A controversial overhaul of the EU's copyright law that sparked a fierce debate between internet giants and content creators has been rejected.
The proposed rules would have put more responsibility on websites to check for copyright infringements, and forced platforms to pay for linking to news.
It's a bit of a slow news week in technology this week due the US celebrating Independence Day this past 4 July, so Ars decided to repost this article about BFS, and I'm nothing if not a sucker for BeOS content, so here it goes.
The Be operating system file system, known simply as BFS, is the file system for the Haiku, BeOS, and SkyOS operating systems. When it was created in the late '90s as part of the ill-fated BeOS project, BFS's ahead-of-its-time feature set immediately struck the fancy OS geeks. That feature set includes:
A dozen years later, the legendary BFS still merits exploration - so we're diving in today, starting with some filesystem basics and moving on to a discussion of the above features. We also chatted with two people intimately familiar with the OS: the person who developed BFS for Be and the developer behind the open-source version of BFS.
A good read.
In some ways, the narrative is out of Apple’s hands. The myth of Snow Leopard is bigger than life, a cultural reference rooted in nostalgia. OS X Lion succeeded 10.6.8 in July 2011 - closing in on 7 years ago. At this point, millions of Mac users have never even used Snow Leopard, and can’t attest to its reliability.
However, a kernel of truth persists underneath the mythology. Improvements to iOS and macOS, no matter how small, contribute to a better experience for everyone. Fixing bugs might not be as marketable as shiny new Animoji or a fresh design, but maintenance can only be deferred so long. If Apple can knock stability out of the park in 2018, maybe the legend of Snow Leopard can finally be put to rest.
There's a tendency for people to fondly look back upon older releases, whether warranted or not. Since I switched away from the Mac before Snow Leopard came out, and was a fervent Mac user during the PowerPC days, my personal Snow Leopard is Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, which I still consider my personal best Mac OS X release. Mac OS X is obviously not alone in this; Linux and Windows users will also have their favourite older releases after which supposedly everything "went downhill".
It's just human nature.
A couple of months ago, it was reported that Microsoft will be launching a cheaper Surface tablet. According to the original report, it was going to include an Intel Core M processor, also known as the Y-series. As we noted at the time, this didn't make sense, given the $281 price point for a Core m3 and the fact that it's supposed to go into a $399 tablet. It would probably be the most inexpensive Core M device ever.
But according to a report from WinFuture, the $399 tablet will include Intel's Pentium CPUs, and that makes a lot more sense. The base model will have a Pentium Silver N5000, which is a quad-core, 32-bit 'Gemini Lake' processor that's clocked at 1.1GHz.
I find this absolutely puzzling. My Surface Pro 4 with its Core i5 processor isn't exactly a speedy computer, and going down to mere Pentium processors surely makes these new rumoured Surface devices even slower. On top of that, didn't Microsoft just make a whole big deal out of Windows on ARM, which would surely be a far better fit for such a cheaper Surface tablet? Or would ARM processor at these price points be even slower? Surely this device will have to be locked into using Microsoft Store applications, since classic Win32 applications will have a lot of trouble functioning properly on such processors.
If this rumour is true, these cheap Surfaces are going to deliver a terrible user experience.
So you've just bought the best Windows laptop, you've gritted your teeth through Cortana's obnoxiously cheery setup narration, and the above screenshot is the Start menu you're presented with. Exactly how special do you feel as you watch the tiles animating and blinking at you like a slots machine? I'll tell you how I felt as I was getting to grips with the Huawei MateBook X Pro for the first time: perplexed. Perplexed that this level of bloatware infestation is still a thing in 2018, especially on a computer costing $1,499 and running an OS called Windows 10 "Pro". Why are we still tolerating this?
Before anyone assumes that this is just a rant against and about Windows, I'll happily include Apple's iOS and some varieties of Google's Android in my scorn. The blight of undesired software and prompts is all around us. If I buy an iPhone, Apple pins the Apple Watch app on my home screen, whether I have the compatible watch or not. Or if I go to Apple's nemesis, Samsung forces its Bixby assistant into everything I do with a Galaxy S.
