OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Introducing the Google Drive plug-in for Microsoft Office

Thom Holwerda 2015-07-21 Google 15 Comments

With Google Drive, you can keep all your important files in one place, then open them with your choice of apps and devices. Building on this open approach, we recently made it possible to launch your favorite desktop applications directly from Google Drive. And today we're taking it a step further by bringing Google Drive to Microsoft Office. Using the new Google Drive plug-in, people using Office for Windows can now open their Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents stored in Drive, then save any changes back to Drive once they're done.

There's an interesting bit of speculation making the rounds about recent activity between Microsoft and Google. Microsoft is, step by step, selling off or shutting down all parts of the company that directly compete with Google - ads, maps, and even Windows Phone seems to be contested right now - which may mean nothing, or, it may mean closer cooperation between the two companies is afoot. Bing is interesting exception, but even that may be sold off in some way sooner rather than later (although Microsoft will most likely retain at least several crucial parts of it for Cortana).

Don't be surprised when you see more Microsoft-oriented software from Google in the near future.

What did the Ignore button do in Windows 3.1?

Thom Holwerda 2015-07-21 Windows No Comments

Now, your reaction to this might be, "How could this possibly work? You are just randomly ignoring instructions!" But the strange thing is, this idea was so crazy it actually worked, or at least worked a lot of the time. You might have to hit Ignore a dozen times, but there's a good chance that eventually the bad values in the registers will get overwritten by good values (and it probably won't take long because the 8086 has so few registers), and the program will continue seemingly-normally.

Your random periodic reminder to read The Old New Thing.

FTC investigation into Apple heats up

Thom Holwerda 2015-07-21 Apple 8 Comments

The FTC has launched an investigation into Apple's dealings with competing music streaming services in its App Store, according to multiple sources. The investigation is targeting Apple's 30 percent fee charged to subscription services who sign up new users through the App Store. This has been a major point of conflict between Apple and rival music services as The Verge reported back in May.

The FTC's inquiries have picked up over the recent weeks, on the heels of its initial investigation into whether Apple pressured labels to kill Spotify's free streaming tier. Sources with direct knowledge of the matter tell The Verge that the FTC has already issued subpoenas to music streaming services as it gathers more information to determine whether Apple's App Store rules are anticompetitive.

The sooner they crack open the App Store, the better.

Online dating website for cheaters gets hacked

Thom Holwerda 2015-07-20 Privacy, Security 36 Comments

Ashley Madison, an online dating website that specifically targets people looking to have an affair, has been hacked by a group that calls itself Impact Team. A cache of data has been released by the Impact Team, including user profiles, company financial records, and "other proprietary information." The company's CEO, Noel Bilderman, confirmed with KrebsOnSecurity that they had been hacked, but did not speak about the extent of the breach.

I'm really surprised by the amount of comments online stating that this is not a problem, because they're just "cheaters" anyway, so they don't deserve privacy, right?

Cheating on your "loved" one is despicable, low, and disgusting (and an immediate, unequivocal relationship/friendship termination in my book), but one, it's not illegal, and two, even if it were, mob justice is not the way to go. This hack and possible release of personal information is just as bad as any other hack.

Submitted by wigry 2015-07-20 Apple 11 Comments

After 22 years, 2 months, 2 days and 2 hours since System 6.0.1 was released, this is a summary of the visible changes. There have been many bugs fixed and many features added that are not immediately visible - they will enable developers to create better future products. Be sure to also read the Shortcuts file on the SystemTools3 disk for more information.

Crazy.

The mobile web sucks

Thom Holwerda 2015-07-20 Internet 31 Comments

Nilay Patel, writing for The Verge:

But man, the web browsers on phones are terrible. They are an abomination of bad user experience, poor performance, and overall disdain for the open web that kicked off the modern tech revolution. Mobile Safari on my iPhone 6 Plus is a slow, buggy, crashy affair, starved for the phone's paltry 1GB of memory and unable to rotate from portrait to landscape without suffering an emotional crisis. Chrome on my various Android devices feels entirely outclassed at times, a country mouse lost in the big city, waiting to be mugged by the first remnant ad with a redirect loop and something to prove.

