From the company’s joint press release (at either Apple’s or Qualcomm’s website): Qualcomm and Apple today announced an agreement to dismiss all litigation between the two companies worldwide. The settlement includes a payment from Apple to Qualcomm. The companies also have reached a six-year license agreement, effective as of April 1, 2019, including a two-year option to extend, and a multiyear chipset supply agreement. And just like that, one of the possibly most expensive lawsuits in technology is a thing of the past.
It’s no secret that Google Chrome is the world’s most popular browser, and while a lot of that might be owed to its quality, some believe that Google intentionally sabotaged competing browsers in order to grow in popularity. A former Mozilla executive has lashed out at the Mountain View company for repeatedly and continuously finding less-than-desirable ways to promote its own browser. Jonathan Nightingale posted a series of tweets over the weekend, detailing some of the events that took place between Google and Mozilla over the years. Nightingale starts by pointing out that Google typically played nice with Mozilla before Chrome was a thing, but things turned sour once Google’s browser launched. While the company kept trying to convince Mozilla that both organizations were on the same side, things would often break in Firefox for no real reason. This is really not that surprising. The only reason Google plays nice with Mozilla is the same reason Microsoft invested in Apple in the late ’90s and kept its products available on Mac OS despite the fact the Mac was basically dead: they need an antitrust lightning rod.
The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) will investigate whether Apple abuses the position it has attained with its App Store. ACM will do so following indications that ACM has received from other app providers over the course of its market study into app stores. That market study has been published today. Henk Don, Member of the Board of ACM, explains: ‘To a large degree, app providers depend on Apple and Google for offering apps to users. In the market study, ACM has received indications from app providers, which seem to indicate that Apple abuses its position in the App Store. That is why ACM sees sufficient reason for launching a follow-up investigation, on the basis of competition law.’ This will be a long, protracted legal battle – in multiple European countries.
9to5Mac has a long list of features that are coming to iOS 10.3. The biggest change is definitely multiwindow on the iPad, which iOS sorely needs. There are many changes coming to iPad with iOS 13, including the ability for apps to have multiple windows. Each window will also be able to contain sheets that are initially attached to a portion of the screen, but can be detached with a drag gesture, becoming a card that can be moved around freely, similar to what an open-source project called “PanelKit” could do. These cards can also be stacked on top of each other, and use a depth effect to indicate which cards are on top and which are on the bottom. Cards can be flung away to dismiss them. This definitely will make iOS a far more mature and capable operating system, and I can’t wait to try this out on my iPad Pro. All it needs now is proper mouse support, and we got ourselves a proper operating system.
Starting today, the NoScript Firefox extension, a popular tool for privacy-focused users, is also available for Google Chrome, Giorgio Maone, NoScript’s author, has told ZDNet. The NoScript Chrome port, on which Maone has worked for months, is now available from the official Chrome Web Store, via this link. Always a useful tool.
Katie Bouman, a researcher who helped create the first image of a black hole, quickly gained internet fame Thursday for her role in the project after a photo of her went viral. But internet trolls soon followed, questioning Bouman’s work and floating false claims that she did not have much of a role in the project. Colleagues rallied to her defense, but the situation highlighted the vitriol that women continue to face on the internet, and the continued vulnerability of major internet platforms to trolling campaigns. Isn’t it funny how it’s always men?
This document was designed to help you programming the Game Boy Classic, Game Boy Pocket, Super Game Boy and Game Boy Color (basics – you will need additionaldocuments for GBC specific programming). It was ment to be a complete handbook to start right off coding forthe hardware. The documents consists of three major parts. The first is the ‘GBSpec.txt’ (also known as the Pan Document) by Pan of Anthrox, Marat Fayzullin, Pascal Felber, Paul Robson, Martin Korth, kOOPa. This will be found in paragraph 1. The second is a mixture of several documents from ‘Game Boy Assembly Language Primer (GALP) V1.0’ by GABY (GAmeBoY). It contains opcodes, time duration and the affected flags per ASM command and the. This can befound in paragraph 2. The third is a summary of specifications and commands for Nintendo Super Game Boy speciffic programming bykOOPa and Bowser. See paragraph 3. Some light reading to kick off the week.
We’re excited to announce that Gmail will become the first major email provider to follow the new SMTP MTA Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS) RFC 8461 and SMTP TLS Reporting RFC 8460 internet standards. Those new email security standards are the result of three years of collaboration within IETF, with contributions from Google and other large email providers. Google hopes other email services will also adopt these new security standards.
