OSnews

How much does adding somewhat frivolous animations to an OS matter? I'm not sure, but I do know that users of Windows will be very vocal as Microsoft experiments with adding them to Windows 10.In Windows 10 Redstone 5 (due fall 2018) I expect Microsoft to continue to refine, improve, and make more consistent UI elements in Windows 10. That includes adding more animations to simple behaviors like the Action Center, but I can already see push back.I know that especially among the kind of people who read OSNews, "animations" in UI design tends to be a very dirty word. I very much do not belong to that group of people, since I adore proper, well-thought out use of animations in UI design, such as the fun little touches in Material Design, the pivots and slides in Windows Phone's Metro, and yes, the brand new flourishes in Microsoft's Fluent Design, which is currently making its way to Windows 10 users all around the world.I'm fine with being in the minority here on this one - to each their own.

FFmpeg 4.0 has been released, and it's a major one. Since this particular subject matter - and its changelog - are way beyond the scope of my capabilities, I'll just leave you with the generic description of the project (in case you live under a rock).FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge. No matter if they were designed by some standards committee, the community or a corporation. It is also highly portable: FFmpeg compiles, runs, and passes our testing infrastructure FATE across Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, the BSDs, Solaris, etc. under a wide variety of build environments, machine architectures, and configurations.

The Verge has a big exclusive - Google has managed to corral carriers into supporting something called the "Universal Profile for Rich Communication Services", or Chat, which basically replaces SMS in every Android phone.top-tier Android phone can cost upwards of a thousand dollars, and for that money, you'll get some amazing features. It will have a stellar screen, top-flight camera, gobs of storage, and an absolutely atrocious texting experience.Most people in the world, whether they buy an iPhone or an Android phone, dump all the preinstalled chat applications into a junk folder, install WhatsApp or WeChat (or Telegram in repressive dictatorships like Russia and Iran), and forget this American obsession with iMessage vs. Google's 238437 chat apps even exists.That being said.Now, the company is doing something different. Instead of bringing a better app to the table, it's trying to change the rules of the texting game, on a global scale. Google has been quietly corralling every major cellphone carrier on the planet into adopting technology to replace SMS. It's going to be called "Chat", and it's based on a standard called the "Universal Profile for Rich Communication Services". SMS is the default that everybody has to fall back to, and so Google's goal is to make that default texting experience on an Android phone as good as other modern messaging apps.Sounds like something they should've done ten years ago, but as you dive further into the details, a whole bunch of huge red flags pop up:But remember, Chat is a carrier-based service, not a Google service. It's just "Chat", not "Google Chat". In a sign of its strategic importance to Google, the company has spearheaded development on the new standard, so that every carrier's Chat services will be interoperable. But, like SMS, Chat won't be end-to-end encrypted, and it will follow the same legal intercept standards. In other words: it won't be as secure as iMessage or Signal.In the current political and societal climate, the lack of end-to-end encryption is absolutely bonkers. Obviously, there's no encryption because carriers (and our governments) want to snoop on our communications, but with end-to-end encrypted options readily available, why even bother going 2-3 years back in time?If you're still trying to wrap your head around the idea that Google won't have a standalone consumer chat app, well, so am I. "The fundamental thesis behind the RCS protocol is it's a carrier service," Sabharwal says. That means that the carriers will be the final arbiters of what Chat can and can't do - and whether it will be successful. The good news is that Google appears to have herded all the carrier cats into a box where their Chat services will actually be interoperable.Isn't the point to get away from under carrier control, not slide back under it?I just don't see how such an archaic service like this will ever gain any traction, when most of the world has already settled on its chat service, mostly dictated by what your friends and family uses. Without end-to-end encryption and while under carrier control, this service seems like a massive step backward - not forward.

Morph.Zone reports:Dan Wood of kookytech.net has published a new MorphOS video that shows some of the new features of MorphOS 3.10 and demonstrates how to change the look of MorphOS in two easy to follow steps.Also the lastest issue of Amiga print magazine Amiga Future has a review of MorphOS 3.10 (reading excerpt).

The headline results for the new processors are that they offer more performance than AMDâs first generation of Ryzen, use the same socket, are offered at similar prices, are competitive with the competition, and come bundled with some nice coolers. While the new Ryzen 2000-series processors are not enough to cause anyone that has already invested in Ryzen 1000-series to upgrade, AMD is offering a very attractive proposition to anyone two-to-three generations (or more) behind to upgrade into a high performance system.AMD's strong run in processors continues.

