Atari launches Indiegogo campaign for VCS, reveals its specs

The Atari VCS, the new gaming console from Atari, has been launched as an Indiegogo campaign with preorders available today, with a shipping date set for early 2019.

Along with the launch, the company has also revealed the technical specs of the console, which include 32GB of internal storage, 4GB of RAM, and AMD's Bristol Ridge A1 CPU and Radeon R7 GPU.

That's certainly not a bad set of specifications, but one has to wonder just how much third party interest there is to go around. Still, even without a ton of original games, this machine is basically a very nicely designed Linux machine, which in an of itself makes it a really tempting product. That being said - it's a crowdfunding project, so take all the warnings that comes with that into account.

Why is Elon Musk raging at “big media”?

Here's the dynamic that explains Musk's Twitter outburst: Tesla is clearly struggling to reach production levels that will justify its valuation. Musk has no facts with which to counter the media reports, and it is illegal for him to lie about these numbers. (Hype is one thing; lying to investors is another.) His Orwellian solution is to convince Tesla fans that what they are reading is not true. The stakes are high. Tesla's $1 billion-per-quarter burn rate makes it very likely that the company will need to raise a couple billion dollars in the fourth quarter of this year.

Musk literally cannot afford for investors to believe a negative storyline. Only his optimistic, visionary narrative will convince potential investors that Tesla is a good bet, rather than a bubble preparing to pop.

Nothing is more dangerous than criticizing Elon Musk, but the cold and harsh facts laid out in this article are very difficult to argue with, other than appealing to some vague sense of Musk wanting to help the planet or whatever, as if that negates Tesla rapidly running out of money and never meeting expectations or failing to keep its promises. We should all want Tesla to succeed, but the recent outbursts from Musk do not bode well for the future of the company.

Twitter randos who could never afford a Tesla might be easily swayed by Musk's Trumpian "boohoo the press hates me" nonsense, but the kinds of billion dollar investors Tesla needs will see right through it.

Nebulet: microkernel that implements WebAssembly in Ring 0

Nebulet is a microkernel that executes WebAssembly modules instead of ELF binaries. Furthermore, it does so in ring 0 and in the same address space as the kernel, instead of in ring 3. Normally, this would be super dangerous, but WebAssembly is designed to run safely on remote computers, so it can be securely sandboxed without losing performance.

Eventually, once the Cretonne compiler matures, applications running on Nebulet could be faster than their counterparts running on Linux due to syscalls just being function calls, low context-switch overhead, and exotic optimizations that aren't possible on conventional operating systems.

Lobotomizing GNOME

But I'll be honest: GNOME is huge and kind of bloated, and it's hard to disable various unwanted components. GNOME Shell is amazing, but a lot of the other components of GNOME are simply unwanted. This is what turns a lot of power users away from GNOME, which I think is a shame given all of the other amazing things about GNOME. While you won't find these instructions in the GNOME manuals, if you know what you're doing modern GNOME releases make it very easy to lobotomize a lot of the unneeded and unwanted features.

UTC is enough for everyone… Right?

Programming time, dates, timezones, recurring events, leap seconds... Everything is pretty terrible.

The common refrain in the industry is Just use UTC! Just use UTC! And that's correct... Sort of. But if you're stuck building software that deals with time, there's so much more to consider.

It's time... To talk about time.

This is one of the best articles - experiences? - I've ever read. It's funny, well-written, deeply informative, and covers everything from programming with time, to time and UI design, to time and accessibility. This is simply an amazing piece of work.

How to enable case sensitivity for NTFS support for folders

Although you can now run a number of Linux distros natively on Windows 10, this integration has been a little tricky when it comes to handling filename case, as Linux is case sensitive and Windows is not.

In order to overcome this limitation, starting with the Windows 10 April 2018 Update (version 1803), NTFS includes a new flag that you can enable on a per-folder basis allowing the file system to treat files and folders as case sensitive.

I'm sure there are countless technical reasons as to why case sensitive is the preferred route to go, but is there a case to be made for case insensitivity being simpler and less confusing to use?

iOS 11.4 released

Apple has released iOS 11.4.

iOS 11.4 is an audio-focused update, introducing support for multi-room audio through a new protocol that supports multi-room audio on all AirPlay 2 enabled devices.

The iOS 11.4 update also introduces Messages in iCloud, a feature that has been in the works for several months and was first promised as an iOS 11 feature in June of 2017. Messages in iCloud is designed to store your iMessages in iCloud rather than on each individual device, allowing for improved syncing capabilities.

watchOS 4.3.1 and tvOS 11.4 have also been released, and the software on the HomePod has been updated as well.

