"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.

Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight."

From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.

"The key takeaway we've reached (after two less than 24 hours playing with the iOS 7 Beta release) is this - every App must consider even basic updates to its UI to survive in a post-iOS 6 world." Great. Telling developers to update their entire application - user interface and behaviour alike - to target a look and behaviour that isn't final yet. Seems like potential for a lot of wasted work here.

"Today, most people are using modern browsers that support the majority of the latest web technologies. Better yet, the usage of legacy browsers is declining significantly and newer browsers stay up to date automatically, which means the leading edge has become mainstream. Given these factors we've decided to retire Chrome Frame, and will cease support and updates for the product in January 2014." Eh.

The Next Web: "First of all, many of the new icons were primarily designed by members of Apple's marketing and communications department, not the app design teams. From what we've heard, SVP of Design Jony Ive (also now Apple's head of Human Interaction) brought the print and web marketing design team in to set the look and color palette of the stock app icons. They then handed those off to the app design teams who did their own work on the 'interiors', with those palettes as a guide. We've also been hearing that there wasn't a whole lot of communication between the various teams behind say, Mail and Safari. And that there were multiple teams inside each group that were competing with various designs, leading to what some see as inconsistencies in icon design. Those may well be hammered out in days ahead." What. Reminds me of how Microsoft does (used to do?) things.

"The German Parliament, the Bundestag, has introduced a joint motion against software patents. The resolution urges the German government to take steps to limit the granting of patents on computer programs. In the resolution, the Parliament says that patents on software restrict developers from exercising their copyright privileges, including the right to distribute their programs as Free Software. They promote the creation of monopolies in the software market, and hurt innovation and job creation." After New Zealand, we now have one of the most powerful economies in the world moving to ban software patents for all the reasons smart people have been outlining for years. also: "The government should also push to ensure that software is covered by copyright alone, and that patent offices (including the European Patent Office) stop granting patents on software." Germany is not a country the EU can ignore. Very good news, this.

"Intel is planning its own UI overlay, codenamed 'Obsidian', that it will bring to the mobile operating system Tizen and possibly Android. A source working at Intel has tipped Ars with several early screenshots and some video of Intel's Obsidian project, which includes a handful of unique UI touches."

Sony just won the console war for this generation. Not only is the PS4 going to be cheaper, Sony's CEO gloated on stage last night at E3 with the biggest possible grin as he detailed that all that nonsensical DRM crap that Microsoft is pulling, like blocking used games sales and stuff like that? Yeah, Sony's PS4 will have none of that. Sony even made an instructional video to explain how sharing games works.

"HP has announced the end of support for OpenVMS, the ancient but trustworthy server operating system whose creator went on to build Windows NT. OpenVMS started out as VAX/VMS on Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX minicomputers, then later was ported to DEC's fast Alpha RISC chips – before the Compaq acquisition of Digital led to their untimely demise. HP ported the software to the Itanium, but HP isn't going to bother moving to the last generation of IA64 and support will finally end in 2015." The article seems to have confused the end of support of VMS (which projected to happen some time after December 2020) with the end of IA64 sales for machines that support VMS and/or the end of support of the Alpha version of the operating system, but it seems either way that the venerable operating system is on its way to meeting the same fate as MPE.

The former NSA employee - a man in military service in the US for a decade - has revealed himself in an interview with The Guardian. "The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards. I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under." He did it out of a sense of civic duty. He's in Hong Kong, and doesn't expect to ever see home again. Poor guy.

The term 'direct access' seems to be the central issue when it comes to the coordinated PR campaign from Silicon Valley, and a new article from The Washington Post seems to clarify it all quite a bit. "Intelligence community sources said that this description , although inaccurate from a technical perspective, matches the experience of analysts at the NSA. From their workstations anywhere in the world, government employees cleared for PRISM access may 'task' the system and receive results from an Internet company without further interaction with the company's staff." This seems to explain why the leaked official documents speak of 'direct access' even though the companies themselves deny it. The leaked documentation probably wasn't written by a technical expert, so he simply used a term that describes the end result (i.e., access whenever, wherever, whatever), but not the actual technical workings (i.e., the system does not directly tap into the companies' own servers). Update: The Guardian has released a new slide from the NSA slide deck: it speaks of "collection directly from the servers" of several US companies, like Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and so on. It also mentions directly tapping into the very cables that carry data to and from the US. I wonder how long Silicon Valley will continue to lie and/or legalese around the issue. Man up for once.

"Bruce Lawson started a very interesting discussion about the Encrypted Media Extensions to HTML a few months ago, with learned and interesting commentary from John Foliot and others. After devoting some thought to this, I believe that the amount of argument around this subject is at least partially caused by its separation of the web from the spirit of the web."

Yes, it's as bad as we expected. This particular paragraph illustrates everything that is wrong with what Microsoft is doing: "Xbox One is designed so game publishers can enable you to give your disc-based games to your friends. There are no fees charged as part of these transfers. There are two requirements: you can only give them to people who have been on your friends list for at least 30 days and each game can only be given once." Yes, with this, Microsoft and publishers are destroying the ability to sell your games on Ebay or similar sites (because of the 30-day requirement). To make matters worse, the ability to sell or even loan games to your friends can be disabled by publishers. Asinine.