The Windows bloatware in particular irks me, since Windows is not a free or pre-installed operating system you just kind of get for free; I purchased my Windows license and have an Office 365 subscription, and yet, I, too, got this bloatware nonsense when I installed Windows 10. I removed all of it right away, but to me, it's inexcusable.
The week-long Summer Games Done Quick gaming marathon concluded on Saturday after raising $2.1 million for charity. That may very well lead outsiders to ask: What kind of gaming event can raise so much money for a global nonprofit like Doctors Without Borders?
Fans of the Games Done Quick organization, which runs two charity marathons a year, might answer that question by pointing to a slew of "speedruns" - attempts to beat a video game as quickly as possible - for classic and modern titles alike. Or they might start shouting a bunch of inside jokes and catch phrases, which are abundant at such a tight-knit, community-driven gathering of some of gaming's biggest nerds.
Either way, while the event has since concluded, its most impressive and silliest moments live on thanks to a complete YouTube video dump. Hours upon hours of speedruns, both quick and lengthy, live on at the Games Done Quick channel. So we thought we'd take this American holiday opportunity to help outsiders catch up on the craziness with a few of our favorite full-game clips.
I always look forward to the two GDQ events every year, and I usually plan my weeks off in such a way that I don't have to work during them. This year's SGDQ was another great experience, and thanks to the wonders of VOD dumps, I can now go back and watch all the runs I missed.
SUSE, the open source software company, has been sold to a Swedish private equity firm.
EQT Partners will acquire SUSE from current owners Micro Focus in a deal worth $2.5 billion USD and is expected to close in early 2019.
EQT is described as “a development-focused investor with extensive experience in the software industryâ€.
Microsoft's Edge browser is the default browser in Windows 10. It's updated twice a year alongside new Windows 10 feature updates, but some people think that cadence of updating is too slow. Google Chrome and Firefox are updated very often with new features and changes, but Edge is stuck being updated alongside Windows 10.
Of course it should. A browser should be updated way more often than twice a year. Especially earlier in its existence, Edge had several annoying bugs that were probably fixed rather quickly, but then took months and months to actually reach me, at which point I had already moved back to Chrome. Edge is a lot less buggy these days, and I'm back to using it full time, but I still want it updated more often.
After a lot of news recently about Microsoft's rumoured Andromeda device, Mary Jo Foley poured cold water on my hope by publishing a story based on her usually well-informed Microsoft sources that Andromeda's future is hanging by a thread, that the software is far, far from ready, and that Andromeda could very well be cancelled. In response, Neowin's Rich Woods published a passionate plea for Microsoft to make Andromeda a reality.
Microsoft talks about innovating and exploring new device types and form factors a lot. It clearly doesn't want to miss out on the next big thing, in the same way that it missed out on phones and it's now missing out on smart speakers.
But the only way to do that is to actually experiment with new things. It's also important to iterate on these things until they actually work, taking feedback from customers and implementing it into a better product. Few new products are an immediate success, but they can be with some work.
Andromeda is one of these things. It's an exciting product, whether it's successful or not.
Third-party app developers can read the emails of millions of Gmail users, a report from The Wall Street Journal highlighted today. Gmail’s access settings allows data companies and app developers to see people’s emails and view private details, including recipient addresses, time stamps, and entire messages. And while those apps do need to receive user consent, the consent form isn’t exactly clear that it would allow humans - and not just computers - to read your emails.
Wait, you mean to tell me that when I granted one of those newfangled we-will-organise-your-email-for-you email clients access to my email I granted them access to my email? I am shocked, shocked I say!
Privacy and security stories tend to get easily inflated, and while it indeed sucks that actual people at said companies can read your email, you did explicitly grant them access to your email account. It's all spelled out right there in the Google account permission dialog. These companies aren't here to make your email lives easier - they're here to mine your data and sell it to third parties.
