Monthly Archive:: September 2019
Today, we’re excited to announce that Windows Virtual Desktop is now generally available worldwide. Windows Virtual Desktop is the only service that delivers simplified management, a multi-session Windows 10 experience, optimizations for Office 365 ProPlus, and support for Windows Server Remote Desktop Services (RDS) desktops and apps. With Windows Virtual Desktop, you can deploy and scale your Windows desktops and apps on Azure in minutes. Among other things, you can use this to run virtualised instances of Windows 7 on Azure, where Windows 7 will get free Extended Security Updates until January 2023. This can be a great tool for maintaining access to legacy Windows 7 applications.
Windows admins have options to create local or Microsoft Accounts when it comes to the operating system. The initial setup after installation pushes the Microsoft Account option but it was possible up until now to create to a local account instead. Microsoft has made it more and more difficult to create local accounts during initial setup and discouraged users to do so. A report on Reddit suggests that Microsoft has made it more difficult to create local accounts during first run. The user reported that no option to create a local user account was presented during first run on the system Windows 10 was set up on. While there’s nebulous ways to make the local account option reappear, this is clearly designed to push people to online Microsoft account. I personally use an online Microsoft account since I find it easier to manage my various machines, but removing or hiding the option to use a local account is just a user-hostile dick move.
Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others. Text rendering is, indeed, in the eye of the beholder, and often preferences revolve around what people are used to more than anything else. Still, displays with higher and higher DPI have taken some of the guesswork out of text rendering, but that doesn’t mean it’s a walk in the park now.
Linux From Scratch (LFS), a project that provides you with step-by-step instructions for building your own custom Linux system, has released a new version of their book in two versions (without and with systemd): The Linux From Scratch community announces the release of LFS Version 9.0. Major changes include toolchain updates to glibc-2.30, and gcc-9.2.0. In total, 33 packages were updated since the last release. Changes to the text have also been made throughout the book. The Linux kernel has also been updated to version 5.2.8. You can read the book online, or download to read locally. In coordination with this release, a new version of LFS using the systemd package is also being released. This package implements the newer systemd style of system initialization and control and is consistent with LFS in most packages. You can read the systemd version of the book online at LFS-systemd, or download-systemd to read locally. The Beyond Linux From Scratch (BLFS) project, which extends the LFS project by providing “instructions for installing and configuring various packages on top of a base LFS system”, such as server and desktop software and libraries, also announced an accompanying release: The BLFS Team is proud to present version 9.0 of Beyond Linux From Scratch. This version includes approximately 1000 packages beyond the base Linux From Scratch Version 9.0 book. The book has 850 updates from the previous version plus many other text and formatting changes. The System V version of the book now has added Gnome as an additional desktop environment in addition to the previous KDE/plasma, xfce, and lxde environments. This is a coordinated release with BLFS-9.0-systemd. You can view the 9.0 version at online or download to read locally. You can view the 9.0 systemd version at online systemd or download-systemd to read locally. I’ve been wanting to set up an LFS system as a learning experience for almost two decades now. I really have to stop putting it off.
Riley Testut, an iOS app developer who has for years worked on mobile video game emulation, just released a project that has the potential to shake up the entire iOS ecosystem. He calls it AltStore, and it’s an alternative to Apple’s App Store that distributes software Testut says may “push the boundaries of iOS.” In particular, it supports Testut’s own Nintendo emulator, called Delta, which will let anyone with an iPhone or iPad play Super Mario and other classics. Also, it doesn’t require you jailbreak your iOS device. Anyone can download AltStore right now. I definitely appreciate the work put into this, and it seems quite slick and usable. It’s been in the works for years, and in a blog post, Testut explains in more detail how it all works. AltStore is a fully native, sandboxed iOS application that allows you to sideload apps by essentially “tricking” your phone into thinking it’s installing apps that you made yourself, when really they can be any apps whatsoever. Since this is an actually supported installation method by Apple, it’s far less fragile than other distribution methods in the past. Similarly, since there’s no single enterprise certificate to revoke (because technically every user now has their own developer certificate using this process), Apple can’t simply shut it down with the press of a button like they have with some 3rd party app stores (until they receive a new certificate in a week or so, of course). To bypass several restrictions put in place by Apple to limit the use of this developer feature, you need to run an AltServer on your PC or Mac, which bypasses these restrictions and pushes new applications to your device using WiFi. It’s quite clever. While I don’t share The Verge’s rather optimistic view that this “has the potential to shake up the entire iOS ecosystem”, it does seem like a very simple and easy way to bring iOS a few steps closer to Android when it comes to being a full, complete operating system.