Look at this screenshot of MacPaint from the mid-1980s. Now look at this screenshot of a current version of Microsoft Excel for Mac. Finally, consider just how different the two applications actually are. The former is a 30-year-old black and white first party application for painting while the latter is a current and unabashedly third party application for creating spreadsheets. Yet despite having been created in very different decades for very different purposes by very different companies, these two very different applications still seem a part of the same thread. Anyone with experience in one could easily find some familiarity in the other, and while the creators of the Macintosh set out to build a truly consistent experience, there is only one significant piece of UX that these two mostly disparate applications share - the menu bar.The lack of a menu bar in (most) touch applications is really what sets them apart from regular, mouse-based applications. It makes it virtually impossible to add more complex functionality without resorting to first-run onboarding experiences (terrible) or undiscoverable gestures (terrible). While menus would work just fine on devices with larger screens such as tablets and touch laptops - I use touch menus on my Surface Pro 4 all the time and they work flawlessly - the real estate they take up is too precious on smartphones.If touch really wants to become a first-class citizen among the mouse and keyboard, developers need to let go of their fear of menus. Especially for more complex, productivity-oriented touch applications on tablets and touch laptops, menus are a perfectly fine UI element. Without them, touch applications will never catch up to their mouse counterparts.

Microsoft has released details on Azure Sphere, their bid to make IoT devices secure by default:First is a new class of microcontrollers (MCUs) that supports seven critical hardware features that Microsoft says are a necessary foundation to build secure systems. These include support for unforgeable encryption keys protected by hardware, the ability to update system software, and hardware-enforced compartmentalization between software components. Microsoft has some track record in building such systems, in particular with the Xbox, which is designed to have tamper-proof hardware that's securely updatable.[...]Second is a new operating system: Azure Sphere OS. The company says this OS combines a custom Linux kernel with Windows-inspired security features, providing a secure platform that scales down to smaller systems than Windows can reach. Application code is run within containers to provide isolation, and Microsoft will have a custom security monitor running beneath the Linux kernel to protect system integrity and arbitrate access to critical resources.The third part is Azure Sphere Security Service, a cloud service that will detect security issues (by recognizing failures and errors on devices), act as a source of software updates, and mediate secure communications between devices and to the cloud.The Microsoft-made microcontroller designs will be available to manufacturers under royalty-free licenses.Additionally, the big news is Microsoft's own Linux distribution, a first for the company. They do have a custom Linux build they us in-house for Azure's networking stack, but that isn't available outside of the company.

But a laptop is more than just a video playback machine. For myself and millions of others, it's the primary tool for earning a living. We use these machines to read, write, remember, create, connect, and communicate. And in most of these other applications, a 16:9 screen of 13 to 15 inches in size just feels like a poor fit.As long as I can easily open more than one document side by side, any aspect ratio gets my blessing. I don't mind black bars on video, especially since today's screens have pretty good black levels, so they're hardly distracting. Still, I'm glad more and more laptop makers are starting to see the benefit in 3:2-like displays.

Honestly, I don't think the Atari 2600 BASIC has ever had a fair review. It's pretty much reviled as a horrible program, a horrible programming environment and practically useless. But I think that's selling it short. Yes, it's bad (and I'll get to that in a bit), but in using it for the past few days, there are some impressive features on a system where the RAM can't hold a full Tweet and half the CPU time is spent Racing The Beam. I'll get the bad out of the way first.Input comes from the Atari Keypads, dual 12-button keypads. If that weren't bad enough, I'm using my keyboard as an emulated pair of Atari Keypads, where I have to keep this image open at all times.Okay, here's how this works.An older story - it's from 2015 - but fascinating nonetheless.

It looked like Windows 10 build 17133 was going to be blessed as the 1803 update, but that plan has been derailed. Though the build was pushed out to Windows Insiders on the release preview ring - an action that, in the past, has indicated that a build is production ready - it turns out that it had a bug causing blue screens of death.Microsoft could likely have addressed the situation with an incremental update, but for whatever reason, it didn't. Instead, we have a new build, 17134. This build is identical to 17133 except that it fixes the particular crashing issue. Fast ring Insiders have the build now, and it should trickle out to Slow ring and Release Preview ring shortly. If all goes well, the build will then make its way out to regular Windows users on the stable release channel.Microsoft's various rings for Windows testing seem to be really paying off. They give testers a lot of flexibility in just how bleeding edge they wish to be, and they make it very easy to change between the various levels, while also providing people like me - who really don't have the time to actively test and report bugs - a safe and easy way to get big updates a few weeks before it hits mainstream.So basically what Linux distributions have been doing for two decades.