From a Microsoft support document (as discovered by Neowin): Windows defines two main policies, Quick removal and Better performance, that control how the system interacts with external storage devices such as USB thumb drives or Thunderbolt-enabled external drives. Beginning in Windows 10 version 1809, the default policy is Quick removal. In earlier versions of Windows the default policy was Better performance. What this means is that starting with Windows 10 version 1809, you no longer need to use the Safely Remove Hardware process when removing a USB drive, because there’s no longer any write operation caching going on. You can still change this policy if you want to.
SonnyDickson.com has footage of a very unique Apple prototype device. There has been a lot said about Apple’s development of the iPhone, and the history and inspiration behind the device – such as this notable 1983 concept of a “Telephone Mac”. One of the most notable examples of this is Apple’s lesser known desk phone known as the W.A.L.T. (Wizzy Active Lifestyle Telephone). The W.A.L.T., which was announced at MacWorld 1983, was never released to the public, and only a very small handful of prototypes were ever constructed for the device. One of the few known samples of this was sold on eBay for $8,000 back in 2012. It was even prototyped in both “classic Mac” color and a somewhat more “business looking” dark gray color. The device is basically a special PowerBook 100 in a unique, custom case, with a touchscreen, running a special version of System 6. Awesome to see this rare device in working order.
Today, Microsoft announced that it’s releasing the May 2019 Update to the Release Preview ring, and it’s available now. In order to sign up, you’ll need to go to the Windows Insider Program tab, click ‘Get started’, and choose the option for ‘Just fixes, apps, and drivers’. After your PC reboots, you’ll need to check for updates, as it’s only being offered to ‘seekers’ right now. The build that you’ll get is build 18362.30, and that’s the release candidate for the Windows 10 May 2019 Update. It’s possible that there will be cumulative updates between now and when it’s released next month, but the major build number should stay at 18362, unless there are some real dealbreakers that are found. I tried to install this latest update, but I was confronted by a most unhelpful dialog. After working so much on my Linux laptop lately, where there’s almost always an easy way to figure out why something’s going wrong and fix it, it starts dawning on you just how incredibly infuriating it is when you run into such unhelpful, user-hostile dialogs.
Guest post by Michael Reed
2019-04-09
Hardware
When OSNews covered the RISC V architecture recently, I was struck by my own lack of excitement. I looked into it, and the project looks intriguing, but it didn’t move me on an emotional level like a new CPU architecture development would have done many years ago. I think it’s due to a change in myself, as I have got older. When I first got into computers, in the early 80s, there was a vibrant environment of competing designs with different approaches. This tended to foster an interest, in the enthusiast, in what was inside the box, including the CPU architecture. Jump forwards to the current era, and the computer market is largely homogenized to a single approach for each class of computing device, and this means that there is less to get excited about in terms of CPU architectures in general. I want to look at what brought about this change in myself, and maybe these thoughts will resonate with some of you.
Just in time for Tax Day, the for-profit tax preparation industry is about to realize one of its long-sought goals. Congressional Democrats and Republicans are moving to permanently bar the IRS from creating a free electronic tax filing system. Last week, the House Ways and Means Committee, led by Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., passed the Taxpayer First Act, a wide-ranging bill making several administrative changes to the IRS that is sponsored by Reps. John Lewis, D-Ga., and Mike Kelly, R-Pa. In one of its provisions, the bill makes it illegal for the IRS to create its own online system of tax filing. Companies like Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, and H&R Block have lobbied for years to block the IRS from creating such a system. If the tax agency created its own program, which would be similar to programs other developed countries have, it would threaten the industry’s profits. This is straight-up corruption.
Guest post by Kroc Camen
2019-04-09
Games
Two bits of related news; the 4.0 release of GlideN64, the most-compatible High-Level-Emulation graphics plugin for N64 emulators: but more interestingly, this story about the struggle to reverse-engineer the GPU microcode used in Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine and Star Wars Episode I: Battle for Naboo that have eluded developers for decades.
Had enough of Windows 10’s hassles? Unless you plan to install Windows 7, which is going to lose support from Microsoft on January 14, 2020, or have the cash to spare for an Apple device, there aren’t many other options for a computer operating system except some flavor of Linux. Although you can expect a learning curve when changing platforms, Windows users who are curious about the state of Linux for mainstream computing might come away surprisingly satisfied after finding a suitable distribution for their machine and spending time getting familiar with the new environment. Here are five-plus reasons why you could easily wind up preferring Linux instead of Windows as the default operating system on your desktop or laptop. Regardless of any preferences you think you might have, assuming you have the means to do so, it is always a good idea set some time apart every now and then and take a good look at the system you’re using, possible alternatives, and how difficult it would be to switch. This fosters the kind of thinking that prevents you from being locked into a platform or ecosystem too easily.
