OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Tabletop gaming has a white male terrorism problem

Thom Holwerda 2016-04-03 Games 1 Comment

White male terrorism is the white underbelly of the gaming community, meant to terrify and disrupt the lives of those who threaten the status quo by race, gender, or sexuality. It succeeds because the majority of men in the community are too cowardly to stand against the bullies and the terrorists. At best, these cowards ignore the problem. At worst, they join the terrorists in blaming their victims for the abuse. The point of online terrorism is that it is endless, omnipresent, and anonymous. I have no way of knowing whether the person with whom I’m gaming is safe or the person who wants to â€œslit throat and fuck the gash until drown in cumâ€. Knowing that the person sending those e-mails could be anyone and the community will not support me if/when I am attacked keeps myself and many others from the hobby.

Happy Sunday.

Apple turns 40

Thom Holwerda 2016-04-01 Apple 51 Comments

In 2016 Apple has become a very different kind of company - the most valuable company in the world, it so happens. Over the past 40 years, Apple has gone from a struggling upstart challenging IBM and Microsoft to being a dominant platform vendor. A company founded by two friends who bonded over a love of hacking the long-distance phone network has become a major economic gatekeeper engaged in historic policy fights with the government. It is a remarkable, improbable success story.

After forty years, Apple is doing better than ever before - yet to me, it feels like they are doing worse than ever. To me, they reached their zenith about 12-15 years ago. I don't like companies for how popular they are, how widespread they are, how successful they are. All those things are irrelevant to me. They have no bearing on my enjoyment of products.

To me, the highpoint of Apple was the PowerPC G4 era. The iMac G4, the iBook G4, the PowerMac G4, and the Cube. I owned all four of those, and still feel remorse for getting rid of them. I liked Apple because of the soul and emotion it used to put into its machines.

I like things that aren't perfect. I like things that are inherently broken. It takes imperfection to notice perfection. I like things that could be better - but make up for it with a sense of uniqueness, personality, charm, quirkiness. Apple doesn't make products like that anymore. Everything they make now is cold, calculated, beancounted. Their products no longer have any soul, any emotion, any individuality. It's an endless parade of cold, dead metal.

I wish they'd loosen up a bit.

The struggle to bring back Baldur’s Gate after 17 years

Thom Holwerda 2016-04-01 Games 26 Comments

Baldur's Gate is one of the most revered RPG series in video game history. It helped write the book on Western-style RPGs, putting a focus on memorable followers and party-based combat, and tossing it all in a blender with a dungeon and a dragon. Nearly two decades later, it's back.

Beamdog is a small studio, but they have grand - verging on grandiose - plans. The company was founded by Trent Oster, BioWare co-founder, and Cameron Tofer, former BioWare lead programmer. They've been quietly tinkering away on Enhanced Editions of classic BioWare and Black Isle RPGs like Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, and Icewind Dale, culminating in today's release of an all-new expansion, Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear. Oh, and they also recently brought on David Gaider, aka That Guy Who Made A Lot Of The Best Words In Dragon Age And Other BioWare RPGs For 17 Years.

The Infinity engine games - the Baldur's Gate games, Icewind Dale, and of course the best one, Planescape: Torment - all make up the first golden age of RPGs. And today, we are lucky enough to witness the second golden age of RPGs, with games like Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland II, and Torment: Tides of Numenera, and cleaned-up versions of the classics. It's a really great time to be a fan of classic RPGs.

And it's about to get even better.

"Basically, Baldur's Gate III, every two weeks when we call Wizards of the Coast, something comes up," said Daigle. "The Baldur's Gate III thing, when are we going to do that? I think the answer is when the right people and the right partners line up, something big will happen."

Yes please.

Microsoft: Windows Phone isn’t our focus this year

Thom Holwerda 2016-03-30 Windows 15 Comments

Microsoft kicked off its Build developer conference in San Francisco with a focus on Windows 10, bots, and developer tools, but there was something missing: Windows Phone. A single demo of Skype running on a Windows Phone was the only time a phone running Windows 10 Mobile appeared for longer than a few seconds, and it felt like Microsoft was more focused on Windows 10 for Xbox and HoloLens. I got the chance to speak to Windows chief Terry Myerson briefly after today's keynote, and it's clear Microsoft focus isn't on phones this year.