The company is announcing two specific TDT features. The first is "Advanced Memory Scanning." In an effort to evade file-based anti-virus software, certain kinds of malware refrain from writing anything to disk. This can have downsides for the malware - it can't persistently infect a machine and, instead, has to reinfect the machine each time it is rebooted - but makes it harder to spot and analyze. To counter this, anti-malware software can scan system memory to look for anything untoward. This, however, comes at a performance cost, with Intel claiming it can cause processor loads of as much as 20 percent.This is where Advanced Memory Scanning comes into effect: instead of using the CPU to scan through memory for any telltale malware signatures, the task is offloaded to the integrated GPU. In typical desktop applications, the GPU sits there only lightly loaded, with abundant unused processing capacity. Intel says that moving the memory scanning to the GPU cuts the processor load to about two percent.

It was supposed to be the laptop that saved the world.In late 2005, tech visionary and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte pulled the cloth cover off a small green computer with a bright yellow crank. The device was the first working prototype for Negroponte's new nonprofit One Laptop Per Child, dubbed "the green machine" or simply "the $100 laptop". And it was like nothing that Negroponte's audience - at either his panel at a UN-sponsored tech summit in Tunis, or around the globe - had ever seen.The OLPC was all the rage and hype for a few years back then, but it never materialised. Still, while not nearly the same thing, cheap mobile phones and smartphones have played a somewhat similar role.

ReactOS 0.4.8 has been released, and its biggest new feature is experimental support for NT6+ applications.With software specifically leaving NT5 behind, ReactOS is expanding its target to support NT6+ (Vista, Windows 8, Windows 10) software. Colin, Giannis and Mark are creating the needed logic in NTDLL and LDR for this purpose. Giannis has finished the side-by-side support and the implicit activation context, Colin has changed Kernel32 to accept software made for NT6+, and Mark keeps working on the shim compatibility layer. Although in a really greenish and experimental state, the new additions in 0.4.8 should start helping several software pieces created for Vista and upwards to start working in ReactOS. Microsoft coined the term backwards compatibility, ReactOS the forward compatibility one.There's tons of other improvements, as well.

On the right you can see photos of a Coolpad Modena 2, which was built around MediaTek's MT6735P SoC (System on a chip). In case you are wondering why we're not showing a picture with postmarketOS running on it: we can't! This is because the vendor decided to ship it with a closed down bootloader, which prevents users from running custom kernels.The postmarketOS team details how they are cracking open the bootloader and the cellular modem firmware on MediaTek-based devices.

It's perplexing that this flagship feature of macOS 10.13.4 feels so incomplete. Sure, we've come a long way since enthusiasts were hacking it together with help from online forums, but more work needs to be done to ensure a consistent experience. We wouldn't advise going out and buying an enclosure just yet, but we nevertheless see reasons in the performance gains to be hopeful that we could recommend it at some point in the future.It seems strange to me that switching GPUs - even external ones - is such an arduous process. It seems this process is more seemless on Windows. On macOS it seems each and every applications needs to be modified to add support for it, whereas on Windows, the operating system itself takes care of it.

64kB intros, 64k for short, are like demos but with an added arbitrary limitation on the size: they must fit entirely within a single binary file of no more than 65536 bytes. No extra assets, no network, no extra libraries: the usual rule is that it should run on a freshly installed Windows PC with up to date drivers.This is crazy.

Trevor Dickinson of A-EON Technology compares the performance of the newly released game Tower57 on various AmigaOne configurations running AmigaOS 4.1 and PowerPC Macs running MorphOS:It's probably no surprise that the AmigaOne X5000/20 comes out on top by quite a margin. The AmigaOne X1000 was no slowcoach either and pushed the G5 PowerMac into third place in my tests. It was also really good to see the AmigaOne A1222 giving the 2.5 Ghz PowerMac a run for its money. However, the really good news is that all of the Amiga Next-generation machines compared favourably with the commercial Steam release and were all very playable.I'm quite surprised by the performance of MorphOS 3.10 on my PowerBook G4 1.33Ghz - even on its paltry 512MB RAM (upgraded yesterday to 2GB). The browser is quite worrisome due to WebKit not being built anymore for PowerPC/big endian so it's quite slow, but everything else is quite smooth. I'm planning on upgrading the mechanical hard drive to an SSD for an additional little boost, but it's nice to see that such old machines can be revived with something other than a custom Linux installation.

