OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Apple confirms its $3 billion deal for Beats Electronics

Thom Holwerda 2014-05-28 Apple 38 Comments

Apple, the company that turned digital music into a mainstream phenomenon, said on Wednesday that it was buying Beats Electronics, the rising music brand, for $3 billion, in a move that will help it play catch-up with rivals that offer subscription-based music services.

I still have no idea why Apple is buying these guys. Then again, that's probably why I'm not a billionaire.

Coincidentally, I find it highly entertaining that technically, this is now an Apple product.

Lisa Pascal development in Lisa Workshop

Thom Holwerda 2014-05-27 Apple 12 Comments

As a follow up to this and this story - Steven Troughton-Smith goes a step further.

Tonight's project: learn how to write code that runs on Apple's LisaOS. In this piece, I am using Lisa Office System 3.1, with Workshop 3.0.

As you can imagine, there hasn't been any kind of documentation on this in decades, so it was all learned through painful trial and error, and scouring old manuals for information. Fun!

The Apple Lisa emulator

Thom Holwerda 2014-05-27 Apple 35 Comments

I'm more or less assuming all of us are familiar with the Apple Lisa, Apple's and Steve Jobs' first attempt at turning Xerox PARC's work into a marketable product. It was a flop, but many of its ideas carried over onto the Macintosh, and in fact, Macintosh development took place on the Lisa.

Due to the fact few Lisas were sold, it's hard to get your hands on a working model, meaning most of us will never get the opportunity to actually use one. Luckily, there's a very advanced Lisa emulator available, written by Ray Arachelian. It's open source (GPL) and available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Setting it up is remarkably easy (there are non-hqx Lisa operating system files too), but do note that technically, you need to own a Lisa yourself in order to use the ROMs. But, of course you do.

The Lisa user interface takes a bit of time to get used to, as its terminology is a bit alien, and some things feel quite a bit arbitrary from our modern, harmonised perspective. For instance, it took me a while to figure out how to open a new file in the Lisa office applications; it turns out that you need to double-click a special kind of icon ('stationary'), which the Lisa calls 'tear off stationary', which creates what to me looks like a copy of said stationary icon. This icon is the actual new file; double-click it to open it.

I'm having quite some fun poking around the Lisa, and the emulator has been holding up perfectly - no crashes, and it's remarkably easy to use. I would definitely advise giving this a go if you have some spare time.

Everything is broken

Thom Holwerda 2014-05-26 In the News 110 Comments

It's hard to explain to regular people how much technology barely works, how much the infrastructure of our lives is held together by the IT equivalent of baling wire.

Computers, and computing, are broken.

Software sucks. It really, really sucks. I have yet to meet a piece of software that didn't make me go "...eh." several times per hour - whether it be a videogame, a browser, or an operating system.

Compile 68k Mac applications for System 1.1 in OS X 10.9

Thom Holwerda 2014-05-25 macOS 6 Comments

Like most of you, I've always wanted want to code and compile 68k Mac OS applications in OS X that work on System 1.1. This question kept me up night after night, but thanks to Steven Troughton-Smith, we now know that it is, indeed, possible. It started with a 68k application on System 6. Not long after, he managed to compile a simple application that worked on System 1.1. This test application's code is available on github.

This is possible using ksherlock's MPW Emulator, which, as the name implies, is an emulator that allows you to run the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop on any OS X 10.9 system (a case-insensitive HFS+ volume is required).

I'm glad this matter has been settled. In all seriousness, while the number of useful applications for this is probably limited, it's still very cool.

Guest post by ddc_ 2014-05-24 OS News 15 Comments

On May 23 Francisco J. Ballesteros announced a new operating system on the 9fans mailing list. Clive is influenced by the Nix (not to be confused with NixOS) and Plan 9 operating systems, featuring "zx" - a universal resource access protocol conceptually similar to Plan 9. The system is written in a modified version of the Go language.

More details are available in the design paper and in the manual.

The state of the Apple developer ecosystem

Thom Holwerda 2014-05-24 Apple 1 Comment

The 10 hours in a metal tube between London and San Francisco provide for some great thinking space. The flights to and from WWDC last year as every year offered plenty of time to take stock of where things are, what could be, and on the way back what it all means. With all the focus on iOS 7's new aesthetic, understandably the "iOS 7-only" mantra was top of everyone s minds. But as I sat in sessions eagerly watching talks about all the new technologies on iOS, something bigger struck me. Something that's taken almost an entire year to fully analyse.

An incredibly detailed look at the state of iOS and OS X development. Grab a drink.