"We're fully committed to that 4-inch screen, there will be a time for it to be our focus, but right now it's part of the family but it's not the core of where I hope to generate developer interest over the next year," explains Myerson. "There's no lack of recognition to realize how important that form factor is, but for Microsoft with Windows and for our platform it's the wrong place for us to lead."

So, like any other year then.

Microsoft brings Bash to Windows

Thom Holwerda 2016-03-30 Windows 57 Comments

This isn't Bash or Ubuntu running in a VM. This is a real native Bash Linux binary running on Windows itself. It's fast and lightweight and it's the real binaries. This is a genuine Ubuntu image on top of Windows with all the Linux tools I use like awk, sed, grep, vi, etc. It's fast and it's lightweight. The binaries are downloaded by you - using apt-get - just as on Linux, because it is Linux. You can apt-get and download other tools like Ruby, Redis, emacs, and on and on. This is brilliant for developers that use a diverse set of tools like me.

Windows just got cancer.

Update: here's more information on the technical implementation. In short, it's a sort-of reverse WINE - it translates Linux syscalls to Windows syscalls in real time.

Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10

Thom Holwerda 2016-03-30 Windows 47 Comments

According to sources at Canonical, Ubuntu Linux's parent company, and Microsoft, you'll soon be able to run Ubuntu on Windows 10.

This will be more than just running the Bash shell on Windows 10. After all, thanks to programs such as Cygwin or MSYS utilities, hardcore Unix users have long been able to run the popular Bash command line interface (CLI) on Windows.

With this new addition, Ubuntu users will be able to run Ubuntu simultaneously with Windows. This will not be in a virtual machine, but as an integrated part of Windows 10.

We'll learn more today, but this sounds like a pretty cool thing to have - and something that can replace Cygwin.

Sortix 1.0 released

Thom Holwerda 2016-03-29 OS News 10 Comments

I'm happy to announce the release of Sortix 1.0. This is the first self-hosting and installable release.

Sortix is a small self-hosting operating-system aiming to be a clean and modern POSIX implementation. It is a hobbyist operating system written from scratch with its own base system, including kernel and standard library, as well as ports of third party software.

We first reported on Sortix (version 0.9) a year ago.

FBI gains access to San Bernadino iPhone without Apple

Thom Holwerda 2016-03-29 Legal 27 Comments

After months of work, the FBI finally has a way into the San Bernardino iPhone. In a court filing today, prosecutors told the court the new method for breaking into the phone is sound, and Apple's assistance is no longer required. "The government has now successfully accessed the data stored on Farook's iPhone," the filing reads, "and therefore no longer requires assistance from Apple." The filing provides no further details on the nature of the new method. Still, the result effectively finishes the court fight that has consumed Apple since February.

This is one of the strangest cases in technology I've seen in a long time.

Hunch: the FBI realised it would never win the case, and got out when it still could.

OpenBSD 5.9 released

Thom Holwerda 2016-03-29 OpenBSD 10 Comments

OpenBSD 5.9 has been released a few days early! As always, OpenBSD doesn't do a very good job of summarising the most important changes in this new release, but that's okay - OpenBSD isn't targeted at people like me who know very little about the BSDs. It doesn't really matter - those of you using OpenBSD were probably already aware of what was coming anyway, and if not, the release notes will still make complete sense to you.

The Verge’s Oculus Rift review

Thom Holwerda 2016-03-28 Games 27 Comments

"Just a few more months" has been the mantra of virtual reality since people started getting excited about the Oculus Rift, and saying it after the headset is released feels like either a huge cop-out or a sign that the VR we want may never actually arrive. But it's impossible to think of all the unreleased Oculus Touch experiences I've tried - like three-dimensional painting tool Quill, Old West shooting gallery Dead & Buried, and a VR version of Rock Band - and not feel like the Rift's best days are still ahead of it.

For the first time, though, there's something to do while you wait. The high cost of buying and running high-end VR headsets makes them inaccessible to many people, and the Rift in particular is relentlessly focused on gaming. Within these limitations, though, the Rift makes a good case for seated VR, and it lays a solid foundation for what's to come. The headset you can buy today is not Oculus' most ambitious vision for virtual reality - but it’s a vision that Oculus has successfully delivered on.