Cloudflare, which operates a content delivery network it also uses to provide DDoS protection services for websites, is in the middle of a push to vastly expand its global data center network. CDNs are usually made up of small-footprint nodes, but those nodes need to be in many places around the world.As it expands, the company is making a big bet on ARM, the emerging alternative to Intelâs x86 processor architecture, which has dominated the data center market for decades.The money quote from CloudFlare's CEO:"We think we're now at a point where we can go one hundred percent to ARM. In our analysis, we found that even if Intel gave us the chips for free, it would still make sense to switch to ARM, because the power efficiency is so much better."Intel and AMD ought to be worried about the future. Very worried. If I were them, I'd start work on serious ARM processors - because they're already missing out on mobile, and they're about to start missing out on desktops and servers, too.

Today marks the initial start of AMD's pre-sale of 2nd Generation Ryzen processors. The full launch is set for April 19th, which is when reviews and performance numbers will be officially available, but today we are able to tell you a bit about the processors that are coming, as well as some pictures, and link readers to where they can pre-order. We're not overly fond of manufacturers offering pre-orders before revealing performance numbers, as with the Threadripper launch last year, however we can at least discuss the details of each part.Good to see AMD continue improving Ryzen.

Google has long struggled with how best to get dozens of Android smartphone manufacturers - and hundreds of carriers - to regularly push out security-focused software updates. But when one German security firm looked under the hood of hundreds of Android phones, it found a troubling new wrinkle: Not only do many Android phone vendors fail to make patches available to their users, or delay their release for months; they sometimes also tell users their phone's firmware is fully up to date, even while they've secretly skipped patches.On Friday at the Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam, researchers Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell of the firm Security Research Labs plan to present the results of two years of reverse-engineering hundreds of Android phones' operating system code, painstakingly checking if each device actually contained the security patches indicated in its settings. They found what they call a "patch gap": In many cases, certain vendors' phones would tell users that they had all of Android's security patches up to a certain date, while in reality missing as many as a dozen patches from that period - leaving phones vulnerable to a broad collection of known hacking techniques.Android is a mess.

Growing up in the era of the Nintendo Entertainment System, I always wanted to create my own NES game. I scribbled ideas in notebooks, mapped out levels on graph paper and spent countless hours composing my own MIDI-based soundtracks to games that didn't exist. These ideas were lost to time until 2018, until I watched Joe Granato's documentary, The New 8-bit Heroes, about his quest to create the game of his childhood dreams. Now, with the successfully funded Kickstarter for his NESMaker software, the project may help to simplify the creation of homebrew NES games. Joe isn't the first one to do this, however, as homebrew has a long and storied history. Today's Tedium seeks to explore this corner of NES history and the creation of NES games over 20 years after the end of the system's commercial life.

Google has posted the beginnings of a documentation project around their microkernel based OS, Fuchsia. From the readme: This document is a collection of articles describing the Fuchsia operating system, organized around particular subsystems. Sections will be populated over time.

The HP 9000 Series of computers spanned almost three decades and very diverse platforms of Unix computers. Both RISC and Unix, with a longer history, were developed into coherent products during the 1980s, moving from academia via industrial R&D to productization at a time when much computing was still done on mainframes, minicomputers and time-sharing machines such as DEC PDP, VAX, IBM AS/400 and System/360.Paul Weissmann tells the story of the development and history of the HP9000.

The Windows File Manager lives again and runs on all currently supported version of Windows, including Windows 10. I welcome your thoughts, comments and suggestions.Open source under an MIT-license, and runs on modern versions of Windows. This is certainly a blast from the past.

I first gave up on Windows Phone back in December 2014. Microsoft's mobile platform was being left behind, and I was tired of not getting access to the apps everyone else was using. It took Microsoft a few years to finally admit Windows Phone is dead, and the company is no longer planning to release any new hardware running its mobile OS or update it with any features. I recently switched on an old Windows Phone to create a silly April Fools' joke about returning to using it as my daily device, and then it hit me: I really miss Windows Phone.He's not alone. I loved the way Windows Phone worked and felt, but sadly, it just didn't have the applications, and Microsoft's various transitions really hurt the platform too. Too bad - it was innovative and fresh.

