Monthly Archive:: August 2018

For some reason I like small laptops and the constraints they place on me (as long as they're still usable). I used a Dell Mini 9 for a long time back in the netbook days and was recently using an 11" MacBook Air as my primary development machine for many years. Recently Microsoft announced a smaller, cheaper version of its Surface tablets called Surface Go which piqued my interest.

The purpose of this text is to provide a reference for University level assembly language and systems programming courses. Specifically, this text addresses the x86-64 instruction set for the popular x86-64 class of processors using the Ubuntu 64-bit Operating System (OS). While the provided code and various examples should work under any Linux-based 64-bit OS, they have only been tested under Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (64-bit).

Anyone who isn't an expert on the internet would be hard-pressed to explain how tracking on the internet actually works. Some of the negative effects of unchecked tracking are easy to notice, namely eerily-specific targeted advertising and a loss of performance on the web. However, many of the harms of unchecked data collection are completely opaque to users and experts alike, only to be revealed piecemeal by major data breaches. In the near future, Firefox will - by default - protect users by blocking tracking while also offering a clear set of controls to give our users more choice over what information they share with sites.

Java 11 has recently been feature frozen and contains some really great features, one in particular we’d like to highlight. The release contains a brand new Garbage Collector, ZGC, which is being developed by Oracle that promises very low pause times on multi-terabyte heaps. In this article we'll cover the motivation for a new GC, a technical overview and some of the really exciting possibilities ZGC opens up.

Lenovo is announcing a second ARM-powered Windows 10 laptop this week, and this time it's a Yoga. The Lenovo Yoga C630 WOS (Windows on Snapdragon) is, as you might have guessed, powered by Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 850 processor. It's the first Windows laptop we've seen with the Snapdragon 850, and its a chip that Qualcomm specifically designed for always-connected Windows 10 PCs. This new processor ushers in the latest generation of ARM-powered Windows 10 laptops.

Lenovo is promising 30 percent better performance over its previous Miix 630 Windows on ARM device, and a surprising claim of 25 hours of battery life to match. While the battery life sounds impressive, it's the performance that will matter in a device like this and we’ll need to test this latest range of ARM-powered laptops to see if app compatibility and performance has improved. As this is powered by the Snapdragon 850, there's also built-in LTE support for mobile connectivity on the go.

I've got kinda sidetracked here waffling on about the history of dial-up BBS systems. What I really want to be concerned with is what made The Microsoft Network unique and interesting: the interface.

The big thing in Windows 95 was their new shell. They wanted everything to go through this. They had this vision of every object in the computer being represented as a shell object, so there would be a seamless intermix between files, documents, system components, you name it. They had this project called Cairo that was supposed to throw out that scruffy old file-based filesystem and bring in a shiny new Object Based File System instead. It never happened, so we'll never know exactly how it might have turned out. But the brave lads at MS didn't give up that easily and so the idea stayed on, admittedly without the tech to back it up, and the principles wormed their way into such glorious developments as The Microsoft Network.

And so The Microsoft Network wasn't a program you loaded like CompuServe. It was part of the OS, with folder icons that looked just like real folders. It was a kind of version of the Web where you could browse online data the same way you browsed your file system. This is what made it cool.

Studies show that the amount of data being recorded is increasing at 30 to 40 percent per year. At the same time, the capacity of modern hard drives, which are used to store most of this, is increasing at less than half that rate. Fortunately, much of this information doesn’t need to be accessed instantly. And for such things, magnetic tape is the perfect solution.

Seriously? Tape? The very idea may evoke images of reels rotating fitfully next to a bulky mainframe in an old movie like Desk Set or Dr. Strangelove. So, a quick reality check: tape has never gone away!

Developed in a magic night of 19 Aug, 2018 between 2am and 8am, the darkriscv is a very experimental implementation of the opensource RISC-V instruction set. Nowadays, after one week of exciting sleepless nights of work (which explains the lots of typos you will found ahead), the darkriscv reached a very good quality result, in a way that the "hello world" compiled by the standard riscv-elf-gcc is working fine!

Space Time explores the outer reaches of space, the craziness of astrophysics, the possibilities of sci-fi, and anything else you can think of beyond Planet Earth with our astrophysicist host: Matthew O’Dowd.

Matt O'Dowd spends his time studying the universe, especially really far-away things like quasars, super-massive black holes, and evolving galaxies. He uses telescopes in space to do it. Matt completed his Ph.D. at NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute, followed by work at the University of Melbourne and Columbia University. He's now a professor at the City University of New York's Lehman College and an Associate at the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium.

Earlier this year Intel announced that it would be introducing two new families to its low power notebook range: Whiskey Lake for new 15W (U-Series) processors, and Amber Lake for new sub-5W (Y-Series) processors. These new parts are at the core the same as the current 8th generation Kaby Lake Refresh parts, but they have been equipped with newer chipsets. With this announcement, we are expecting to see a large number of OEMs with new devices on display at the IFA trade show this week in Berlin.

Well, it's been over 30 years since the NES was released, and while those classic games have aged well, the same can't be said for the hardware they ran on. With a screen-resolution of just 256x240, the NES didn't give games all that much screen real-estate to work with. Nevertheless, intrepid game developers squeezed amazing, iconic worlds into NES games: the maze-like dungeons of The Legend of Zelda, the sprawling planet of Metroid, or the colorful levels of Super Mario Bros.. And yet, due to the NES's hardware limitations, gamers only ever experienced these worlds a single 256x240 viewport at a time...

Until now.

Introducing: wideNES. A new way to experience NES classics.

Once upon a time, Apple came very close to releasing ZFS as part of MacOS. Apple did this work in its own copy of the ZFS source base (as far as I know), but the people in Sun knew about it and it turns out that even today there is one little lingering sign of this hoped-for and perhaps prepared-for ZFS port in the ZFS source code. Well, sort of, because it's not quite in code.

The Nintendo 64's GoldenEye 007 - or GoldenEye 64, as it's often known - is seen as one of the system's all-time classics. Aug. 25, 2018, will be the game's 21st birthday (allowing Bond to finally taste one of his revered cocktails), so we reached out to the people who played, reviewed and created the game to see how it all came together, way back in 1997. From the multiplayer being added as an afterthought to the game almost having every Bond actor ever, the game you and your buddies logged hours on - paintballing in the Stack or shooting Boris in the balls - was almost something very, very different.

Google has just publicly disclosed that it discovered an extremely serious vulnerability in Epic's first Fortnite installer for Android that allowed any app on your phone to download and install anything in the background, including apps with full permissions granted, without the user's knowledge. Google's security team first disclosed the vulnerability privately to Epic Games on August 15, and has since released the information publicly following confirmation from Epic that the vulnerability was patched.

In short, this was exactly the kind of exploit that Android Central, and others, had feared would occur with this sort of installation system.