Swift was introduced at Apple’s 2014 WWDC and it is interesting to measure Apple’s own use of Swift in iOS over the years. iOS 9 released in 2015 included a single application written with Swift: Calculator. Since then the number of applications using Swift in iOS has grown each year with iOS 10.1, iOS 11.1 and iOS 12.0. Now that iOS 13.1 is available, let’s measure how many applications are using Swift this year. Apple is clearly increasing its usage of Swift, and dogfooding it properly around its mobile operating system. That should give developers confidence to use Swift themselves.
Google has detailed some of the new features of the Go edition of Android 10, the version of Android designed specifically for lower-end devices. First, this new release helps you switch between apps faster and in a memory-efficient way. Speed and reliability are also enhanced—apps now launch 10 percent faster than they did on Android 9 (Go edition). Encryption underpins our digital security, as it protects your data even if your device falls into the wrong hands. That’s why Android 10 (Go edition) includes a new form of encryption, built by Google for entry-level smartphones, called Adiantum. Up until now, not all entry-level smartphones were able to encrypt data without affecting device performance. Encryption on every Android phone, regardless of specifications, is a huge deal. Good move.
The Internet is forever, we tell social media users: be careful what you put online, because you can’t ever take it back off. And while that’s gospel for US users, there’s some nuance to that dictum across the Atlantic. In Europe, individuals have a right to be forgotten and can request that information about themselves be taken down—but only, a court has now ruled, within Europe. The Court of Justice of the European Union, the EU’s highest court, issued a ruling today finding that there is no obligation under EU law for a search service to carry out a valid European de-listing request globally. I think this is a logical, common-sense ruling. I’m not entirely sure what to make of the right to be forgotten, since I can see valid uses for it, but it’s also very open to abuse, and one has to wonder just how effective it really is.
The ReactOS team is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.12. As always a multitude of improvements have been made to all parts of the OS, though userland components saw special emphasis this time around. A lot of work has gone into filesystem support, with the ultimate goal being the ability to run Microsoft’s filesystem drivers – a goal the project has not yet achieved. PXE booting has been fixed as well, and window snapping has been added, among many other things.
The “surround screen” on the Alpha wraps entirely around the device to the point where it meets the camera module on the other side. The effect is of a phone that’s almost completely made of screen, with status icons like network signal and battery charge level displayed on the side. Pressure-sensitive volume buttons are also shown on the side of the phone. Xiaomi is claiming more than 180 percent screen-to-body ratio, a stat that no longer makes any sense to cite at all. Settings aside the obvious usability concerns associated with this design, I do have to say I can barely believe technology like this is now entering the market. This was the kind of stuff confined to science fiction not too long ago.
The “stream” of development in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem has been Fedora > RHEL > CentOS, but Red Hat is changing things up: The CentOS Stream project sits between the Fedora Project and RHEL in the RHEL Development process, providing a “rolling preview” of future RHEL kernels and features. This enables developers to stay one or two steps ahead of what’s coming in RHEL, which was not previously possible with traditional CentOS releases.
