Microsoft has recently held talks to buy GitHub, reviving on-and-off conversations the two have had for years, according to people close to the companies.
The talks have come as GitHub, a popular platform for software developers, has struggled to hire a new CEO.
Even as a non-developer, I 'use' GitHub almost daily to check out new projects or download some piece of software. This would be a pretty major acquisition.
I designed and built a Canon EF Mount for my Game Boy Camera. The GBC has a sensor size of about 3.6mm² which seems equivalent to a 1/4" sensor. This gives the GBC a crop factor of about 10.81. With my 70-200 f4 mounted on a 1.4x extender, this gives me a max equivalent focal distance of about 200x1.4x10.81=3,026.8mm.
I always wanted a Game Boy Camera when I was a kid. It still looks like magic to me today.
Developer Steve Troughton Smith today tweeted photos of macOS 10.14 with some very juicy details about Apple's upcoming operating system. The OS is very clearly sporting a fresh new dark theme, presumably a toggle-able setting, with the dark UI affecting all application chrome. You can also see an icon for a Mac News app in the Dock, as well as a first look at Xcode 10.
Smith explains that the API the Mac App Store uses behind-the-scenes is including a video preview for Xcode, something that the current Mac App Store does not support. It represents a pretty big leak on Apple's part ahead of Monday's keynote.
Another major leak because Apple just uploaded a video to a place where everyone can find it. Good work, Apple.
As far as dark modes go - I'm generally not a fan, because they often feel like tacked-on afterthoughts, without designers really taking the implications into consideration. The only time where I saw "dark mode" work well was Windows Phone, because that UI was designed for it from the ground-up. Also, dark modes tend to be "dark", and not black. With today's modern displays with deep blacks, dark mode should really be black mode.
Although ARM-based PCs are now available, apps that utilize native 64-bit architectures on Microsoft's Windows 10 on ARM have been relegated to legacy support for 32-bit apps. Microsoft introduced the proper frameworks for 64-bit apps at its recent BUILD conference, allowing developers to port their apps and begin native app integration. After a small wait, apps are starting to appear; VLC - the swiss army knife of multimedia players - is one of the first to launch a dedicated ARM64 app.
I'm obviously not going to cover every single major Windows application that gets ported from x86 over to ARM, but I do find there's something fascinating about seeing the first few applications getting the ARM treatment. It makes me think of the very early days of Windows NT, when it was available for not only x86, but also for Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC, Clipper, and SPARC (although those last two were never actually released).
"The issue is, isn't going to remove The Witcher or Grand Theft Auto or anything like that from Steam ," says Rasmussen. "We're the smallest kind of demographic without any kind of lobbying power. We can't influence Valve to leave us alone." While we still don't (and may never) know exactly why Steam sent and then retracted those takedown notices, it has left many visual novel creators even less confident about what sexual content is acceptable on the platform, and more concerned that their work will unexpectedly be categorized as pornography. That's going to hurt visual novel developers the most, but it's going to make things worse for the vitality and diversity of gaming at large, too.
Being Dutch, America's obsession with trying to curtail nudity, sex, and pornography, all the while allowing the most grotesque forms of brutal violence without so much as batting an eye, will never cease to amaze me. Steam is filled to the brim with overly violent video games with the most realistic rendering of gore, yet it's the cartoon-style content with boobs everybody seems to stumble over.
It's just sex. Nobody's going to get scarred for life from seeing naked women and men, so stop obsessing over it, slap an 18+ label on it, and be done with it.
Today, Apple released the latest update for macOS. High Sierra 10.13.5 primarily adds Messages in iCloud support, but it also includes some enterprise and security updates. Users of supported Macs can download and install it from the Mac App Store now.
Get it right before WWDC starts.
Google will not seek another contract for its controversial work providing artificial intelligence to the U.S. Department of Defense for analyzing drone footage after its current contract expires.
Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene announced the decision at a meeting with employees Friday morning, three sources told Gizmodo. The current contract expires in 2019 and there will not be a follow-up contract, Greene said. The meeting, dubbed Weather Report, is a weekly update on Google Cloud’s business.
Google would not choose to pursue Maven today because the backlash has been terrible for the company, Greene said, adding that the decision was made at a time when Google was more aggressively pursuing military work. The company plans to unveil new ethical principles about its use of AI next week. A Google spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions about Greene's comments.
A good move, and it shows that internal pressure can definitely work to enact change inside a corporation.
The Cortex A76 presents itself a solid generational improvement for Arm. We've been waiting on a larger CPU microarchitecture for several years now, and while the A76 isn't quite a performance monster to compete with Apple's cores, it shows how important it is to have a balanced microarchitecture. This year all eyes were on Samsung and the M3 core, and unfortunately the performance increase came at a great cost of power and efficiency which ended up making the end-product rather uncompetitive. The A76 drives performance up but on every step of the way it still deeply focused on power efficiency which means we'll get to see the best of both worlds in end products.
In general Arm promises a 35% performance improvement which is a significant generational uplift. Together with the fact that the A76 is targeted to be employed in 7nm designs is also a boost to the projected product.
This seems like a solid next step.
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