Qualcomm announces the details of the Snapdragon 855

Today is the second day of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Technology Summit in Maui, and while yesterday was all about 5G and a teaser for its new chipset, today is all about the Snapdragon 855. The new chipset is built on a 7nm architecture, promising faster speeds, better battery life, and improved connectivity.

But as far as general performance goes, Qualcomm says that its Kryo 485 cores will offer a 45% boost, and the Adreno 640 GPU will show a 20% increase. With the firm's Snapdragon Elite Gaming Platform, gamers will be able to play in HDR with physically based rendering (PBR).

If these numbers hold up - only independent benchmarking will tell - this will go a ways to closing the wide gap with Apple's current offering at least partially.

Measuring Google’s “filter bubble”

The filter bubble is particularly pernicious when searching for political topics. That's because undecided and inquisitive voters turn to search engines to conduct basic research on candidates and issues in the critical time when they are forming their opinions on them. If they're getting information that is swayed to one side because of their personal filter bubbles, then this can have a significant effect on political outcomes in aggregate.

Now, after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and other recent elections, there is justified new interest in examining the ways people can be influenced politically online. In that context, we conducted another study to examine the state of Google's filter bubble problem in 2018.

Interesting study into the very real problem of Google's filter bubble, but do note that the study is performed by DuckDuckGo, a competitor to Google Search (one that I use myself, I might add). That being said, all the results, methodology, and data is freely available, and the code used to analyse the data is available on GitHub.

Visual Studio 2019 preview released

Today, in the Microsoft Connect(); 2018 keynote, Scott Guthrie announced the availability of Visual Studio 2019 Preview 1. This is the first preview of the next major version of Visual Studio. In this Preview, we've focused on a few key areas, such as making it faster to open and work with projects stored in git repositories, improving IntelliSense with Artificial Intelligence (AI) (a feature we call Visual Studio IntelliCode), and making it easier to collaborate with your teammates by integrating Live Share. With each preview, we'll be adding capabilities, improving performance, and refining the user experience, and we absolutely want your feedback.

It seems like we have a lot of developer-oriented news today. As I've repeatedly said, I'm not a programmer in any way, shape, or form, so I tend to stick to just shutting up entirely (and there was much rejoicing). Luckily, knowledgeable folk usually step up in the comments.

Announcing open source of WPF, Windows Forms, and WinUI

At Build 2018, I outlined our approach to helping you be more productive when developing apps, including the introduction of .NET Core 3.0. We also started decoupling many parts of the Windows development platform, so you can adopt technologies incrementally. Today at Microsoft Connect(); 2018 Conference we shared the next steps - specifically to support innovations in UI:

  1. .NET Core 3.0 Preview 1 adds support for building client apps using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms, and XAML Islands.
  2. WPF, Windows Forms, and Windows UI XAML Library (WinUI) are now open source, so you can create experiences with the freedom you want.

Microsoft to replace Edge with Chromium-powered browser

Well, I sure didn't expect this kind of news to land in the middle of the night.

Microsoft's Edge web browser has seen little success since its debut on Windows 10 back in 2015. Built from the ground up with a new rendering engine known as EdgeHTML, Microsoft Edge was designed to be fast, lightweight, and secure, but launched with a plethora of issues which resulted in users rejecting it early on. Edge has since struggled to gain any traction, thanks to its continued instability and lack of mindshare, from users and web developers.

Because of this, I'm told that Microsoft is throwing in the towel with EdgeHTML and is instead building a new web browser powered by Chromium, a rendering engine first popularized by Google's Chrome browser. Codenamed Anaheim, this new web browser for Windows 10 will replace Edge as the default browser on the platform. It's unknown at this time if Anaheim will use the Edge brand or a new brand, or if the user interface between Edge and Anaheim is different. One thing is for sure, however; EdgeHTML is dead.

I use Edge, but not necessarily because of the rendering engine - I use it because of its proper Windows UI and snappy overall performance. If Microsoft can maintain those strong points while switching to Chromium, that's a plus in my book. It does raise concerns about the further consolidation of the web on Chromium (or Blink, more accurately) and WebKit, but since nobody used or cared about Edge anyway, I doubt this news has any real impact on this specific issue.

PC/GEOS source code released under Apache 2.0 license

Blueway Software Works (who purchased the intellectual property rights to PC/GEOS from the estate of Frank Fischer of Breadbox when he passed away) seems to have published the source code for PC/GEOS on their GitHub repository.