Porting guide from Qt 1.0 to 5.11

Now that Qt 5.11 is released, it is finally time to upgrade the last Qt 1.0 applications out there... No, not really. I want to take a look at how well we have kept compatibility in Qt over the years since the first official release.

Qt guarantees source and binary compatibility between minor releases, and we take that seriously. Making sure that you don't have to rewrite (or even recompile) your application when you upgrade to a newer version of Qt is important to us. However, there are times when we need to make bigger changes in order to keep Qt up to date. This is done in major releases. Since the release of Qt 1.0 in 1996 (almost twenty-two years ago), we have broken source compatibility four times: in 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 (some of you may remember that as a painful transition), and 5.0.

We do try to keep breakages to a minimum, even in the major releases, but the changes do add up. This raises the question: How hard would it be to port a Qt application from Qt 1.0 to 5.11?

Not only an interesting look at Qt history, but also a look back on mid 90s C++, and what has and hasn't changed.

“Huawei’s new MateBook X Pro is the best laptop right now”

There are many products that cross my desk for review, and very few of those products surprise me. I've been doing this for long enough that I can generally guess how a device is going to perform or work before it even gets to me.

Huawei's new MateBook X Pro is an exception. Even though the MateBook X Pro has a deep bench of specs and an eye-catching design, Huawei is not exactly an established brand in the laptop world. Prior Huawei laptops weren't great, either: they had poor battery life, not enough power, bad design, frustrating trackpads, and were generally not worth considering.

Fortunately, the MateBook X Pro has completely and thoroughly exceeded my expectations. While it is not a perfect laptop and it has a couple of faults that will stop some from considering it, it is still the best laptop I've used all year. That makes it my new recommendation as the productivity and entertainment laptop to buy right now.

This looks like a great all-rounder

PUBG takes US game firm to court

Korean game developer PUBG, a subsidiary of Bluehole, has filed a copyright violation lawsuit against U.S.-based Epic Games, asking a court to determine whether the latter's "Fortnite" was copied from the former's "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds."

A PUBG official said Friday that the firm filed an injunction, alleging copyright infringement, with the Seoul Central District Court against Epic Games Korea.

This is crazy. The two games share the same premise, but are entirely different in almost every element of execution. The games industry has always been refreshingly progressive in the way it handles copying ideas - it is entirely normal for revolutionary ideas and new gameplay elements to rapidly spread throughout the industry. This is one of the main reasons why the gaming world hasn't really stagnated, and keeps coming up with new ideas and fresh takes, and also why small studios and even lone developers are relatively free to make whatever they want, copying ideas left and right.

If this case ever gets any serious traction, it will have a seriously chilling effect on the industry.

‘Crush them’: oral history of the lawsuit that upended Silicon Valley

Nineteen-ninety-eight changed the course of technology, which is to say that it changed the course of history. A nearly bankrupt relic of '80s tech nostalgia released a gumdrop-shaped PC called the iMac. An innovative search engine originally known as BackRub became a company with an even stranger name. A fast-growing online bookstore hatched a plan to start selling, well, everything.

In hindsight, these were tectonic shifts, but they hardly registered as tremors compared to the earthquake emanating from Washington, D.C. On May 18, 1998, the U.S. Justice Department and 20 state attorneys general filed an antitrust suit against the most powerful tech company in America: Microsoft.

How the world has changed - now we look towards Brussels for monopoly-busting. In the current political climate I the US, it's highly unlikely that technology companies today will be treated the same way Microsoft was 20 years ago.

Game companies need to cut the crap: loot boxes are gambling

Game companies now lean heavily on loot boxes to monetize their products. Legislators around the world are threatening to impose regulations on the boxes, claiming that they're gambling. Industry groups, however, insist that the boxes are not.

I play games that are funded with loot boxes. My favorite game of all time, Dota 2, is funded almost exclusively through loot boxes. Regulations that tightly restrict or absolutely prohibit loot boxes will definitely hurt the gaming industry and will hurt, perhaps even fatally, games I love. There will definitely be economic harm, and games companies will have to figure something out to fill the monetary gap. It's no surprise that game companies are defending the practice.

But here's the thing: loot boxes are gambling. The essential features of the transaction match those of gambling, the reward pathways and addiction mechanisms are those of gambling, and playing dumb about it, as the industry is currently doing, is a bad look.

I wholeheartedly agree. Loot boxes in gaming lead to real addictions and all its associated problems, and while I'm never a fan of outright bans - I'm Dutch, after all - I do think we need to have an honest and open discussion about protecting especially younger and more vulnerable people from the effects of gambling.

