This article has been in my to read list for a few days now, but due to a lack of time I haven't been able to finish it yet. There's a lot of information in the article about the development of Windows Vista, and even though I haven't finished it yet I can guarantee you it's worth the read.

Mauro A. Meloni submitted a link to the article, accompanied by the following note:

My experience with Vista wasn't all that different, but especially with the powers of hindsight it's hard to discount just how important Vista has been for Microsoft. It was all part of Microsoft's massive cleanup effort in the Windows codebase, the fruits of which the company is still picking today, and will be picking for a long, long time to come. Many other a company would've been forced to write a completely new operating system, but Microsoft actually managed to clean up such a complex codebase.

The cleanup of the Windows codebase might very well be one of the most impressive technical achievements in Microsoft's history, and Vista is a hugely important part of that.

We've already covered the most interesting announcements Apple made last night, so consider this item a grab bag of other things the company announced. First, a new iPad Pro with thinner bezels housing a 10.5" display, 120Hz refresh rate, better pen tracking, and, of course, eventually it'll get iOS 11 with a lot of iPad-specific improvements.

Apple also entered the market for speakers-you-can-talk-to with the HomePod, which is exactly what it sounds like: Siri in a can with a bunch of speakers. None of these products - the Echo, the Google Home, or this one - are available in The Netherlands, so I have no idea how useful they actually are. I don't quite understand what a speaker which will be invariably worse than your hi-fi system has to offer over your smartphone and a ChromeCast or ChromeCast Audio, especially since you can't take the can with you. Maybe I'm just not getting it.

Then there's watchOS 4:

Combined with yesterday's items, this covers pretty much all of the stuff Apple announced last night. A lot of cool new features and products to look forward to for Apple users.

During Apple's WWDC keynote, the company updated both its iMac and MacBook lineup with 7th generation Kaby Lake processors, better GPUs, better displays, and so on - good, solid speed bumps all around. Nothing to get too excited about, but Apple has been inconsistent with keeping up with the industry, so this is a good step.

Much more exciting is that Apple also announced an upcoming iMac Pro - an iMac with incredibly specifications for its body size - Xeon processors, Radeon Pro Vega GPUs, all-flash storage, 5K displays, u to 128GB RAM.

The base price is $5000 for the base 8-core Xeon with 32GB of RAM, Radeon Pro Vega 56 with 8GB of HBM2 memory, and a 5K display - which may sound like a lot, but for such a workstation-class machine combined with a display like that, it's actually a pretty good price (a similarly-specced HP Z workstation, for instance, will probably be similarly priced, but won't come with a 5K display).

The iMac Pro will be available in December of this year, and it's good to see Apple pre-announce such professional products instead of keeping them under wraps until the last minute. Professional users need roadmaps for planning purposes, and it's beginning to look like Apple is accepting that.

There's a ton of great stuff coming once iOS 11 is released, and it truly looks like the iPad-focused release people have been asking for. Be sure to take a peek at Apple's official iOS 11 page, as it details some of the prime new features.

The actual Windows Explorer shell is one of the last high-profile parts of Windows that's still mostly Win32. This CShell is supposed to be its replacement.

With the new version 17.05, the Genode project moves forward to the goal of becoming more attractive and approachable to a wider audience. On the one hand, the release promises to be a sustainable basis for longer-term projects. With a modern tool chain based on GCC 6.3, Qt 5.8, VirtualBox 5.2.11, and the framework's finished API modernization, the foreseeable future will be free of disruptions for users. On the other hand, Genode introduced a new approach and tooling for package management to relieve users from low-level technicalities.

Modern operating systems are unthinkable without a package-management solution for installing and updating software. Until now, however, Genode's work flows were primarily geared towards appliance-like systems that come in the shape of system images. Even though the Genode developers managed to build a day-to-day usable OS (called "Turmvilla") for their own use on that basis, there is a natural limit of how scalable such systems can be. Even for the developers, installing and updating such a system is a burden. Instead up building and installing a new system image on each update, users universally expect to install software from ready-to-use packages, and to update and configure the system in parts instead of a whole.