You wouldn't let a random small company install cameras in your house. Why do you treat your email any differently?
I'm back to say I was wrong, and I've found a machine that not only matches Apple's standard of hardware quality, but goes far beyond it to demonstrate how a laptop of the future should work.
That machine is the 15-inch Surface Book 2 and somehow Microsoft has made the 2-in-1 that Apple should've been building all along, to the same level of quality I'd expect from anyone other than Microsoft.
I've used the Surface Book 2 as my daily computer for three months now and it's consistently blown me away with how well considered it is across the board, how great the software works and has completely converted me into the touchscreen laptop camp.
That's what happens when Apple ignores its Mac product line - people start looking at alternatives, only to realize that Apple's laptops weren't nearly as far ahead of the rest - if at all - as they once thought.
When Microsoft took to the Game Developers Conference in 2000 to drum up interest in the original Xbox, it used a prototype console that was, basically, a giant X.
This prototype was used for the hardware reveal at GDC by ex-Microsoft boss Bill Gates and head of the Xbox project Seamus Blackley. Microsoft took this unit to trade shows and events such as GDC to help give developers an idea of what they've be working with and present demonstrations to press, despite it not offering the power the retail unit would.
According to Dean Takahashi's book Opening the Xbox, each prototype unit cost $18,000 to manufacture because they were milled out of a solid block of aluminium. In a recent tweet, Seamus Blackley, one of the key players in Microsoft's Xbox, said the prototype was a working unit.
Interesting little bit of Xbox history.
Years later, I had that story on my mind when I was browsing a local online classifieds site and stumbled across a gem: a Macintosh IIsi. Even better, the old computer was for sale along with the elusive but much-desired Portrait Display, a must-have for the desktop publishing industry of its time. I bought it the very next day.
It took me several days just to get the machine to boot at all, but I kept thinking back to that article. Could I do any better? With much less? Am I that arrogant? Am I a masochist?
Cupertino retro-curiosity ultimately won out: I decided to enroll the Macintosh IIsi as my main computing system for a while. A 1990 bit of gear would now go through the 2018 paces. Just how far can 20MHz of raw processing power take you in the 21st century?
The Macintosh IIsi is such an elegant machine, a fitting home for the equally elegant System 7.x.
We've been on a bit of a history trip lately with old computer articles and books, and this one from 1985 certainly fits right in.
In January 1981, a handful of semiconductor engineers at MOS Technology in West Chester, Pa., a subsidiary of Commodore International Ltd., began designing a graphics chip and sound chip to sell to whoever wanted to make "the world's best video game". In January 1982, a home computer incorporating those chips was introduced at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nev. By using in-house integrated-circuit-fabrication facilities for prototyping, the engineers had cut design time for each chip to less than nine months, and they had designed and built five prototype computers for the show in less than five weeks. What surprised the rest of the home-computer industry the most, however, was the introductory price of the Commodore 64: $595 for a unit incorporating a keyboard, a central processor, the graphics and sound chips, and 64 kilobytes of memory instead of the 16 or 32 that were considered the norm.
A fully decked-out Commodore 64 with all the crucial peripherals - tape drive, disk drive, printer, joysticks, official monitor - is still very high on my wish list.
Today we're rolling out Beta 3 of Android P, our next milestone in this year's Android P developer preview. With the developer APIs already finalized in the previous update, Beta 3 now takes us very close to what you'll see in the final version of Android P, due later this summer.
Available on Pixel devices and a number of third party devices.
Are we focusing too much on analyzing exactly how many jobs could be destroyed by the coming wave of automation, and not enough on how to actually fix the problem? That's one conclusion in a new paper on the potential affects of robotics and AI on global labor markets from US think tank, the Center for Global Development (CGD).
