's the (lapsed) Lutheran in me, but calling the original Material Design a "gospel" struck a chord. It was religiously adhered to by the Android faithful ever since it launched. Apps that followed Material Design were holy; apps that didn't were anathema. I can't count the number of times I saw an app get dismissed by the Android community because it wasn't updated for Material Design.And to extend the metaphor (yes, please grant me an indulgence on this), it was also a very restrictive doctrine. The tools it offered helped make many Android apps feel consistent, but it also stripped away too much differentiation between them. They all ended up feeling the same. More importantly, many app makers didn't want to give up their brand to Material Design. It made too many apps look and feel identical.Simply put, people were being too dogmatic about how Material Design apps should look.I have a long posting history at OSNews talking about how I value consistency in GUI design, because the more consistent my UI, the less I have to think about using said UI. To me, the strictness of Material Design is a feature, not a bug - and seeing its designers consider it the other way around has me shaking my head. I don't give a rat's butt about "brands" and "differentiation" - I just want to use my damn software with as little effort as possible.Less auteur app design, more standard controls and views.I've been using an iPhone X since it came out, and the utter lack of consistency between iOS applications remains a stumbling block to me to this day. It'd be a shame if Material Design went down the same dark path.