Monthly Archive:: July 2018

VMS doesn't have different OS personalities, as NT does, but its kernel and Executive subsystems are clear predecessors to NT's. Digital developers wrote the VMS kernel almost entirely in VAX assembly language. To be portable across different CPU architectures, Microsoft developers wrote NT's kernel almost entirely in C. In developing NT, these designers rewrote VMS in C, cleaning up, tuning, tweaking, and adding some new functionality and capabilities as they went. This statement is in danger of trivializing their efforts; after all, the designers built a new API (i.e., Win32), a new file system (i.e., NTFS), and a new graphical interface subsystem and administrative environment while maintaining backward compatibility with DOS, OS/2, POSIX, and Win16. Nevertheless, the migration of VMS internals to NT was so thorough that within a few weeks of NT's release, Digital engineers noticed the striking similarities.

Those similarities could fill a book. In fact, you can read sections of VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures (Digital Press) as an accurate description of NT internals simply by translating VMS terms to NT terms. Table 1 lists a few VMS terms and their NT translations. Although I won't go into detail, I will discuss some of the major similarities and differences between Windows NT 3.1 and VMS 5.0, the last version of VMS Dave Cutler and his team might have influenced.

If you've followed any one of the amazing tutorials on how to set up a mainframe on a conventional personal computer, you've probably noticed they end with the login screen as if everything beyond that point will be intuitive and self-explanatory to newbies. I mean... That was my assumption going into this project. I'll figure it out. How hard could it be? Maybe it would take me a few hours. Maybe I'd have to Google some stuff... Read some documentation...

It took me over a week.

Over a week to figure out enough to compile and run a basic program.

Freeloader is now able to read files and follow symlinks from btrfs partition. One major issue is left here - case sensitivity.

On the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude talk about their new documentary, "General Magic", which tells the story of a pioneering tech startup that tried and failed to invent a smartphone in the 1990s. Kara appears in the documentary, as do some of the most important figures from the company's history, such as Andy Hertzfeld, John Sculley and Tony Fadell. Although few people know the name General Magic anymore, Kerruish and Maude say the team's failure paved the way for the Silicon Valley we know today.

Intel has set a concrete deadline for when it'll finally have processors built on a 10nm process in the mainstream market: holiday season 2019.

While the company's 14nm manufacturing process is working well, with multiple revisions to improve performance or reduce power consumption, Intel has struggled to develop an effective 10nm process. Originally mass production was planned for as far back as 2015. In April, the company revised that to some time in 2019. The latest announcement is the most specific yet: PC systems with 10nm processors will be in the holiday season, with Xeon parts for servers following soon after. This puts mainstream, mass production still a year away.

Microsoft, Apple and Google are three of the world's most influential tech companies. Billions of people use personal computing platforms, tools, or devices they supply or inspire.

From cloud, AI, smartphones, PCs, apps and more they've created a multi-ecosystem personal computing world that supports an increasingly-interconnected, and overlapping range of computing scenarios.

Personal computing is no longer restricted to desks as a sedentary experience. Nor are users completely liberated from that setting and capable of existing fully in the mobile space. They regularly transition from desktop to mobile and across ecosystems and devices because no single platform and device moves seamlessly with them across contexts. Microsoft, through Windows 10 and Surface, has embraced a platform and hardware philosophy that drives devices that conform to users' contexts. Despite the smartphones success as mobile computing's focus, Microsoft's rivals may be missing an important industry shift.

Over the past two years, the biggest buzz among the geo chatterati has been Justin O'Beirne's meticulously argued (albeit bizarrely formatted) feature-by-feature comparisons of Google and Apple Maps: their design choices, their data, their production processes.

What fascinates me is how the comparison is implicitly phrased. Apple Maps is fighting on Google Maps' turf, and Justin O'Beirne never questions that. He asks "How far ahead of Apple Maps is Google Maps?". It implies the same direction of travel. They’re going the same place, but Google is getting there quicker.

Meanwhile, OpenStreetMap goes its own way.

Looking back at the past three years, React Native has proven to be extremely successful at Discord and helped drive our iOS user adoption from zero to millions!

More specifically, React Native has allowed us to reap the benefits of quickly leveraging reusable code across platforms, as well as develop a small and mighty team.

Meanwhile, we've learned to adapt to its inevitable pain points without sacrificing overall productivity.

GCC 8.2 is a bug-fix release from the GCC 8 branch containing important fixes for regressions and serious bugs in GCC 8.1 with more than 99 bugs fixed since the previous release.

Have you ever had to stop what you were doing, or wait for your computer to boot up because the device updated at the wrong time? We heard you, and to alleviate this pain, if you have an update pending we've updated our reboot logic to use a new system that is more adaptive and proactive. We trained a predictive model that can accurately predict when the right time to restart the device is. Meaning, that we will not only check if you are currently using your device before we restart, but we will also try to predict if you had just left the device to grab a cup of coffee and return shortly after.

No Man's Sky is back in the number one position on Steam after yesterday's successful launch of No Man's Sky latest update, called "Next", and a 50 percent off sale on the PC version of the game. It has also launched, for the very first time, on Xbox One. Amazon has it listed as the number one best-seller on the Xbox platform as of this morning.

It feels like a corner has been turned in the game's story, both in terms of the game itself and the drama surrounding it.

Twist ties that bedevil. Thick plastic requiring scissors to break open. Tape that gets wrapped around fingers. Those cursed strips known as zip ties.

Packaging can be annoying for any consumer. But for people with disabilities, it often creates yet another challenge in a world riddled with them, an unnecessary obstacle that leads to frustration and a delay getting to the object inside.

Recognizing that reality, Microsoft's Packaging Design team faced a unique challenge in creating a box for the new Xbox Adaptive Controller, designed to accommodate gamers with limited mobility. The box for the device, which will be available for $99.99 in September through the Microsoft Store, needed to be as accessible as what was inside. It had to enable gamers with limited dexterity, who might be using just one hand or arm, to easily open the box and remove the controller. And it had to be as high-quality and aesthetically appealing as any other Xbox packaging.

But Popular Electronics readers were introduced to something in the January 1975 issue that they had never encountered before. Below a heading that read "PROJECT BREAKTHROUGH", the magazine's cover showed a large gray and black box whose front panel bore a complicated array of lights and toggles. This was the Altair 8800, the "world's first minicomputer kit to rival commercial models", available for under $400. Though advertised as a "minicomputer", the Altair would actually be the first commercially successful member of a new class of computers, first known as "microcomputers" and then eventually as PCs. The Altair was small enough and cheap enough that the average family could have one at home. Its appearance in Popular Electronics magazine meant that, as Salsberg wrote in that issue, "the home computer age is here - finally".

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 8.0, the sixteenth major release of the NetBSD operating system.

This release brings stability improvements, hundreds of bug fixes, and many new features.