I really don't know what to make of the current crop of VR headsets. I just don't see the appeal in strapping an ugly hardware monstrosity on your head to play a few video games or watch some movies. There are several weird disconnects; you can look around - but not in 360 degrees, because the cables make that impossible. You can move your head to look - but you need buttons to walk. It feels more like a glorified display setup than VR, really.

On top of that, while I love to dive into a carefully crafted game or movie world mentally, I wouldn't want to do so physically. When you're using one of these things, you are effectively wearing a blindfold, with no idea of what's happening around you. I don't know about other people, but to me, that just sounds terrifying - and a little distopian.

I appreciate the science and engineering that's currently being done on VR, and I'm in no way saying this won't go anywhere - just that it doesn't seem like my personal cup of tea. On top of that, there are probably a ton of non-gaming uses where technology like this could really shine.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for VR to grow up into the holodeck.

Introducing Warp3D Nova for AmigaOS 4

Thom Holwerda 2016-03-28 Amiga & AROS 10 Comments

A-EON Technology is pleased to announce the upcoming release of Warp3D Nova, its advanced 2D/3D shader based graphics system for AmigaOS 4 supporting selected RadeonHD 7xxx and Radeon Rx graphics cards with Southern Islands series GPUs.

Warp3D Nova delivers shader-based 3D graphics acceleration along with perpixel lighting and fluid rendering of larger vertex arrays as well as many other advanced graphics features. The addition of programmable shaders gives AmigaOS 4 developers an exciting new world of graphics possibilities. Warp3D Nova is a huge leap forward over earlier Warp3D and MiniGL implementations.

The AmigaOS clearly isn't the state of the art any longer - in case you've been living under a rock - but I am always surprised by the amount of development the platform is still seeing. Great work.

Submitted by garyd 2016-03-28 Ubuntu 17 Comments

After the first few Ubuntu smartphones, it only made sense for Ubuntu to find its way to a tablet as well. The Aquaris M10 can now be preordered, and has the ability to switch between tablet mode and desktop mode, providing an interface for each.

When you switch to desktop mode, the scopes become windows which you can navigate using the touchscreen or with a mouse. You can also connect the tablet to a monitor to view your work on a larger screen. This convergence facilitates multitasking and expands the tablet’s possibilities as a work tool. What's more, it includes apps like LibreOffice and GIMP Image Editor, so you can use it without restrictions in a professional environment.

We're getting ever closer to an interface which automatically adapts to whatever screen or input devices it's connected to, which is something I personally would go for in a heartbeat. I find it incredibly silly that we're lugging around a phone and a laptop, have a desktop at home, and maybe even a tablet, when many of these devices are more than powerful enough to take on almost all computing tasks of any of them.

The Ubuntu tablet comes in two flavours, and starts at â‚¬259.

How Smartphones Will Become Unboring

David Adams 2016-03-28 Wireless 15 Comments

The release of the iPhone SE is emblematic of the "boringness" of the smartphone landscape. For the last few years, the only thing exciting about new smartphone releases was that they kept getting bigger. Now the tide has turned. An article at the Atlantic makes an interesting parallel: the codex, or the innovation now known as "the book" hasn't seen many innovations in centuries, but that doesn't mean that books are boring. It just means that the innovation is at the edges. The article points at the release of the Caterpillar S60 smartphone, designed for industrial use and featuring a thermal imaging camera, as indicative of a new trend of specialization that might make the mobile computing market interesting as it extends into ever more narrow niches.

Submitted by JPisini 2016-03-24 KDE 61 Comments

Now here's a blast from the (somewhat recent) past: the Trinity Desktop Environment. TDE is a fork of the last available release of the KDE 3.x series, coming into existence in 2008. The project's been under steady development ever since, and the most recent release is R14.0.3. since this is just a maintenance release, it might be more fitting to look at the release notes for R14.0.0, the base release, from december 2014.

Unlike previous releases TDE R14.0.0 has been in development for over two years. This extended development period has allowed us to create a better, more stable and more feature-rich product than previous TDE releases. R14 is brimming with new features, such as a new hardware manager based on udev (HAL is no longer required), full network-manager 0.9 support, a brand new compositor (compton), built-in threading support, and much more!