The Windows 10 April Update (1803): the littlest big update

We're about three years into Windows 10, and we've seen a lot of changes to the OS, as well as the servicing model, in those three years. The move to no longer offering major OS updates every couple of years with a new name, and requirement for purchase, is very welcome, and has likely been the biggest success of the Windows 10 launch. Microsoft has also refined the servicing model to a more consistent pattern of two updates per year, and while that can either be a pro or a con depending on where you stand, they've met that over the last couple of updates. With the Windows 10 April Update, which is version 1803, we’ve got arguably the smallest update yet in terms of new features, but that's not really a bad thing. Three years in, the OS is mature enough that it's good to see the company dialing back on the major interface changes, and hopefully focusing more on consistency, and reliability.

AnandTech's review of the Windows 10 April Update.

USB reverse engineering: down the rabbit hole

I tend to dive down rabbit holes a lot, and given the cost of context switching and memory deteriorating over time, sometimes the state I build up in my mind gets lost between the chances I get to dive in. These 'linkdump' posts are an attempt to collate at least some of that state in a way that I can hopefully restore to my brain at a later point.

This time around I was inspired to look into USB reverse engineering, protocol analyis, hardware hacking, and what would be involved in implementing custom drivers for arbitrary hardware. Or put another way: how do I hack all of the USBs?!??

It seems the deeper I went, the more interesting I found the content, and this post grew and grew. Hopefully it will help to shortcut your own journey down this path, and enlighten you to a whole new area of interesting things to hack!

Let's continue this impromptu series on things I barely understand, shall we?

The AD9361: when microchips are more profitable than drugs

When Analog Devices released their SDR transciever AD9361 in 2013 - it was a revolution in digital radio. SDR's were there before, but only now you can have it all: 2 channels for TX and RX with onboard 12-bit DAC/ADCs with 56MHz of RF simultanious bandwidth, local oscillators, mixers and LNA - all working in the range from 70 (TX from 47) to 6000Mhz. Using AD9361 out of the box one could implement almost any useful digital radio, with the rare exceptions of UWB and 60GHz. You only need to add data source/sink (which is still often an FPGA), external filters and PA if your task requires it.

Finally I was able to take a look inside and peek at manufacturing cost of a microelectronic device with such an exceptional added value.

This is a little over my head, but I love the pretty pictures.

The forgotten ’80s home robot trend

The Gemini was the most technically advanced of the personal robots available in 1985, with features that remain impressive today. It not only spoke but took voice commands. It was self-charging, and retained a map of your home for navigation purposes, a feature that was only introduced into the Roomba line in 2015, 13 years and 5 generations after its introduction. It could sing with synthesized piano accompaniment, recite poetry, and connect to early online services like CompuServe.

That's quite amazing.

There’s real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, et al.

One of the ongoing system administration controversies in Linux is that there is an ongoing effort to obsolete the old, cross-Unix standard network administration and diagnosis commands of ifconfig, netstat and the like and replace them with fresh new Linux specific things like ss and the ip suite. Old sysadmins are generally grumpy about this; they consider it yet another sign of Linux's 'not invented here' attitude that sees Linux breaking from well-established Unix norms to go its own way. Although I'm an old sysadmin myself, I don't have this reaction. Instead, I think that it might be both sensible and honest for Linux to go off in this direction. There are two reasons for this, one ostensible and one subtle.

US news sites block EU readers due to GDPR

This article is terrible, and clearly chooses sides with advertisers and data harvesters over users - not surprising, coming from Bloomberg.

For some of America's biggest newspapers and online services, it's easier to block half a billion people from accessing your product than comply with Europe's new General Data Protection Regulation.

The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The New York Daily News are just some telling visitors that, "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries."

With about 500 million people living in the European Union, that's a hard ban on one-and-a-half times the population of the U.S.

Blanket blocking EU internet connections - which will include any U.S. citizens visiting Europe - isn't limited to newspapers. Popular read-it-later service Instapaper says on its website that it's "temporarily unavailable for residents in Europe as we continue to make changes in light of the General Data Protection Regulation."

Whenever a site blocks EU users, you can safely assume they got caught with their hands in the user data cookie jar. Some of these sites have dozens and dozens of trackers from dozens of different advertisement companies, so the real issue here is even these sites themselves simply have no clue to whom they're shipping off your data - hence making it impossible to comply with the GDPR in the first place.

The GDPR is not only already forcing companies to give insight into the data they collect on you - it's also highlighting those that simply don't care about your privacy. It's amazing how well GDPR is working, and it's only been in effect for one day.