Archive.org is continuing its mission to make a whole bunch of older software available online, in your browser, through emulation, with a whole slew of Amiga software - games, mostly, but also some general software, as well as, of course, a whole bunch of demos.
The emulator in question is the Scripted Amiga Emulator, an emulator written in HTML5 and JavaScript. It's based on WinUAE and makes use of AROS' Kickstart replacement.
Fast forward to July 15, 2016 (there’s that lab journal again…) when, after receiving an email from Google asking me to indicate how exactly I would like them to use my data to customise adverts around the web, and after thinking for a bit about what kind of machine learning tricks I would be able to pull on you with 12 years of your email, I decided that I really had to make alternative plans for my little email empire.
Somehow FastMail came up and in one of those impulsive LET'S WASTE SOME TIME manoeuvres, I pressed the big red MIGRATE button!
The rest of this post is my mini-review of the FastMail service after almost 3 weeks of intensive use.
I'm pretty sure at least some of you are contemplating a similar migration, away from companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, to something else.
So, is Apple doomed? Of course not. As John Gruber says, "Any conversation that uses that word is in silly la-la land." With Macs, iPads, and software applications and services, Apple isn’t a one-trick pony like BlackBerry, to use an example cited by those most freaked out about the recent iPhone slowdown. It recorded $50.6 billion in sales during that "disappointing" quarter, more than the combined revenue of Google parent Alphabet ($20.3 billion) and Amazon ($29.1 billion) over the same period. Its $10.5 billion in profits outpaced not just the combination of Alphabet ($4.2 billion) and Amazon ($513 million) but also Facebook ($1.5 billion) and Microsoft ($3.8 billion).
"I don't read all the coverage on Apple that there is," Cook tells me a few days after my lunch with Cue and Federighi. "The way that I look at that is, I really know the truth." And he's ready to talk about it.
Can you spot the differences with the messages above? The left side has a few more capital letters than the right side. Big O, little o. Who cares, right?
Well, if you write for an app or website, you should care. A little thing like capitalization can actually be a big deal. Capitalization affects readability, comprehension, and usability. It even impacts how people view your brand.
While there are some more objective arguments to be made, most arguments for and against either title case or sentence case mostly come down to whatever you're used to - what you grew up with. Title case looks entirely ridiculous and confusing to me, and makes dialog boxes, text, and other things much harder to read than when it's in sentence case.
The reason? We don't use title case in Dutch. Everything is sentence case. In English, it's mostly a case of preference, and either case type is fine as long as you're consistent.
Interestingly enough, Apple - generally considered the poster child for title case - actually localises its choice for case type. When you run Apple software in, say, Dutch - it doesn't use title case at all, opting for sentence case instead, because that's the norm in Dutch.
Title case also appears to be on its way out - generally, while pre-internet publications use title case, publications originating from the internet generally use sentence case. I wouldn't be surprised to see title case fall into disuse almost entirely over the coming decades in English - including at Apple. There's going to be an inflection point where title case will simply look incredibly out of place in English, as younger generations grow up on new publications that do not use it.
Title case is old - very old - probably because lowercase evolved out of uppercase, and over the centuries, we've been slowly pushing uppercase letters to perform very specific functions in text. Capitals have become an integral and core part of punctuation rules in every (?) language using on the Latin, Greek (?), and Cyrillic (?) scripts, and while there is some variation here and there - e.g. German holding on to capitalising every single noun, not just proper nouns - there's a remarkable consistency between them.
I'm fairly certain English' title case is the odd-one out, and as the internet continues to break down barriers between cultures and languages, title case will eventually disappear from English, too.
DragonFly version 4.6 brings more updates to accelerated video for both i915 and radeon users, home-grown support for NVMe controllers, preliminary EFI support, improvements in SMP and networking performance under heavy load, and a full range of binary packages.
The Windows 10 Anniversary Update was released earlier this evening, and I dutifully installed it so that I could write about any oddities that might pop up. Well, a number of oddities have popped up, and they're bad - really bad. The Anniversary Update does some really shady stuff during installation that it doesn't inform you of at all until after the fact.
First, the Anniversary Update reinstalls Skype "for you", even if you had it uninstalled earlier, which in and of itself is a blatant disregard for users - I uninstalled it for a reason, and I'd like Microsoft to respect that. That in and of itself is bad enough, but here's the kicker: during installation, Microsoft also automatically logs you into Skype, so that possible Skype contacts can just start calling or messaging you - again, without ever asking for the user's consent.
Imagine my surprise when I open that useless Metro notification center thing - whose button now sits in the bottom right of the task bar, right of the clock, even, and is unremovable - and see that Skype is now installed, and that I'm logged in. This is a blatant disregard for users, and I'm sure tons of users will be unpleasantly surprised to see Microsoft forcing Skype down their throats.
There was an even bigger surprise, though: during installation of the Anniversary Update, Microsoft apparently flags Classic Shell - a popular Start menu replacement that gives Windows 10 a customisable Start menu that doesn't suck - as incompatible with the Anniversary Update, and just straight-up deletes hides it from your computer - again, without ever notifying you beforehand or asking you for your permission.