You have installed MorphOS to a compatible machine, but... now what? You could always go and install a pre-configured package like Chrysalis, but you would end up with a system configured for someone else's taste and you still wouldn't know how to actually use the operating system. If you are in this situation and would like to learn how MorphOS works, this is a tutorial for you! The tutorial will guide you through the things you should do and notice after a fresh install, with practical examples from basic configuration options to installing new software. It won't cover all the details and is just an opinion on how to proceed, but it should give you some knowledge how to continue on your own and make your own decisions.I bought a used PowerBook last weekend - a 17" PowerBook G4 1.33Ghz with 512MB RAM with 2GB on the way - specifically for MorphOS and its recent 3.10 release, and I'm having a total blast. This guide is a great first stop after installing MorphOS, as is the accompanying tips and tricks article. Amiga-like operating systems have some very unique paradigms and ways of doing things, and articles like these really ease you into them, while offering a first few glimpses into the absolutely insane amount of customization options they offer.

Intel first launched its 8th-generation branding last year. In the mobile space, we had the U-series Kaby Lake-R: four-core, eight-thread chips running in a 15W power envelope. On the desktop, we had Coffee Lake: six-core, 12-thread chips. In both cases, the processor lineup was limited: six different chips for the desktop, four for mobile.Those mobile processors were joined earlier this year by Kaby Lake-G: four-core, eight-thread processors with a discrete AMD GPU on the same package as the processor.Today, Intel has vastly expanded the 8th generation lineup, with 11 new mobile chips and nine new desktop processors, along with new 300-series chipsets.Intel's naming scheme is a bit of a mess, isn't it? At this point I really have no idea what is what without consulting charts and tables. Can all the bright minds at Intel really not devise a more sensible naming scheme?

At its launch back in 2010, the iPad was heavily criticized for being a big iPhone. iOS 11 and the iPad Pro proved that wasn't the case. Things further diverged with the introduction of the iPhone X, which has led to some confusion for anyone who regularly uses an iPad. I've been using an iPhone X and iPad Pro together for nearly six months now, and I often feel lost when moving back and forth between the devices - one with a physical home button, the other with webOS-like gestures. The result is a vastly different user experience, even though they run the same version of iOS on large rectangles of glass.I also use both an iPhone X and an iPad Pro 12.9", and I actually don't see this as a problem at all. The two devices are vastly different, and I use them in completely different ways - one as a smartphone, the other as a laptop - so it only makes sense to use them differently. Forcing the iPad into the same gestures and UI as the iPhone only leaves it hamstrung; it restricts the iPad into being an oversized iPhone, while what I want is for the iPad to gain more and more features from classic operating systems like macOS and Windows.

While it's true Steam Machines aren't exactly flying off the shelves, our reasons for striving towards a competitive and open gaming platform haven't significantly changed. We're still working hard on making Linux operating systems a great place for gaming and applications. We think it will ultimately result in a better experience for developers and customers alike, including those not on Steam.Through the Steam Machine initiative, we've learned quite a bit about the state of the Linux ecosystem for real-world game developers out there. We've taken a lot of feedback and have been heads-down on addressing the shortcomings we observed. We think an important part of that effort is our ongoing investment in making Vulkan a competitive and well-supported graphics API, as well as making sure it has first-class support on Linux platforms.Valve has done a lot for Linux gaming, and it's good to hear they pledge to continue doing so.

XScale is a microarchitecture for central processing units initially designed by Intel implementing the ARM architecture (version 5) instruction set. XScale comprises several distinct families: IXP, IXC, IOP, PXA and CE (see more below), with some later models designed as SoCs. Intel sold the PXA family to Marvell Technology Group in June 2006. Marvell then extended the brand to include processors with other microarchitectures, like ARM's Cortex.With the smartphone and tablet revolution dominated by ARM, with Windows and Apple moving to ARM, we can probably say that, with the magical superpower of hindsight, Intel selling its XScale business to Marvell will probably go down as one of the biggest blunders in technology history.The entire computing world is slowly moving to ARM - first smartphones, then tablets, now laptops, soon surely servers and desktops - leaving Intel (and AMD, for that matter) in a terrible position.

We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 6.3. This is our 44th release. We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of more than twenty years with only two remote holes in the default install.As in our previous releases, 6.3 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system.