My Trip to GNOME: a 3.10 Review

Howard Fosdick 2014-05-23 Gnome 30 Comments

Remember back when GNOME and KDE dominated Linux desktops? Seems like a long time ago, doesn't it? Yet it was only three years ago, in April 2011, that GNOME 3 was released. Its radically redesigned interface shook up everyone. Some eagerly adopted it. Others left GNOME.

In this brief review I take a fresh look at GNOME today, as it's currently distributed in several popular Linux distributions.

New Windows 8.1 SKU: Windows 8.1 with Bing

Thom Holwerda 2014-05-23 Windows 23 Comments

As we move forward, many of these lower cost devices will come with a new edition of Windows called Windows 8.1 with Bing. Windows 8.1 with Bing provides all the same great experiences that Windows 8.1 offers with the Windows 8.1 Update, and comes with Bing as the default search engine within Internet Explorer. And of course customers will be able to change that setting through the Internet Explorer menu, providing them with control over search engine settings. This new edition will be only be available preloaded on devices from our hardware partners. Some of these devices, in particular tablets, will also come with Office or a one-year subscription to Office 365.

Windows 8.1 with Bing is exactly the same as every other Windows 8.1 SKU - except for the fact that OEMs cannot change the default search engine - users still can, though. The price for OEMs will be lower, which makes me wonder why on earth OEMs would go for the other SKUs.

The secret history of hypertext

Thom Holwerda 2014-05-23 Internet 21 Comments

Historians of technology often cite Bush's essay as the conceptual forerunner of the Web. And hypertext pioneers like Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee have all acknowledged their debt to Bush’s vision. But for all his lasting influence, Bush was not the first person to imagine something like the Web.

This actually reminds me a lot of how contemporary technology media look at smartphones and such. They often have little to no experience with the breadth of mobile technology that came before the iPhone and Android, and as a consequence, they treat everything as new, revolutionary, and 'owned' - even though virtually everything has been taken from somewhere else.

Neo900 progress update

Thom Holwerda 2014-05-22 Wireless 12 Comments

As Friedrich Nietzsche famously said, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger". We feel that the Neo900 project is gathering strength after all the twists and turns it experienced. We're looking forward for the future with more optimism than ever, taking lessons from our past mistakes.

The Neo900 project is seeing some major organisational difficulties, which takes resources away from the actual technical stuff. Progress on that front is still being made, though, and this update details some of it.

Submitted by Shane 2014-05-22 General Development 126 Comments

I was at the OpenStack Summit this week. The overwhelming majority of OpenStack deployments are Linux-based, yet the most popular laptop vendor (by a long way) at the conference was Apple. People are writing code with the intention of deploying it on Linux, but they're doing so under an entirely different OS.

But what's really interesting is the tools they're using to do so. When I looked over people's shoulders, I saw terminals and a web browser. They're not using Macs because their development tools require them, they're using Macs because of what else they get - an aesthetically pleasing OS, iTunes and what's easily the best trackpad hardware/driver combination on the market. These are people who work on the same laptop that they use at home. They'll use it when they're commuting, either for playing videos or for getting a head start so they can leave early. They use an Apple because they don't want to use different hardware for work and pleasure.

Apple's laptops are still the best PCs money can buy at the moment (despite their horribly outdated displays). It's no wonder Linux developers, too, favour them.

DuckDuckGo gets complete redesign, new features

Thom Holwerda 2014-05-20 Internet 41 Comments

Everybody's favourite not-Google search engine - DuckDuckGo - has received a complete redesign and a whole slew of new features.

Today DuckDuckGo is launching a reimagined and redesigned version that focuses on smarter answers and a more refined look. This new version adds often requested features like images, local search, auto-suggest and much more.

Compared to today's Google, it looks incredibly clean, and the new features - for once - do not get in the way of the stuff that was already there. It must be hard to redesign and add new features to a search engine that is more or less known for being the opposite of Google, but I think they have managed to pull it off.

Submitted by BloopFloop 2014-05-20 OS News 20 Comments

Arrakis is a research operating system from University of Washinton, built as a fork of Barrelfish.

In Arrakis, we ask the question whether we can remove the OS entirely from normal application execution. The OS only sets up the execution environment and interacts with an application in rare cases where resources need to be reallocated or name conflicts need to be resolved. The application gets the full power of the unmediated hardware, through an application-specific library linked into the application address space. This allows for unprecedented OS customizability, reliability and performance.

The first public version of Arrakis has been released recently, and the code is hosted on GitHub.