Update: actually, the application isn't removed entirely - it's still there in the Program Files folder, but it's entirely scrapped from search results and the Start menu. Effectively, for most users, that's identical to removing it. What an incredibly odd and user-hostile way of dealing with this. You can see how the wording in the screenshot below is confusing regarding the removing vs. hiding issue.
Classic Shell released an update to fix the compatibility issue detected, so I hope my settings are still there somewhere, because it'd suck having to redo all of them because Microsoft just randomly deleted a program from my computer hid a program, without informing me or asking me for my permission. It could've just disabled the program, prevented it from running - why delete hide it entirely? Are they that desperate to try and get me to use their terrible excuse for a Start menu?
So, just in case you're about to install this update - Microsoft will force Skype down your throat, and may randomly delete hide programs from your computer without asking for your permission.
Have fun.
Ars' take on the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, due out today.
For now, the Anniversary Update is an incremental update that makes Windows 10 incrementally better. For Windows 10, the decision to upgrade is obvious, and in many cases, there's no decision to be made. In fact, home users will be getting it whether they like it or not. They shouldn't fear this; if nothing else the revised Start menu layout makes the upgrade worthwhile.
But the decision for Windows 7 and 8.1 users is rather different now than it was a year ago. A year ago, upgrading to Windows 10 was an easy decision to make, because the upgrade was zero cost. Unless upgrading was absolutely impossible (due to an incompatibility or being particularly wedded to Media Center), then upgrading was the obvious thing to do. Windows 10 is a better operating system than those two, especially for $0.
I'm pretty sure there's loads of people who'd much rather hold on to Windows 7, for a multitude of reasons, but that's just me.
Honestly, I've been out of the loop on this whole Anniversary Update, mostly because Windows (and OS X and desktop Linux for that matter) just isn't very exciting. Windows got exciting with 8, which, while deeply flawed and inherently broken, at least represented some form of progress from what had come before to something new, but in Windows 8, that "something new" - Metro - was incomplete, buggy, slow, broken, and effectively useless.
We're Fiona knows how many years down the line now, and it's still an incomplete, buggy, slow, broken, and effectively useless mess. There's not a single Metro application that's worthy of anyone's time, and there's a better - albeit less attractive-looking, at times - Win32 alternative in virtually every instance. This leaves Windows 10 as a Windows 7 where you need to turn a whole bunch of useless crap off or hide it to make it work properly.
It's far from ideal, and the idea many bloggers are peddling - that Windows 10 is a must-have upgrade over Windows 7 - seems rooted more in a sense of "the shiny" than actual merit.
Last year, we announced that beginning with the release of Windows 10, all new Windows 10 kernel mode drivers must be submitted to the Windows Hardware Developer Center Dashboard portal (Dev Portal) to be digitally signed by Microsoft. However, due to technical and ecosystem readiness issues, this was not enforced by Windows Code Integrity and remained only a policy statement.
Starting with new installations of Windows 10, version 1607, the previously defined driver signing rules will be enforced by the Operating System, and Windows 10, version 1607 will not load any new kernel mode drivers which are not signed by the Dev Portal. OS signing enforcement is only for new OS installations; systems upgraded from an earlier OS to Windows 10, version 1607 will not be affected by this change.
Tomorrow Samsung will announce the Galaxy Note 7, actually the sixth main entry in its popular series of gigantic, stylus-equipped phones. The Note line usually builds on the Galaxy S series, applying Samsung's latest technologies to a larger canvas; with the S7 and S7 Edge setting an impressive precedent, expectations for this year's model will be high.
How will Samsung match them? Kim Gae-youn might have an idea. He's the man who heads up smartphone planning at Samsung, making the calls about what goes into each model and how they're positioned in the market. I spoke with him at Samsung's headquarters in Suwon, South Korea just after the release of the S7, and he had a lot to say about exactly how the company goes about making its decisions - from screen size, to software customization, to the amount of bloatware.
Canonical has been talking about making Ubuntu on tablets and phones a reality now for several years, and in recent months we have finally seen a few devices come on the market. A review of the Meizu Pro 5, a Ubuntu-powered smart phone that is compatible with North American 4G networks, appeared on DistroWatch.The article covers how Ubuntu compares to Android and explores the differences between traditional apps vs Ubuntu scopes:
Scopes are a slightly unusual concept in the smart phone market, but I grew to appreciate the idea. What eventually gave me the "a-ha" moment when it came to scopes was when I realised scopes are for looking at information and apps for doing things. Scopes are always on, always waiting in the background to provide us with small bits of data. Applications are for performing tasks. A scope will tell me what is on my calendar for the day, an application will create new appointments. A scope will tell me who called me recently while an app will place a new call.
According to multiple reliable sources, we believe that Google plans to debut a brand-new launcher for Nexus devices some time in the near future, likely on its 2016 Nexus (if they are Nexuses) smartphones Marlin and Sailfish.
That unremovable date widget is an absolutely dreadful idea. Luckily though, this is Android, so you can replace it with whatever launcher you want.