In addition, you're also going to start seeing an option to "stream" some apps you don't have installed, right from Google Search, provided you're on good Wifi. For example, with one tap on a "Stream" button next to the HotelTonight app result, you'll get a streamed version of the app, so that you can quickly and easily find what you need, and even complete a booking, just as if you were in the app itself. And if you like what you see, installing it is just a click away. This uses a new cloud-based technology that we're currently experimenting with.

With Continuum, capable Windows 10 Mobile devices will be able to act like PCs, hooking up to keyboards, mice, and monitors for a full Windows desktop experience, and Microsoft is looking into ways of expanding these capabilities. Apparently, that involves investigating the possibility of running Win32 apps from phones, according to Microsoft's Kevin Gallo during the Connect() 2015 conference.

Enough time has passed that I feel safe blogging about my prior project here at Microsoft, "Midori". In the months to come, I'll publish a dozen-or-so articles covering the most interesting aspects of this project, and my key take-aways.

Midori was a research/incubation project to explore ways of innovating throughout Microsoft's software stack. This spanned all aspects, including the programming language, compilers, OS, its services, applications, and the overall programming models. We had a heavy bias towards cloud, concurrency, and safety. The project included novel "cultural" approaches too, being 100% developers and very code-focused, looking more like the Microsoft of today and hopefully tomorrow, than it did the Microsoft of 8 years ago when the project began.

MINIX3 now has support for live update and rerandomization of its system services. These features are based on LLVM bitcode compilation and instrumentation in combination with various run-time extensions. Live update and rerandomization support is currently fully functional, although still in an experimental state, not enabled by default, and available for x86 only. This document describes the basic idea, provides instructions on how to enable and use the functionality, provides more in-depth information for developers, and lists open issues and further reading material.

I've dropped the codename "Vienna" before on our weekly podcast and in the forums, but these renders are the first real look we've had at the design. Vienna ditches the Priv's slider in favor of the iconic BlackBerry layout, with a front-facing physical keyboard that is always present. The keyboard looks to be of the same size and design as that of the Priv's, but it's hard to tell simply based off of the renders alone.

If you look too closely, the old proof set artwork is pretty ugly, certainly nothing we could use if we wanted to build a larger museum exhibit, say 3x4 feet, or import the mask artwork into a PCB layout package to build a giant, working circuit board. The old artwork just wasn't going to cut it. So McNerney took a pair of high-resolution photomicrographs (kindly donated by reverse engineer extraordinaire, Christopher Tarnovski), and set out to trace every wire, transistor, resistor, and capacitor using Adobe Illustrator. Just hours before the 44th anniversary, he finished tracing the first, complete draft of the mask set artwork. The next step is to verify it against the schematics and try it out in simulation.

All that said, right now, it seems that choosing SteamOS over a Windows box means sacrificing a significant amount of performance on many (if not most) graphically intensive 3D games. That's a pretty big cost to bear, considering that Alienware sells its Windows-powered, console-style Alpha boxes at prices that are only $50 more expensive than identically outfitted SteamOS machines. That's not to mention the fact that Steam on Windows currently has thousands of games that aren't on SteamOS - including most AAA recent releases -while SteamOS has no similar exclusives to recommend it over Windows.

Hopefully, Valve and other Linux developers can continue improving SteamOS performance to the point where high-end games can be expected to at least run comparably between Linux and Windows. Until then, though, it's hard to recommend a SteamOS box to anyone who wants to get the best graphical performance out of their PC hardware.

The products, especially those built on iOS, Apple's operating system for mobile devices, no longer follow the well-known, well-established principles of design that Apple developed several decades ago. These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations, establishing Apple's well-deserved reputation for understandability and ease of use. Alas, Apple has abandoned many of these principles. True, Apple's design guidelines for developers for both iOS and the Mac OS X still pay token homage to the principles, but, inside Apple, many of the principles are no longer practiced at all. Apple has lost its way, driven by concern for style and appearance at the expense of understandability and usage.

Apple is destroying design. Worse, it is revitalizing the old belief that design is only about making things look pretty. No, not so! Design is a way of thinking, of determining people’s true, underlying needs, and then delivering products and services that help them. Design combines an understanding of people, technology, society, and business. The production of beautiful objects is only one small component of modern design: Designers today work on such problems as the design of cities, of transportation systems, of health care. Apple is reinforcing the old, discredited idea that the designer's sole job is to make things beautiful, even at the expense of providing the right functions, aiding understandability, and ensuring ease of use.

Today, the US Department of Energy announced that it had established a partnership with NVIDIA that would be enhancing the LLVM compiler collection. The goal will be to port an existing FORTRAN compiler that targets massively parallel GPUs. The results are expected to be released as open source in late 2016.

Cutting-edge research still universally involves Fortran; a trio of challengers wants in. While FORTRAN isn't a mainstream language, it's still heavily used in scientific computing, and there's lots of legacy code that relies on it. A lot of that code is maintained by people at the US National Labs, and the new project is being organized by staff at Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, and Los Alamos.

Firefox for iOS lets you take your favorite browser with you wherever you go with the Firefox features you already love including smart and flexible search, intuitive tab management, syncing with Firefox Accounts and Private Browsing.

The Windows 10 November update is available now to everyone running Windows 10. This first major update has a handful of visible features, a variety of bug fixes, and even some enterprise features. Microsoft's message to businesses is that if they were following the traditional policy of waiting for the first Service Pack or major update to Windows before deploying it, this is it: time to take the plunge.

It's also the time for gamers to make the switch too - in parallel with this release, Microsoft is rolling out the new Xbox Experience, which is based on Windows 10, and gives the dashboard a big shake-up.

While the iPad Pro was in many ways inevitable, it also points to a crisis of original thought at Apple, which has been coasting on the iPhone’s coattails for perhaps too long. At Apple, the solution to every problem is another iPhone. And the iPad Pro, like the new Apple TV and the Apple Watch, is really just another attempt to duplicate that singular success in other markets.

Tag Heuer has teamed up with Google and Intel to launch the Connected Watch, its first Android Wear timepiece. The Connected isn't just any average Android Wear watch, however. It's a $1,500 luxury timepiece clad in titanium and bearing more than a passing resemblance to Tag Heuer's analog watches.

"Yes, the iPad Pro is a replacement for a notebook or a desktop for many, many people. They will start using it and conclude they no longer need to use anything else, other than their phones," Cook argues in his distinctly Southern accent (he was born in Alabama). He highlights two other markets for his 12.9 inch devices, which go on sale online on Wednesday. The first are creatives: "if you sketch then it’s unbelievable..you don't want to use a pad anymore," Cook says.