Apple Inc. is planning to use its own chips in Mac computers beginning as early as 2020, replacing processors from Intel Corp., according to people familiar with the plans.The initiative, code named Kalamata, is still in the early developmental stages, but comes as part of a larger strategy to make all of Apple's devices - including Macs, iPhones, and iPads - work more similarly and seamlessly together, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. The project, which executives have approved, will likely result in a multi-step transition.This shouldn't be at all surprising. Apple's own Ax chips are quite amazing, but still limited in how far they can be pushed because of the small form factors they're being used in. On top of that, everything seems to be pointing towards the latest Windows-on-ARM devices having multiple-day battery life, with which Intel chips simply can't compete. It makes 100% sense for Apple to put its own processors inside Macs.

Objective-C is conceptually similar to BOOPSI - it's generally an add-on to the C programming language. In both Obj-C and BOOPSI calling a method implies calling a dispatcher function that resolves the actual method to call and invokes it. With the addition of reference counting to BOOPSI in MorphOS, both follow the same memory management principles.The main difference comes from the fact that BOOPSI classes need to be manually created with functions being manually assigned their IDs and let's not even start on the extra hassle of having to write the code for the dispatchers. This made programmers reluctant to add new classes in their applications, in turn making the overall code less object oriented.Here's where Objective-C fills in.Meanwhile, the MorphOS team has also released an early beta of the operating system's future default email client, Iris. It uses many of the new features introduced in MorphOS 3.10, and support IMAP, OAth2 for Gmail and Outlook, and much more.

Ars Technica's long-running series on the history of the Amiga continues, with part 12 published today. As always - required reading.The year 2000, which once seemed so impossibly futuristic, had finally arrived. Bill McEwen, president of the new Amiga Inc., celebrated with a press release telling the world why he had bought the subsidiary from Gateway Computers."Gateway purchased Amiga because of Patents; we purchased Amiga because of the People." It was a bold statement, the first of many that would come from the fledgling company. Amiga Inc. now owned the name, trademark, logos, all existing inventory (there were still a few Escom-era A1200s and A4000s left), the Amiga OS, and a permanent license to all Amiga-related patents. They had also inherited Jim Collas' dream of a revolutionary new Amiga device, but none of the talent and resources that Gateway had been able to bring to bear.The Amiga world is one of the strangest subcultures in technology. I can't believe it's still going sort-of strong, and in various flavours even.

macOS 10.13.4, released to the public yesterday afternoon, introduces official support for eGPUs (external graphics processors) on Thunderbolt 3 Macs. Alongside the release, Apple has published a detailed support document that outlines how eGPU support works and provides graphic card and chassis recommendations for use with your Mac.External GPUs seem like an incredibly clunky solution to a problem I doubt many people actually have. If your workload relies heavily on GPU power, you're probably not using Apple laptops anyway.

The following article is a historical look at the era that spawned the first raytracers for home computers, a predecessor to Blender among them. It's possible thanks to the fact, that, for the first time, the program and source code of said predecessor are publicly available.Today Blender is one of the industry leaders, but it started quite small, three decades ago. If you ever wondered when and where some of the most iconic Blender conventions like "right-click select" or 3D cursor originated, it's then, in the Amiga era, even before Blender was born.

After starting with Ubuntu, Microsoft has added a number of Linux distributions to its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) Linux runtime environment. A Windows machine can simultaneously offer an Ubuntu, SUSE, Debian, and Kali "personality," providing users with a choice of the different distributions' preferences and package management.But if your distribution isn't yet available or if you want a Linux installation that's customized just the way you like it, there's now an answer: Microsoft has an open source tool for building your own Linux package. The tool is aimed at two groups: distribution owners (so they can produce a bundle to ship through the Microsoft Store) and developers (so they can create custom distributions and sideload them onto their development systems).Neat.

A US federal court has overturned the jury's decision in favour of Google from 2016.Google's use of Java shortcuts to develop Android went too far and was a violation of Oracle's copyrights, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled Tuesday. The case - first filed in 2010 - was remanded to a federal court in California to determine how much the Alphabet Inc. unit should pay. Oracle had been seeking $8.8 billion, though that number could grow. Google expressed disappointment and said it's considering its next steps in the case.The dispute, which could have far-reaching implications for the entire software industry, has divided Silicon Valley for years between those who develop the code that makes software steps function and those who develop software programs and say their "fair use" of the code is an exception to copyright law."It's a momentous decision on the issue of fair use," lawyer Mark Schonfeld of Burns & Levinson in Boston, who's been following the case and isn't involved. "It is very, very important for the software industry. I think it's going to go to the Supreme Court because the Federal Circuit has made a very controversial decision."This could be one of the absolute worst legal decisions in technology history.

