Microsoft launches redesigned Bing website

With this release we've created a modern Bing.com experience - one that is faster, cleaner and more visually appealing. We believe that search can be beautiful as well as functional and efficient. With that as our goal, we evaluated fonts, spacing, color, visual scan patterns, the search box and even the underlying code.

My problem with this and recent moves by Google: when I do a regular search, I do not want my search results to be spammed by news, picture, and video results. Bing seems to follow in Google's footsteps by adding irrelevant crap to search results for the sake of looking cool, but at the cost of usability.

I mean, check this screenshot. How much of the page is reserved for actual search results, and not pictures, info boxes, news items, and god knows what else?

Exactly: none.

OpenZFS launch announcement

ZFS is the world's most advanced filesystem, in active development for over a decade. Recent development has continued in the open, and OpenZFS is the new formal name for this open community of developers, users, and companies improving, using, and building on ZFS. Founded by members of the Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and illumos communities, including Matt Ahrens, one of the two original authors of ZFS, the OpenZFS community brings together over a hundred software developers from these platforms.

ZFS plays a major role in Solaris, of course, but beyond that, has it found other major homes? In fact, now that we're at it, how is Solaris doing anyway?

iOS7 before and after pictures

Interesting site that compares iOS 6 applications to their iOS 7 counterparts.

A few things stand out. First, while I dislike the look of iOS 6 applications, they at least look a lot less confusing than their iOS 7 counterparts - easier to read, clearer buttons, better contrast in the colour palette, that sort of thing. Second, many of them, like iOS 7 itself, are quite bright. I'm used to the darker colours of Windows Phone and Android, and iOS 7 is a heck of a lot brighter. Three, there's a lot of Holo and Metro influences in there.

I have actually played with several of the iOS 7 betas, and found none of them particularly convincing. This look has a lot of growing up to do.

Dell brings big battery life to new $379 Inspiron 11

With Intel's new Haswell chip, manufacturers can choose to either build slimmer notebooks or try to optimize battery life as much as possible. Dell has clearly shown its dedication to the latter with the new Inspiron 11 3000 series. Budget notebooks don't always have big batteries, but Dell claims the $379 Haswell version of the Inspiron 11 lasts up to eight hours and 20 minutes on a single charge.

Something I've been pondering for a while: if we can have high-quality tablets and smartphones at low prices, why can't we have high-quality laptops at said prices too? Cheap laptops are almost always crap, but this Inspiron 11 actually looks like it could reverse the trend. Since I don't really need an expensive laptop anymore, a cheap but still relatively high quality 11" laptop is right up my alley. Is anyone aware of any alternatives?

Also, when did Dell find the design stick?

Gabe Newell: Linux gaming announcement next week

Gabe Newell, the co-founder and managing director of Valve, said today that Linux is the future of gaming despite the minuscule share of the market it has today.

That seems hard to believe, given that Newell acknowledged Linux gaming generally accounts for less than one percent of the market by any measure including players, player minutes, and revenue. But Valve is going to do its best to make sure Linux becomes the future of gaming by extending its Steam distribution platform to hardware designed for living rooms.

"Half-Life 3 - SteamBox/Linux exclusive". There, chicken and egg problem solved.

Betting on Whether Elop Will Be Microsoft’s Next CEO

PC Magazine reports that bookies at the Ladbrokes betting service give 1:4 odds that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop will be the next Microsoft CEO. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg comes in second place with 7:1 odds against, while Steven Sinofsky, previously head of the Windows division, comes in third at 12:1 odds against.

Without intending any disrespect, I can't imagine a worse choice for the next CEO than Mr. Elop. His blind fealty to Windows at Nokia cost the stock an 85% drop on his watch. Microsoft needs new directions and new ideas, not another Windows loyalist.

Sailfish runs Android applications, runs on Android devices

Users enjoying the unique gesture-based and modern Sailfish OS user experience will be able to take full advantage of the Android application ecosystem available through various app stores globally. Jolla will cooperate with leading global app stores to ensure users can seamlessly download Android apps just as they would do on any Android device.