With The Verge itself being the poster child for how slow the mobile (and non-mobile) web can be, this article did leave a bit of a funny taste in my mouth. Luckily, The Verge's parent company - Vox Media - is going to put its money where its mouth is, and focus entirely on performance - with solid promises we can hold them to. Very nice.

Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 available for download

Thom Holwerda 2015-07-20 .NET 9 Comments

Today, I am excited to announce that Visual Studio 2015 and .Net 4.6 are available for download.

These releases are the next big step in the journey we outlined last November to bring the productivity of Visual Studio and .NET to any developer working on any kind of application while also delivering a new level of innovation in developer productivity for all Visual Studio developers.

Guest post by charlieg 2015-07-19 Haiku 23 Comments

A significant new development as Haiku continues pushing towards a stable release.

Since the switch to our package manager, there was no longer a way to influence the boot process at all. The only file you could change was the UserBootscript which is started only after Tracker and Deskbar; the whole system is already up at this point.

The launch_daemon gives the power back to you, but also allow software you install to automatically be started on system boot as well. You can also even prevent system components from being started at all if you so wish.

A summary of features:

Furthermore, it allows for event based application start, start on demand, a multi-threaded boot process, and even enables you to talk to servers before they actually started.

Read the full article for a detailed description.

The smartphone Nintendo should make

Thom Holwerda 2015-07-19 Games 9 Comments

Ladies and gents, meet Smart Boy, the Game Boy-inspired smartphone. Designed by Pierre Cerveau, it has everything a Nintendo lover could dream of giving a phone, from power-saving 8-bit mode to a 'Game Bat' controller that basically turns the thing into a DS. I might actually cry because this beautiful phone will probably never be made.

Probably a bit too retro for most, but if Nintendo made this, I would be all over it.

Who’s actually buying iPods these days?

Thom Holwerda 2015-07-19 Apple 30 Comments

With this week's update to the entire iPod lineup, many have been asking "Who are iPods even for these days?" Well, I worked the last 3 years managing an electronics department for Target, and have sold a lot of Apple devices over that time. Since Apple doesn't break down demographics for who is buying each device, I thought I would share my experience.

Kind of exactly as you expect it to be.

Windows 10’s forced automatic updates are a good idea

Thom Holwerda 2015-07-17 Windows 42 Comments

Microsoft will force Windows 10 Home users to download and install updates to its operating system without any options to turn them off. A final version of the OS, distributed to testers this week, contains a clause in the end user license agreement (EULA) that reveals Windows 10 users will receive "automatic updates without any additional notice." The changes have left some Windows users concerned.

We'll get some registry switch within a matter of weeks or even days I'm sure, but the prospect of forced automatic updates is an odd one - I've had some issues with Windows updates not working out very well in the recent past, and as such, I kind of like to retain control over how and when updates are applied.

That being said, I'm sure it's great news for the huge loads of outdated, insecure machines you have to fix on holidays while visiting family.

US exhausts IPv4 addresses

David Adams 2015-07-17 Internet 14 Comments

Ars Says, "Remember how, a decade ago, we told you that the Internet was running out of IPv4 addresses? Well, it took a while, but that day is here now: Asia, Europe, and Latin America have been parceling out scraps for a year or more, and now the ARIN wait list is here for the US, Canada, and numerous North Atlantic and Caribbean islands. Only organizations in Africa can still get IPv4 addresses as needed. The good news is that IPv6 seems to be picking up the slack."

Submitted by flypig 2015-07-17 Wireless No Comments

As Jolla hinted earlier this month, it announced the first Sailfish licensee at Mobile World Congress Asia as being Intex. Intex is claimed by Jolla to be India's second largest smartphone manufacturer, and manufactures in both India and China, and has a range of Android phones sold under the Aqua brand. The phone should appear by the end of the year.