New to Android Studio 3.1 is a C++ performance profiler to help troubleshoot performance bottlenecks in your app code. For those of you with a Room or SQLite database in their your app, we added better code editor support to aid in your SQL table and query creation statements. We also added better lint support for your Kotlin code, and accelerated your testing with an updated Android Emulator with Quick Boot.

The MorphOS development team is proud to announce the immediate availability of MorphOS 3.10, which represents one of the biggest updates in its history yet. This brand new version introduces support for AmigaOne X5000 systems as well as A-EON X5000 mainboards, and it greatly expands the general hardware compatibility by adding numerous new drivers for graphics cards, scanners, network cards, SATA controllers, and USB audio devices.Furthermore, MorphOS 3.10 brings Flow Studio, which is an integrated development environment that offers features such as a built-in source level debugger and seamless MorphOS shell access.In addition to many bug fixes and general performance improvements, MorphOS 3.10 also provides varied user interface and usability improvements. This release includes modern themes, new fonts, and support for vector graphics, such as SVG icons, as well as time zones via Coordinated Universal Time.This is a huge update, and it contains so many improvements I don't even know where to start. The massive list of hardware compatibility improvements is incredibly welcome, as are the brand new themes which make MorphOS look a bit less dated. Be sure to read the full, detailed list of changes.This is definitely the release that finally pushed me to get a PowerBook G4 to run MorphOS on (preferably the 17" 1.67Ghz with DDR2), since this release really reaffirms that the team is 100% dedicated to the operating system. I can't wait to go used PowerBook shopping this week.

Even though Android is open source, virtually every Android device sold outside of China contains a chunk of closed code from Google in the form of Google Play Services and the GApps. These two deeply related software packages turn a rather stale mobile operating system into the full-on Google Android most of us know. There aren't a whole lot of Android users (again, outside of China) who aren't using these.Since these packages aren't open source, custom Android ROMs ship without them; you have to sideload them manually after installing your ROM image. Luckily for us, Google has always allowed this, but it's always been a bit tenuous. It's about to get a whole lot more tenuous, since Google appears to be blocking GApps from running on uncertified Android devices - but thankfully, they're allowing custom ROM users to register their Android device to get an exception.Earlier this week, we received an anonymous tip from a person claiming to be within the industry. This person, who said they worked for an OEM/ODM, notified us that Google has started entirely locking out newly built firmware from accessing Gapps. This change apparently went into effect March 16th and affects any software builds made after this date (Google Play Services checks ro.build.fingerprint for the build date apparently).You can register your device to get an exception, and you can register up to 100 devices per user - which should be enough for virtually everyone, I assume.

I stumbled upon an absolute gem of a website over the weekend - Sophie Haskins' Pizza Box Computer. On this site, Haskins details a number of ancient non-x86 workstations. All of the posts on the site are fun and interesting reads, so let's pick one of her machines - a DEC Multia running Windows NT for Alpha - The Multia was an attempt by Digital to make a lower-cost Alpha workstation for running Windows NT. There were Alpha and Intel Pentium models, and they use a lot of off-the-shelf PC components rather than custom Digital ones (hence its later name, the "Universal Desktop Box"). It's quite tiny - so much so that it has laptop PCMCIA slots for expansion!The latest post details getting Windows NT up and running on the Multia, and is certainly worth a read - like the rest of the site.

Feature updates are the bigger updates to Windows 10, released twice a year, that are probably more akin to the service packs of yore than regular updates or full releases. Microsoft is improving the process of installing these larger updates.The Windows Fundamentals team focuses on the underlying technologies that are used to install feature updates as well as a host of other things. We've heard your feedback about the lengthy amount of time your PC is unusable during a feature update installation, and we've been working on ways to decrease this time. Today, I am excited to share more details about the improvements we've made to the feature update experience.For as much as Windows has problems, I really like that Microsoft is working on improving things like this. It would be very easy for them to set low-level work like this aside in favour of flashy stuff that's easy to show off in an ad blurb, so I appreciate the effort put in addressing less sexy problems like this.A faster, less invasive update process is always welcome.

LineageOS is an operating system for everyone: from the average user to the advanced developer. While users have a giant playground in their hands with many customization options, we also want to make LineageOS a fun place for developers. The standards for official builds help ensure developers that their app will not end up in a bad state because of inappropriate Android API changes or broken hardware support, but this is not enough for us; we're announcing some new APIs that will allow your apps to do more when they're running on a LineageOS-powered device.The Lineage platform SDK (LineageSDK for short) is a powerful resource that allows us to both keep our features out of the core Android frameworks (for better security and easier bringup processes) and expose some extra functionality to app developers.We'll have to wait and see if developers are willing to add some code to their Android applications for the features in this SDK.