Android applications, unaltered. Sounds great as a stopgap, but there's always the integration issue (will they make use of, say, Sailfish OS-native notifications and gestures?), and it may hinder the development of native applications. I'm curious to see how well it works.

Jolla has made a major breakthrough in Android hardware compatibility by developing Sailfish OS to run on common hardware produced for Android, particularly smartphones and tablets. Vendors interested to utilize Sailfish OS are now able to develop phones and tablets based on many different chipset and hardware configurations. This new level of compatibility will enable device vendors who use Sailfish OS to fully utilize the existing Android hardware ecosystem.

This is great news. This means that Sailfish OS will become available for popular Android phones, which will surely generate needed enthusiasm among people like us who read OSNews. Of course, the Jolla smartphone (mine's on pre-order, and I cannot wait) will be the optimal device for Sailfish, but this at least gives those who are interested the option to try Sailfish out before plonking down cash for an actual Sailfish device.

The specter of a Nokia Android phone

A team within Nokia had Android up and running on the company's Lumia handsets well before Microsoft and Nokia began negotiating Microsoft’s $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia's mobile phone and services business, according to two people briefed on the effort who declined to be identified because the project was confidential. Microsoft executives were aware of the existence of the project, these people said.

Another person said the idea of Nokia using Android wasn't a part of Microsoft’s discussions with the company about an acquisition, even though that was widely recognized as a possibility.

Windows Phone never fit into Nokia's DNA. It's too closed, too external, too controlled; Nokia had little influence over its own destiny with Windows Phone. It's not surprising that many of the brightest minds in the company left in the wake of the Windows Phone announcement (such as the team now at Jolla).

Nokia should have gone Android.

Michael Dell buys back Dell

Michael Dell has the won the battle for control of the computer company that he created, after shareholders backed his $24.8bn offer to take Dell private and revive the struggling business away from the incessant pressure of Wall Street.

The vote clears the way for the huge buyout, in which Dell is working with private equity partners Silver Lake after seeing off a challenge from activist investor Carl Icahn.

Must have been hard for him to see his baby slide into irrelevance. I hope for him he can turn things around, but I'm not sure if they'll be able to - they missed the boat, and it's probably in Fiji by now.

Apple: new iPhone not storing fingerprints

Apple's new iPhone 5S, which comes with a fingerprint scanner, won't store actual images of users' fingerprints on the device, a company spokesman confirmed Wednesday, a decision that could ease concerns from privacy hawks.

Rather, Apple's new Touch ID system only stores "fingerprint data", which remains encrypted within the iPhone's processor, a company representative said Wednesday. The phone then uses the digital signature to unlock itself or make purchases in Apple's iTunes, iBooks or App stores.

In practice, this means that even if someone cracked an iPhone's encrypted chip, they likely wouldn't be able to reverse engineer someone's fingerprint.

This seems relatively safe - but then again, only if you trust that government agencies don't have some sort of backdoor access anyway. This used to be tinfoil hat stuff, but those days are long gone.

I dislike the characterisation of privacy "hawks", though. It reminds me of how warmongering politicians in Washington are referred to as 'hawks", and at least in my view, it has a very negative connotation.

Valve launches Steam Family Sharing

Steam Family Sharing allows close friends and family members to play one another's games while earning their own Steam achievements and saving their own game progress to the Steam cloud. It's all enabled by authorizing a shared computer.

Sounds neat, but it does look convoluted and complex. I have a simpler system, which is quite revolutionary. It's called physical copies and I can just give them to friends. It's magic.

Apple announces new iPhones

Apple's event is going on right now - and most of the new stuff already leaked weeks and months ahead of time. So, we're getting an iPhone 5S, an iPhone 5C, and iOS7 will be available later this month. I like the design of the 5C more than of the 5S; it's more playful, colourful - harking back to the coloured iMacs and PowerMac G3s. Too bad it doesn't come in red.