From personal experience, I am aware that heat issues on laptops are often caused by a poor application of the stock thermal paste (also known as “thermal interface material” or TIM), provided that the cooling system is functioning. The reason is simple: the thermal paste – as the name suggests – is supposed to facilitate the transfer of the heat from the CPU/GPU to the heatsink. This only works efficiently, though, if a very thin layer of thermal paste is applied between CPU and heatsink in such a way that minimises the chance of creating “air bubbles” (air has a bad thermal conductivity). So the problem is that very often, the stock thermal paste is applied in factories in ridiculously large amounts, that often spread out of the die of the CPU and that most certainly achieve the opposite effect by slowing down, instead of facilitating, the transfer of heat from CPU to heatsink. Sadly, Apple doesn’t seem to be any different from other manufacturers from this point of view, despite the higher prices and the generally wonderful design and construction quality. Plus, often the stock thermal paste used by some manufacturers is quite cheap, and not based on some very efficient thermally conductive material. This is a very common problem, and one that is actually fairly easily rectified if you have even a modicum of understanding of how a screwdriver works. I’m planning on replacing the stick thermal paste on my XPS 13 9370 just to see if it will make a difference. I run Linux on it – KDE Neon – and Linux is slightly less efficient at decoding video than Windows, causing more fan spin-up. There’s a very real chance replacing the thermal paste will give me just enough thermal headroom to address this issue.
In December, we announced our intention to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop. Our goal is to work with the larger Chromium open source community to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers. Today we’re embarking on the next step in this journey – our first Canary and Developer builds are ready for download on Windows 10 PCs. Canary builds are preview builds that will be updated daily, while Developer builds are preview builds that will be updated weekly. Beta builds will come online in the future. Support for Mac and all supported versions of Windows will also come over time. At this point, the builds really do feel like Chrome with some UI modifications, so I don’t see any reason other than curiosity and developer prep to use these builds. Still, I’m keeping it installed to keep up with the progress, but at the same time, I’m surprised it doesn’t seem to update through the Microsoft Store, instead opting for its own update mechanism. These are the kinds of tiny details they ought to sweat, because the one advantage these application stores do have is centralised updating (like Linux systemshave had for ages).
There’s a new(ish) smartphone operating system aimed at folks who want to be able to run Android apps, but want additional security and privacy features. It’s called GrapheneOS, and it comes from Daniel Micay, the former lead developer of another security-based Android fork called CopperheadOS. After the founders of Copperhead had a falling out last year, Micay turned his attention to the Android Hardening Project, which he recently renamed GrapheneOS to better reflect what the project has become. Official images are currently available for Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 3, but source code is available if you’re interested in installing it on another device with an unlocked bootloader.
Colm MacCárthaigh, who was Principal Engineer for Amazon Web Services Elastic Load Balancer five years ago, posted an interesting recollection of his experience the day the Heartbleed bug went public. OpenSSL was in use widely across AWS, and the team there basically dropped everything to hot patch millions of deployments, then over the next hours and days took many other steps to mitigate the damage. It’s a fascinating story if you’re familiar with information security, or even just minimally familiar with the infrastructure that keeps the internet going.
The IBM System/360 was a groundbreaking family of mainframe computers announced on April 7, 1964. Designing the System/360 was an extremely risky “bet-the-company” project for IBM, costing over $5 billion. Although the project ran into severe problems, especially with the software, it was a huge success, one of the top three business accomplishments of all time. System/360 set the direction of the computer industry for decades and popularized features such as the byte, 32-bit words, microcode, and standardized interfaces. The S/360 architecture was so successful that it is still supported by IBM’s latest z/Architecture mainframes, 55 years later. Although the S/360 models shared a common architecture, internally they were completely different to support the wide range of cost and performance levels. Low-end models used simple hardware and an 8-bit datapath while advanced models used features such as wide datapaths, fast semiconductor registers, out-of-order instruction execution, and caches. These differences were reflected in the distinctive front panels of these computers, covered with lights and switches. This article describes the various S/360 models and how to identify them from the front panels. I’ll start with the Model 30, a popular low-end system, and then go through the remaining models in order. Conveniently IBM assigned model numbers rationally, with the size and performance increasing with the model number, from the stripped-down but popular Model 20 to the high-performance Model 195. This is an incredibly detailed article on this – relatively speaking – arcane topic, filled with beautiful photography. A delight to read.