After days of silence, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has responded to the controversy over the 2014 leak of private Facebook user data to a firm that went on to do political consulting work for the Donald Trump campaign in 2016.Cambridge Analytica got the data by paying a psychology professor, Aleksandr Kogan, to create a Facebook personality quiz that harvested data not only about its own users but also about users' friends. Kogan amassed data from around 50 million users and turned it over to Cambridge.Zuckerberg says that when Facebook learned about this transfer in 2015, it got Kogan and Cambridge to certify that they had deleted the data. But media reports this weekend suggested that Cambridge had lied and retained the data throughout the 2016 presidential campaign.This whole thing should make everyone think twice about how - and if - they should keep using Facebook. I've personally always been incredibly careful about what data I put on Facebook and I've rarely - if ever - used any Facebook 'apps', but in the end, you don't even need to feed Facebook any data for them to figure out who you are and what you're interested in. It's actually remarkably easy to extrapolate a whole lot about you from simple things like the times you're online, or which sites with Facebook social trackers you visit, and so on.I trust Google with such forms of data, but not Facebook. If it wasn't for my friends, I'd delete my Facebook account in a heartbeat. My hope is that this story - which has certainly permeated beyond tech media into the mainstream media - will push more and more of the people around me to consider leaving Facebook.

Pretty big news out of LG - they're releasing their variant of webOS - the TV and smartwatch one - as open source.webOS is a web-centric and usability-focused software platform for smart devices. The operating system has constantly evolved, passing through its journey from Palm to HP, and most recently to LG Electronics. Now, we are releasing webOS as an open source project, named webOS Open Source Edition (OSE).This marks the second time webOS has been released as open source. It's released under the Apache License, version 2, and there's instructions for getting it to run on a Raspberry Pi 3.We are a truly open project. You will see us working in the open like any community member, so you can see what we're doing in real time. We operate using typical open practices: the Project uses the Apache 2.0 license, is hosted on GitHub, and accepts contributions via a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) approach. As the community grows and individuals and organizations emerge who make significant contributions, it is our intention to invite them into the governance of the Project.It seems like a truly open project, but at the same time, one has to wonder what this means for webOS' commercial future at LG. The cold and harsh truth is that moves like this generally mean the end of commercial viability, not the beginning. This isn't necessarily a problem though - at least this move ensures the code and operating system will continue to exist.

Can two programmers who are accustomed to making games for modern computers with gigabytes of RAM and high-color HD displays port one of their games to MS-DOS? Neither of us had any experience developing on such old hardware, but since working within artificially limited systems is something of a Zachtronics game design specialty, we felt compelled to try!

For Windows Insiders in the Skip Ahead ring, we will begin testing a change where links clicked on within the Windows Mail app will open in Microsoft Edge, which provides the best, most secure and consistent experience on Windows 10 and across your devices. With built-in features for reading, note-taking, Cortana integration, and easy access to services such as SharePoint and OneDrive, Microsoft Edge enables you to be more productive, organized and creative without sacrificing your battery life or security.I'm one of those weird people who actually really like the default Windows 10 Mail application, but if this absolutely desperate, user-hostile move - which ignores any default browser setting - makes it into any definitive Windows 10 release, I won't be able to use it anymore.As always, we look forward to feedback from our WIP community.Oh you'll get something to look forward to alright.

If you blink during Appleâs latest iPhone ad, you might miss a weird little animation bug. Itâs right at the end of a slickly produced commercial, where the text from an iMessage escapes the animated bubble itâs supposed to stay inside. Itâs a minor issue and easy to brush off, but the fact itâs captured in such a high profile ad just further highlights Appleâs many bugs in iOS 11.The fact Apple's marketing department signed off on this ad with such a bug in it is baffling.

As our technology and partnerships have evolved, so have our users. In 2017, one out of three new Android Wear watch owners also used an iPhone. So as the watch industry gears up for another Baselworld next week, weâre announcing a new name that better reflects our technology, vision, and most important of all - the people who wear our watches. Weâre now Wear OS by Google, a wearables operating system for everyone.If a company changes the name of one of its operating system, but nobody cares - has the name really been changed?