This repository is the official place to hold all the source code around the PC/GEOS graphical user interface and its sophisticated applications. It is the source to build SDK and release version of PC/GEOS. It is the place to collaborate on further developments.

While I can't ascertain the exact version that they have published, it looks like it contains all of the UI options/themes provided in Ensemble 2.0 onwards (i.e. Motif, OS/2 2.0 PM and Windows 95). It also looks like they have published the source code for all of the Breadbox titles (extra games and so on) that were sold separately. By the looks of it, they are also re-factoring the source to allow it to be compiled on Windows and Linux with more modern toolchains.

What makes BeOS and Haiku unique

A great article about a number of things that make Haiku (and BeOS) unique. There's a lot to cover here, so I'll just take a random sample to quote here:

Really, the first feature a new user will notice, before even noticing packages (which I covered first as they were new to the Beta) is the Be user interface. It manages to remain fundamentally true to itself, while also being quite powerful.

The BeOS user interface was one of my favourite user interfaces ever created. There was something unassuming, simple, and straightforward about it, and it always looked very appealing and attractive to me. The Haiku developers and designers have managed to modernize the visual aspects of the user interface very well, and thanks to their beautiful icons and light modernisations in every UI element in the operating system, it still looks really nice today.

I have enough experience in this industry to know that the odds of lots of application developers picking up Haiku to create useful applications re slim, at best, but I'm just going to ignore my own (justified) skepticism and keep hoping magic happens here.

On a related note, the latest Haiku monthly activity report is out, and details the work done since the release of the first beta.

Buying a Commodore Amiga 30 years later

A few months ago I watched "From Bedroom to Billions", it triggered some serious nostalgia and a lot of memories came flooding back. So on a whim, I decided to see if I could pick-up an Amiga on eBay to replay some of those old games that I loved as a child.

It turns out it's not too hard. There's a thriving community that still uses and loves the Amiga. There's also a fair number of people on eBay who refurbish and upgrade them with a 4GB memory card containing workbench and a bunch of software and games. This is very handy because, even if you did manage to buy the original games, there's no guarantee they will work due to the magnetic platters getting mouldy or damaged over the last 30 years. Yes, that's real life bit rot in action.

The market for older computers like these and associated modern expansion cards and add-ons to make using them a little less frustrating in modern times is actually a lot larger than most people seem to think, and anything from using SD cards as boot drives to things like ethernet and WiFi are often available as well. Even if you don't purchase these computers, it's still fun to browse sites like eBay to see what's on offer.

Announcing PhysX SDK 4.0, an open-source physics engine

NVIDIA is proud to announce PhysX SDK 4.0, available on December 20, 2018. The engine has been upgraded to provide industrial grade simulation quality at game simulation performance. In addition, PhysX SDK has gone open source, starting today with version 3.4! It is available under the simple 3-Clause BSD license. With access to the source code, developers can debug, customize and extend the PhysX SDK as they see fit.

I'm not well-versed enough in this area to gauge how big of a deal this news it, but regardless, it seems like a good contribution to the open source community.

Surface ‘Centaurus’ is another dual-screen Microsoft PC

Microsoft is working closely with Intel on a new dual-screen Surface device powered by Windows Core OS that's similar to Intel's Copper Harbor prototype that was revealed earlier this year. Codenamed "Centaurus", this device is akin to Microsoft's canceled Courier project, which saw the company conceptualize the idea of a digital journal in 2010. Centaurus marks the second dual-screen device we believe Microsoft is currently working on internally, the first of which is codenamed "Andromeda."

Next year could be the year of dual-screen or even bendable screen devices. Microsoft has been exploring this for years now.

Nvidia created the first game demo using AI-generated graphics

The recent boom in artificial intelligence has produced impressive results in a somewhat surprising realm: the world of image and video generation. The latest example comes from chip designer Nvidia, which today published research showing how AI-generated visuals can be combined with a traditional video game engine. The result is a hybrid graphics system that could one day be used in video games, movies, and virtual reality.

Impressive technology. I can see how this will eventually make it a lot easier to generate graphics for 'realistic' games.

Samsung’s folding screen tech stolen and sold to China

Samsung's latest bendable screen technology has been stolen and sold to two Chinese companies, according to prosecutors in South Korea.