Microsoft unveils Surface Pro 3

Thom Holwerda 2014-05-20 Microsoft 40 Comments

Microsoft has unveiled a new Surface Pro 3 device at a press event in New York City today. Like the previous Surface tablets it still includes a kickstand, but Surface chief Panos Panay says it's designed to remove the conflict of buying a laptop or a tablet. The kickstand on the device is multi-stage, and the device is just 9.1mm thick. "This is the tablet than can replace your laptop," claims Panay. Microsoft has moved to a 12-inch screen on the Surface Pro 3 with a 3:2 aspect ratio and HD display, but the new tablet also has thin bezels with a silver and black design. Microsoft will start accepting pre-orders on the Surface Pro 3 tomorrow starting at $799.

It's an amazing piece of hardware, and Microsoft really deserves praise for the amount of power it has managed to pack in such a slim and light package, but the same could be said of the previous Surface Pro - and that one hasn't exactly taken the market by storm either. The problem, is software - something Microsoft was remarkably hush-hush about during the unveiling.

Something else Microsoft was hush-hush about: Windows RT and ARM. No new RT/ARM-based Surface device, and I have a feeling that particular experiment has met its end today.

2275 MorphOS licences sold

Thom Holwerda 2014-05-19 Morphos 50 Comments

Now this is interesting. The WarMUp Association, the world association of MorphOS users, publishes a webzine with a whole lot of information and news about MorphOS. There's a whole lot of cool stuff in the latest issue about new software releases - low-level and user-facing - but what jumped out at me is a very detailed breakdown of MorphOS sales.

In total, 2275 MorphOS licenses were sold until 14 April, and the detailed history of sales is quite, quite interesting. This seems like a low number - and technically, it is - but considering that one, the AmigaOS scene is small enough as it is, and MorphOS is a subsection of that already small scene, and two, that it is not a cheap investment, requiring both hardware and software, I'm actually surprised they have managed to sell this many copies thus far, and that sales are clearly not slowing down.

No, it won't make any of the developers rich, but it's not bad either.

Sources: YouTube to acquire Twitch

Thom Holwerda 2014-05-19 Google 21 Comments

Google's YouTube has reached a deal to buy Twitch, a popular videogame-streaming company, for more than $1 billion, according to sources familiar with the pact.

The deal, in an all-cash offer, is expected to be announced imminently, sources said. If completed the acquisition would be the most significant in the history of YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006 for $1.65 billion.

I watch a lot of YouTube and Twitch for gaming, and in an ideal world, I can definitely see the potential for a great close cooperation between the two. Sadly, the world is not ideal, and I have a bad feeling about this. One of the reasons Twitch is so good at what it does is that it doesn't deal with stuff like Content ID. If Twitch is to be part of Google, it suddenly becomes an incredibly attractive target for all kinds of lawyers - and thus, Content ID-like crap.

Submitted by bowkota 2014-05-17 Legal 23 Comments

Apple Inc and Google Inc's Motorola Mobility unit have agreed to settle all patent litigation between them over smartphone technology, ending one of the highest profile lawsuits in technology.

In a joint statement on Friday, the companies said the settlement does not include a cross license to their respective patents.

Good news.

"Apple and Google have also agreed to work together in some areas of patent reform," the statement said.

Bad news. Two of the largest technology companies in the world working on "patent reform"? Translated to Standard English, that reads: "working together to strengthen the position of large, established companies to make it even harder for newcomers to challenge us".

iTunes 11.2 update hides Users folder on OS X

Thom Holwerda 2014-05-16 macOS 49 Comments

One side effect of the iTunes 11.2 update on Thursday, May 15th 2014 has been that some but not all Macs were seeing the /Users and /Users/Shared folders disappear.

The permissions on the /Users folder were also changed to be world-writable, so that anyone could read and write to the /Users folder.

As far as bugs go, this is a very fascinating one. Initially, people thought the OS X 10.9.3 update was the culprit, but as it turns out - it's the iTunes 11.2 update. I'm interested to (eventually) hear the root cause of all this, but for now, the linked article contains a temporary workaround.

(Ab)using language features: Common Lisp condition system

Thom Holwerda 2014-05-16 General Development 16 Comments

The hardest thing about learning a new programming language is that there are usually at least one or two novel features that break the mold of our current mental framework. If not, the language may not be worth learning in the first place.

So, given that learning new languages can be challenging, I would like to share a tip that has served me well over the years.

One of the best ways to really understand a new or novel language feature is to think of ways to twist and abuse it.