Honestly, I have no idea how many people still see value in a maintained KDE 3.x desktop, but since I've personally always been a fan of KDE 3 (KDE 4 never really managed to convince me), I'm glad his project is still around offering the option for those among us who want to use KDE 3.

Apple’s first foray into original TV is a series about apps

Thom Holwerda 2016-03-24 Apple 14 Comments

Apple announced on Thursday that it was working with the entertainer Will.i.am and two veteran TV executives, Ben Silverman and Howard T. Owens, on a new show that will spotlight the app economy.

"One of the things with the app store that was always great about it was the great ideas that people had to build things and create things," Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet software and services, said in an interview.

So a series about overworked, stressed out, underpaid, barely getting by developers who are at the mercy of Apple's approval and rejection process, and who worry about Apple stealing their idea, banning them, and then implementing said idea in iOS+1?

So a drama, then. I'm sure 2009, when apps still mattered, is going to love this.

Twitter kills TweetDeck, Facebook stops BlackBerry development

Thom Holwerda 2016-03-23 Internet 24 Comments

Two high-profile companies are shutting down development for two platforms this week. First, Facebook has announced it is ceasing development of the Facebook and WhatsApp applications for BlackBerry OS.

The app landscape continues to evolve, and in ways that are not always within our control. Recently, Facebook made the decision to discontinue support of their essential APIs for BlackBerry and WhatsApp announced they would end support for BlackBerry 10 and BBOS at the end of 2016.

In addition, Twitter announced it is ceasing development of its only application for desktop Windows, TweetDeck.

To better focus on enhancing your TweetDeck experience, we'll no longer support a standalone Windows app. If you use Windows, you'll still be able to visit TweetDeck on the web - nothing is changing about TweetDeck itself, just where you access it from. This change will take effect on April 15th.

TweetDeck was the only desktop Twitter client the company ever supported (it bought TweetDeck several years ago), and while it is far from perfect, it's the only desktop Twitter client that was halfway decent. Twitter never created a proper Win32 client, and neither did anyone else. They do have a Metro client developed by a third party, but it's pretty terrible and a horrible user experience on a desktop machine.

Unlikely as it is, I'm still stubbornly holding out hope somebody creates a nice and elegant Win32 Twitter client, because with the shutdown of TweetDeck, I don't have any options for using Twitter on the computing platform I use the most (i.e., Windows).

Submitted by cbass 2016-03-22 OS News 2 Comments

As a follow-up to Genode's 16.02 release, the project just published an in-depth article describing the experience with the RISC-V architecture and the steps taken to enable Genode on this platform.

The article is targeted at enthusiasts interested in the practical use of RISC-V and can also be used as a guideline on how to bring Genode to a different CPU architecture.

FBI finds other way to hack iPhone, withdraws Apple case

Thom Holwerda 2016-03-22 Legal 34 Comments

Yesterday, the government made a surprising retreat in the San Bernardino encryption case, after an unnamed source revealed a new method of breaking iPhone lockscreen protections. After a hastily assembled conference call, the parties agreed to put the court order on hold until it could be determined whether Apple's help was still necessary.

But excerpts from a court transcript of that proceeding, published here for the first time, show the government was far less prepared for the new method than some have assumed. "We only learned about this possibility today, this morning," Assistant US Attorney Tracy Wilkison told the judge in the conference call. "We have a good faith basis at this point in order to bring it up." That timeline is consistent with recent court filings, which show the first successful demonstration of the method coming that Sunday.

What a weird story. Jonathan Zdziarksi has a theory about the supposed hack.

How Vizio and Google radically reinvented the TV

Thom Holwerda 2016-03-22 Google 29 Comments

Vizio, the successful American TV maker, has created a very interesting solution to the smart TV problem. Instead of building yet another smart TV platform or using Android TV, the company has worked very closely with Google these past two years to integrate Chromecast - renamed today to just Google Cast - right into the TV. Vizio then ships a pretty good Android tablet alongside their TV, with all the Google Cast stuff you already know from Chromecast built right in.