The Suwon District Prosecutor's Office charged 11 people on Thursday with stealing tech secrets from Samsung (SSNLF), the office said in a statement.

The prosecutors allege that a Samsung supplier leaked blueprints of Samsung's "flexible OLED edge panel 3D lamination" to a company that it had set up. That company then sold the tech secrets to the Chinese firms for nearly $14 million, according to the prosecutors.

Samsung invested 130 million dollars and six years of work to develop this technology - only to have it stolen and sold to Chinese competitors. Crazy.

Facebook considered selling user data

Internal Facebook documents seized by British lawmakers suggest that the social media giant once considered selling access to user data, according to extracts obtained by the Wall Street Journal. Back in April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told congress unequivocally that, "We do not sell data." But these documents suggest that it was something that the company internally considered doing between 2012 and 2014, while the company struggled to generate revenue after its IPO.

This just goes to show that no matter what promises a company makes, once the shareholders come knocking, they'll disregard all promises, morals, and values they claim to have.

UTF-7: a ghost from the time before UTF-8

On Halloween this year I learned two scary things. The first is that a young toddler can go trick-or-treating in your apartment building and acquire a huge amount of candy. When they are this young they have no interest in the candy itself, so you are left having to eat it all yourself.

The second scary thing is that in the heart of the ubiquitous IMAP protocol lingers a ghost of the time before UTF-8. Its name is Modified UTF-7.

Go 2, here we come!

A major difference between Go 1 and Go 2 is who is going to influence the design and how decisions are made. Go 1 was a small team effort with modest outside influence; Go 2 will be much more community-driven. After almost 10 years of exposure, we have learned a lot about the language and libraries that we didn't know in the beginning, and that was only possible through feedback from the Go community.

The Go team s revealing some things about the future of the programming language.

Haiku R1/beta1 in Vagrant

Over the last year, I have been slowly pushing patches upstream to Vagrant introducing native Haiku support. Vagrant is an open-source tool to build and maintain portable virtual development environments. Essentially, Vagrant lets you deploy and rapidly customize a Haiku virtual machine with programmatic scripts.

Since we now have a new stable release, I have prepared some updated R1/beta1 images to play with under an official Haiku, Inc. account.

If I understand this correctly, this is the easiest way to setup a Haiku development environment. As someone who intends to snag up a decent used laptop to fully dedicate to Haiku, I will do whatever I can - no matter how little - to entice people to create applications for Haiku.

Google makes a case to never buy a Pixel at launch again

Google’s Pixel phones are far from perfect, but they are getting better year by year. Despite various flaws, they remain some of our favorite phones on the market. However, with the Pixel 3, Google has made it abundantly clear that almost no one should ever buy one of its phones at launch.

Coincidentally, I just bought a new phone to replace my iPhone X, and while the Pixel devices are not available in The Netherlands (they are only available in like 4 countries), as a thought exercise, I did include the Pixel in my deliberations as to what phone to buy. And you know what? Aside from its exceptional camera, the Pixel phones don't really seem to offer any benefits over other Android phones, while still being quite expensive.

The only redeeming quality is updates, but since OnePlus has been excellent with Android updates, I opted to buy the OnePlus 6T, which also happens to be considerably cheaper, despite having pretty much the same specifications. Virtually every single review also noted that the 6T had superior performance to the Pixel 3, which seems to have considerable performance issues.

With devices like the 6T on the market, is there really any reason to buy a Pixel at all?

Amazon developed its own ARM core for its own cloud services

Today we are launching EC2 instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton Processors. Built around Arm cores and making extensive use of custom-built silicon, the A1 instances are optimized for performance and cost. They are a great fit for scale-out workloads where you can share the load across a group of smaller instances. This includes containerized microservices, web servers, development environments, and caching fleets.

Interesting to see Amazon design its own ARM core specifically for its own product.

Stories of harsh working conditions in the video game industry

For many people, the chance to make PS4 and Xbox games is a dream job - but the reality of working conditions in the video game industry can be six-day working weeks, 24-hour shifts and unrelenting stress. Sam Forsdick speaks to the employees who have experienced the dark side of the industry.

Nobody - from cleaner to programmer - should be working or should be expected to work these kinds of hours in these kinds of conditions. It's inhumane and should be illegal in any functioning modern society. This is barbaric.