The fingerprint sensor in the 5S is interesting, but I wonder how accurate it will be in the real world; on top of that, with all the NSA news, I'm not particularly keen on Apple reading my fingerprint all the time. Supposedly, applications don't have access to it and it's not stored in the cloud, but I have little to no trust for companies.

The biggest news for me is the fact that the iPhone 5S has a new chip - the A7 - which has the honour of being the first 64bit chip inside a smartphone. iOS7 and first party Apple applications are all 64bit, and Xcode obviously supports it. While this obviously future-proofs the platform for more RAM, I wonder what other motives are involved here. ARM desktops and laptops, perhaps?

I doubt 64bit will provide much benefit today, but you have to hand it to Apple: at least they're done with the transition before it's even needed.

The Z-80 has a 4-bit ALU – here’s how it works

The 8-bit Z-80 processor is famed for use in many early personal computers such the Osborne 1, TRS-80, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and it is still used in embedded systems and TI graphing calculators. I had always assumed that the ALU (arithmetic-logic unit) in the Z-80 was 8 bits wide, like just about every other 8-bit processor. But while reverse-engineering the Z-80, I was shocked to discover the ALU is only 4 bits wide! The founders of Zilog mentioned the 4-bit ALU in a very interesting discussion at the Computer History Museum, so it's not exactly a secret, but it's not well-known either.

I have been reverse-engineering the Z-80 processor using images from the Visual 6502 team. The image below shows the overall structure of the Z-80 chip and the location of the ALU. The remainder of this article dives into the details of the ALU: its architecture, how it works, and exactly how it is implemented.

Ken Shirrif's blog is an absolute must for fans of ultra-low-level hardware stuff. This goes way over my head, but interesting nonetheless.

How Chrome Apps will finally take on Windows

The new apps look and behave much like the native apps you find on Windows and OS X. They're built using web technologies, but also with Chrome-specific code that means they won't be able to run on other web browsers - they're truly Chrome apps. They can exist outside of your browser window as distinct apps, work offline, and sync across devices and operating systems. They can also access your computer's GPU, storage, camera, ports, and Bluetooth connection. Chrome Apps are, for now, only available through Chrome on Windows or Chrome OS on a Chromebook. Mac users will have to wait another six weeks before their version of Chrome will be updated.

This is very important for Chrome OS - since this means it can now have applications outside of the browser. Google's plans for Chrome OS suddenly became a whole lot clearer.

Samsung Galaxy Gear unveiled

The Verge on the Galaxy Gear:

There are a couple of significant downsides that temper my enthusiasm for the new Gear. First and foremost is the speed and intuitiveness of the user interface - or rather, the lack thereof. There's a tangible lag to anything you do with the Gear, while the swipe gestures are hard to figure out and do different things depending on where you are in the menus.

Also important will be the Galaxy Gear's battery life. It does use the Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy standard to communicate, but at 315mAh its battery is decidedly small. Samsung promises "about a day" of endurance from the Gear, but by the end of our briefing with the company, the cameras on most of its demo units were refusing to turn on due to the watches running low on power.

Yeah, no. I don't know what a smartwatch is, but this, is not it.

Nokia confirms: its patent attacks may continue

Microsoft paid billions for a license to Nokia's patents, but the company has made explicit that Nokia still owns the patents. The genius of this move is that it allows Microsoft to double down on its patent war with Android. Microsoft boasts that the majority of Android phones sold worldwide have already paid for a license to Microsoft patents. By 2011, patent licensing revenue exceeded Microsoft's revenue from Windows Phone.

Now, Nokia can go after Android phone makers for royalties - even ones that have already paid Microsoft.

When pressed on the issue today, a Nokia spokesman confirmed that more patent licensing is indeed part of the plan.

So, without products, Nokia will become a true patent troll. Good to know.