The company's solution is the Vizio Tablet Remote, which isn't a remote at all: it's a six-inch tablet running stock Android Lollipop on an eight-core Snapdragon processor with a very nice 1080p screen, a soft-touch back, dual speakers, and a wireless charging cradle. It lacks any dedicated buttons to control the TV - it only turns into a "remote" when you open Vizio's new SmartCast app or kick off a streaming session from another app that supports Cast, like Hulu or Netflix.

But you don't have to cast anything to the TV at all - after all, it's just an Android tablet. You can go ahead and watch Netflix on the Smart Remote if you want. You can download apps from the Play Store. You can cast Netflix to the TV and use the tablet to check Twitter. You can let a kid play games on the tablet and control the entire TV with the SmartCast app on your iPhone. The tablet is basically another small TV.

This is exactly what a smart TV should be. I have a Chromecast - the current hockey puck model - and it's probably one of the best technology products I've ever owned. It's so simple and elegant, and it just works. Now that I have it, I can't imagine ever having gone without it. Instead of shoving yet another ugly box underneath my TV or learning and installing apps on yet another platform, I can just use the damn phone in my pocket. Why would I want it any other way?

Vizio and Google have been smart about this whole thing too. The Google Cast portion of the TV is isolated from everything else, and updates comes straight from Google, so it's always up to date and in line with any other Google Cast device.

The big upsaide for both Vizio and consumers? They don't have to worry at all about getting deals with content creators and owners.

But by dropping any desire to put apps on the TV itself, Vizio completely sidesteps the platform war entirely. Every app in the Android and the iOS app stores that supports Google Cast is a P-Series app. And iOS and Android apps are the apps developers care about most, so they're often the best apps from a given service.

That means when Netflix and Hulu update their Android and iOS apps, they're also updating the P-Series experience. Vizio doesn't need to beg HBO and ESPN to support its TVs anymore, because they already support Google Cast - and thus the P-Series. There's no NFL Sunday Ticket app for the Apple TV, but the iOS and Android apps support Cast, so P-Series owners can pay to stream football.

Brilliant, and the future of smart TVs. These silly anachronistic glorified settop boxes like Android TV and the Apple TV? They are relics, old-world thinking. A TV should be a dumb screen ready to receive input from my phone or tablet, and Vizio built just that.

All they need to do now is ship to Europe.

Today’s Apple event spells the end for OS X

Thom Holwerda 2016-03-21 macOS 81 Comments

Apple's new iPad Pro is the twelfth iPad to be released since the original debuted back in 2010, and it borrows features from two of Apple's existing tablets. The new iPad Pro has the size and weight of the iPad Air 2 - 9.7-inches, which Apple notes is by far the most popular of its three iPad size choices - while bringing over the power and accessories of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro launched last year. (Yes, the new iPad Pro and the existing iPad Pro have the same name - you'll have to get used to identifying them by size.)

Apple's event today was one of the most telling events it has held in years, and I specifically chose the new iPad Pro 9.7" to focus on. As far as products and announcements go, the event wasn't all that monumental; it was the tone and wording that really set this event apart from all others. This wasn't Apple talking about new products today - this was Apple talking about how it sees the future of personal computing.

On several occasions during the event, Apple referred to the iPad Pro - both the new 9.7" model and the old 12.9" model - as their vision for the future of personal computing, and Tim Cook referred to the 12.9" model as a "giant step" toward the "future of computing".

Read between the lines of today's event, and you could clearly see the writing on the wall: after letting the Mac and specifically OS X languish since the release of iOS, and after internal struggles about which of the two - or both - platforms to focus on going forward, it seems like Apple is letting the world know that it finally made a choice, and that choice is iOS.

I'm not basing this solely on today's event, of course, but also on the lack of development on OS X, the lack of consistent Mac hardware updates over the years, and insights I'm getting from people who... Know Apple things better than we do. I already mentioned it in the previous news item, and I'm going to state it plainly and bluntly again to drive the point home: as far as Apple is concerned, the Mac and OS X are the past. Their eventual death won't be sudden or clear-cut, but the gradual decline of the platform's importance in Apple has been ongoing for a long time now, and will only accelerate from here on out.

I'm not saying this is either good or bad - those of you who follow me on Twitter and are intimately aware of my 'life' with iOS can guess in which camp I belong - I'm just spelling out what's pretty obvious between the lines. I'll leave it up to you if this makes you happy or sad.

We've got an interesting number of years ahead.