The paper's authors, Lukas Schlogl and Andy Sumner, say it's impossible to know exactly how many jobs will be destroyed or disrupted by new technology. But, they add, it's fairly certain there's going to be significant effects - especially in developing economies, where the labor market is skewed towards work that require the sort of routine, manual labor that's so susceptible to automation. Think unskilled jobs in factories or agriculture.
As earlier studies have also suggested, Schlogl and Sumner think the affects of automation on these and other nations is not likely to be mass unemployment, but the stagnation of wages and polarization of the labor market. In other words, there will still be work for most people, but it'll be increasingly low-paid and unstable; without benefits such as paid vacation, health insurance, or pensions. On the other end of the employment spectrum, meanwhile, there will continue to be a small number of rich and super-rich individuals who reap the benefits of increased in productivity created by technology.
Whether masses of people become unemployable or are forced to accept increasingly crappier and lower-paying jobs, while a rich few get ever richer, the end result will be massive social upheaval. We're already seeing the consequences of mass inequality in many countries in the world, and it isn't pretty. Expect things to get worse.
Much worse.
It's well-known that you should measure the performance of your code, and not rely only on the opcode's "cycle counts".
But how fast is an IBM PC 5150 compared to a PCjr? Or to a Tandy 1000? Or how fast is the Tandy 1000 HX in fast mode (7.16Mhz) compared to the slow mode (4.77Mhz)? Or how fast is a nop compared to a cwd?
I created a test (perf.asm) that measures the performance of different opcodes and run it on different Intel 8088 machines. I run the test multiple times just to make sure the results were stable enough. All interrupts were disabled, except the Timer (of course). And on the PCjr the NMI is disabled as well.
There's no point in any of these benchmarks, but that doesn't make them any less interesting.
With the aim to protect the interests of copyright holders, Google is making 'pirate' sites more difficult for its users to find. This week the search engine revealed more information about the scope of this effort. Thus far, Google has downranked 65,000 sites, a measure that led to a 90% reduction in referrals from search results.
That, so the story goes, was the remit given to BBC engineers in the late 1960s: find a way to transmit a printable page of text so that the corporation’s transmitters weren't simply left to idle overnight. Their efforts would eventually give rise to an iconic medium that would span five decades, become the basis for a global standard and - perhaps most importantly - let you check the lottery numbers on Sunday morning. (Well, you never knew.)
As is so often the case when a revolutionary technology's lingering just over the horizon, it's difficult to know precisely where the tale of teletext truly begins. Engineers at several different corporations were already experimenting with ways of transmitting text remotely, each with different goals in mind. The Post Office, who at that time were responsible for the telephone system, naturally wanted to use their infrastructure to boost the number of phone owners across the country. Boffins back at the BBC, meanwhile, had begun investigating ways to provide subtitled television programmes for the deaf.
Teletext (or Teletekst in Dutch) is still active here, and lots of people have the smartphone app for Teletekst installed as well. Fascinating technology that I used all the time when I was younger.
Over the past few months, the wildest rumors in video game industry circles haven't involved the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Two. The most interesting chatter has centered on a tech company that's been quietly making moves to tackle video games in a big way: Google, the conglomerate that operates our email, our internet browsers, and much more.
We haven't heard many specifics about Google's video game plans, but what we have heard is that it's a three-pronged approach: 1) Some sort of streaming platform, 2) some sort of hardware, and 3) an attempt to bring game developers under the Google umbrella, whether through aggressive recruiting or even major acquisitions. That's the word from five people who have either been briefed on Google's plans or heard about them secondhand.
Cracking the gaming market is hard. Over the past few decades, only two companies succeeded in entering the gaming market: first Sony, then Microsoft. Virtually all other attempts either flopped hard, or started lukewarm only to quickly peter out. Hence, I have a lot of reservations about Google's supposed plans here, especially since they seem to involve streaming. Even streaming on my local LAN using PS4 Remote Play, while passable, is clearly not even remotely as good as the "real thing".
We definitely need more concrete information.
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