Harvey OS, Bringing Plan9 to the Earth

Submitted by Ãlvaro Jurado 2015-07-17 OS News 6 Comments

Harvey is an effort to get the Plan 9 code working with gcc and clang. According to the team: "Our aim is to provide a modern, distributed, 64 bit operating system that does away with Unix's wrinkles and allows for new ways of working. At this point we have an AMD 64 bit kernel with many changes and improvements. For example, a new modern, simplified syscall system. We use gdb to investigate problems and we can compile in Linux or OSX using Harvey's headers and libs; no need to change anything else. It's fast compiling the whole system and boots quickly. Though we are working in many other features, all Plan 9 traditional userland is available. At this moment, we are working to move console and mouse out of kernel, ttyfs file server in user space, and improved ANSI/POSIX environment where gcc or clang can live, and we plan to add X11 with rio-like multiplexing, bash and other shells and many other well known things that people want in their machines. We are focusing in server set up for now, but keeping in mind end-user. All of this, of course, keeping classic and beautiful distributed features of old Plan 9."

“Telly Off:” Android TV vs Firefox TV

David Adams 2015-07-17 Hardware 8 Comments

The battle for Smart TV dominance continues to ratchet up, with Google and Firefox now both wading into the same connected space. The former has reignited its living room ambitions via Android TV, while open source rival Firefox has partnered with Panasonic. You might reasonably expect both to be cut from much the same cloth, but having lived with new tellies from each camp, I can reveal there’s a world of difference. One is lithe, intuitive and fun to use. The other isn’t.

Hacking Team Android App Could Bypass Google Play Code Review

David Adams 2015-07-17 Privacy, Security No Comments

"Security researchers at Trend Micro's Trend Labs have uncovered a trick in a sample of a fake news application for Android created by the network exploitation tool provider Hacking Team that may have allowed the company's customers to sneak spyware through the Google Play store's code review. While the application in question may have only been downloaded fewer than 50 times from Google Play, the technique may have been used in other Android apps developed for Hacking Team customers--and may now be copied by others trying to get malware onto Android devices." OSNews readers would have never fallen for this ruse, since the name of the app was BeNews. Once we noticed there was nothing about BeOS in these, we discern its nefarious intent.

Windows 10 Downgrade Options

David Adams 2015-07-15 Windows 34 Comments

For one year, Microsoft is allowing consumers and some businesses with systems running Genuine Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 a free upgrade to Windows 10. But when we asked: Once you upgrade for free to Windows 10, is it possible to downgrade back to Windows 8 or 7 without having to buy a new OS license? Microsoft said those who upgrade to Windows 10 for free will have one month to revert back to the old OS on their device.

Interview With Former Mozilla Exec Behind H5OS

David Adams 2015-07-15 Original OSNews Interviews 15 Comments

A Hong Kong-based startup run by former Mozilla President Li Gong aims to take on Android with its new Web-based operating system, H5OS. Similar to the Firefox operating system from Mozilla, H50S is based on HTML5, a website development language that tries to give Web apps the same capabilities as so-called native applications that are downloaded to a device like the iPhone. More on H5OS here.

More Microsoft Apps Are Coming to Android and iPhone

David Adams 2015-07-15 Windows 6 Comments

After cutting 7,800 staff and taking a $7.6bn loss on its Windows Phone division, Microsoft’s chief executive Satya Nadella intends to ramp up the company’s invasion of iPhone and Android with its apps and services. While the write-down has been seen as effectively neutering the remainder of the smartphone business Microsoft bought from Nokia in 2012, Nadella insists that his company is not exiting the smartphone market.

Commodore PET Returns: as a Phone

David Adams 2015-07-15 Android 4 Comments

If the name "Commodore" conjures up images of clicking keyboards, beige boxes, and blinking command lines rather than buttery smooth ballads, this one's for you. Yes, that mainstay of '80s home computing is back, this time as a mobile phone. The Commodore PET--which shares its name with the iconic all-in-one computer released in 1977--might not run Commodore BASIC, but it does feature a customised version of Android 5.0 Lollipop, a 5.5-inch 1080p IPS display, and a pair of emulators for running old Commodore software. Update: It's not quite as stylish as the Macintosh phone.