The discussion of suitable package-management approaches for Genode reaches several years back. The first step in this direction were custom tools for managing and integrating 3rd-party source code with the framework. But there was no notion of pre-built and easy-to-install packages, nor even a tangible idea of what a package in the context of Genode should represent. During a long period of experimentation, the developers encountered and fell in love with the Nix package manager. This encounter was followed by porting work, mind-bending architectural discussions, and a series of prototype scenarios. However, while those prototypes were technically sophisticated and interesting playgrounds, they were also complicated. A real-world solution remained cloudy.

At one time, it became clear that the universal notions of "software packages" and the role of a package manager made things more complicated than they should be. After all, Nix is designed for Unix-like systems with its existing ecosystem of libraries, build tools, conventions, and methodologies. In contrast, Genode opens up unique opportunities for simplification thanks to its breath of scope that covers the entire software stack including the build system, tool chain, the ABI and API design, the inter-component protocols, the dynamic linker, the system configuration, and the execution runtime. By taking a step back and soul-searching for the actual problem to solve, a strikingly simple new approach emerged. It is undeniably inspired by the virtues of Nix. But it leverages Genode in ways that wouldn't be possible with a ported version of Nix. For example, it facilitates Genode's notion of library ABIs to largely decouple libraries from applications and thereby completely eliminates transitive build-time dependencies. Or as another example, by introducing sensible categories of packaged content, the need for a package description language disappeared.

Genode's release 17.05 contains the new packaging tools. Even though they are still labeled as experimental, the release comes with several examples of modest system scenarios based on them. Other prominent news are a feature-complete version of VirtualBox 5 for the NOVA microkernel, the update of Qt to version 5.8, added support for the Nim programming language, a new tool chain based on GCC 6.3 including Ada support, new tools for monitoring network traffic and CPU load, greatly enhanced flexibility of the init component, and a brand new timeout API. All these topics are covered in detail by the release documentation.

There's something unsettling about these brutalist redesigns by Pierre Buttin - but I don't outright hate them. There's something very functional about them.

All this competition.

Ars does a duo-interview with two Android execs at Google.

Android's creator, Andy Rubin, has been teasing his next big project for a while now, and today he finally unveiled everything: his new company Essential has a new smartphone, an Amazon Echo-like device with its own operating system, and a few accessories. Just another company trying to break into the smartphone market, surely, were it not for the creator of Danger and Android at the helm.

The phone has all the latest and greatest specifications, including an almost bezelless screen. It makes an interesting design choice by placing the front camera inside the screen at the top, which I'm sure most people will either not care about or deeply hate. I want to see the whole thing in person first, but I like that they at least try to 'own' this design choice. Another rather unique element is the ceramic back, which is a material choice we'll probably see more of over the coming years.

Of particular note: the company is hinting at using stock Android, with fast updates. I've seen those promises before, so I'm not exactly taking them at face value when I hear them for the 1038th time.

Their Amazon Echo competitor, the Essential Home, has a screen and sports its own operating system, but the company doesn't have a whole lot to say about it other than some marketing fluff, such as this:

So probably Android with some custom API bits on top. They do state they are focusing on privacy, doing the AI and API bits on-device instead of in the cloud - which is a plus for me, but I'm not sure normal people really care too much about this at all.

In Rubin's blog post announcing the company and its devices, he has some... Interesting words to say about what Android has become.

Is it just me, or is Rubin not happy with who his child has become?

They managed to install a hex editor and a mod loader onto unmodified Super Mario World cartridges running on unmodified Super Nintendos. With the mod loader, you can, for instance, give Mario telekinesis powers. This is somewhat reminiscent of a similar extraordinary feat in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night we talked about earlier this year.

I'm starting to sound like a broken record on this topic, but it can't be said often enough: the preservation of software - whether important world-changing or not - is crucial if we want to document the history of where software came from, and where it's going to.

postmarketOS (I love the name) aims to do the same for smartphones. A small Linux distribution with a phone interface, designed to be easy to update and maintain to solve the problems Android poses in this area. The project is in its infancy, so it needs a lot of help to further realise its vision.

This is a great idea, and it could breathe life into devices not even LineageOS can keep alive.

It's interesting - and unsurprising - that while Google is investing in server-side AI by developing its own custom AI hardware, Apple is apparently investing in keeping AI local. It fits right into the different approaches to privacy by these two companies, which is why I find this entirely unsurprising.

As a sidenote - isn't it interesting how when new technologies come around, we try to offload it to a specific chip, only to then bring it back into the main processor later on?