The iPad’s device-specific features have been advancing for years, and Apple is finally making the divergence official. Though the first version seems to still be iOS with some iPad-specific components (not all that different from previous versions of iOS on the iPad), presumably this release signals that in the future the iPad and iPhone versions of the OS will diverge more radically. Personally, I hope to see it iPad become more Mac-like, rather than seeing the Mac become more iPad-like. I’d love to see iPadOS evolve to the point that Apple would release an iPad Pro keyboard with a trackpad. Crucially, the iPadOS will be compatible with devices going back to the five-year-old iPad Air 2.
John Stanley Ford, my father, was the first black software engineer in America, hired by IBM in 1946. Passed over for promotions, discriminated against in pay, with many inside IBM working to ensure his failure, he still viewed his job as an opportunity of a lifetime. He refused to give up. Minority underrepresentation in high tech has been present since the earliest days of the industry. In reflecting upon my father’s career for a new memoir I wrote about him, I saw important lessons about the history and nature of racism in high tech, and about the steps that corporations and individuals can take to bring about much-needed change. An important and fascinating story – especially since it involves IBM, a company with a long and deep roots in racism, eugenics, and genocide.
xv6 is a re-implementation of Dennis Ritchie’s and Ken Thompson’s Unix Version 6 (v6). xv6 loosely follows the structure and style of v6, but is implemented for a modern RISC-V multiprocessor using ANSI C. Exactly what it says on the tin. It runs on Qemu’s RISC-V target.
We’re excited to announce the release of .NET Core 3.0. It includes many improvements, including adding Windows Forms and WPF, adding new JSON APIs, support for ARM64 and improving performance across the board. C# 8 is also part of this release, which includes nullable, async streams, and more patterns. F# 4.7 is included, and focused on relaxing syntax and targeting .NET Standard 2.0. You can start updating existing projects to target .NET Core 3.0 today. The release is compatible with previous versions, making updating easy.
EasyOS is designed from scratch to support containers. Any app can run in a container, in fact an entire desktop can run in a container. Container management is by a simple GUI, no messing around on the commandline. The container mechanism is named Easy Containers, and is designed from scratch (Docker, LXC, etc are not used). Easy Containers are extremely efficient, with almost no overhead — the base size of each container is only several KB. This is just one of the details of EasyOS, an experimental Linux distribution that really does things differently.
Full video of what shows a Nokia feature phone running Android 8.1 has now emerged. The unknown Nokia feature phone prototype is not running KaiOS and rather one can clearly notice Android 8.1 mentioned in the system settings. It wouldn’t surprise me if Google did indeed have plans to shoehorn Android into feature phones, only to realise it made more sense to just invest in KaiOS instead. I don’t think this Nokia phone is more than an old prototype.
Something atypical for Apple is iOS 13’s notably buggy rollout. Since June, when Apple hosted its annual WWDC software shindig, the company has been releasing developer and public beta versions of its new OS for iPhones. This is usually a fertile time for communities of early users to share notes about their experiences online, and provide useful feedback to Apple on how the software works. This year, some developers say they’re surprised by what feels like a scattershot release. “iOS 13 has felt like a super-messy release, something we haven’t seen this bad since iOS 8 or so,” Steve Troughton-Smith, an app and game developer, tweeted earlier this week. Troughton-Smith frequently blogs about his experiences coding for Apple platforms. “Definitely needs a lengthy period of consolidation and bug fixing,” he says of the new mobile OS. Virtually everyone who’s been testing iOS 13 seems to advise waiting for 13.1. Regardless, it’s iOS/iPadOS release time, which means Federico Viticci’s must-read review has been published. It’s an insanely long read this year, so grab a few coffees and enjoy his excellent work.
This release is the result of the LLVM community’s work over the past six months (up to trunk r366426 plus commits on the branch). Some highlights include: – Support for asm goto, enabling for example the mainline Linux kernel for x86_64 to build with Clang – The RISCV-V target is no longer experimental, but built by default – Experimental support for C++ for OpenCL As well as many bug fixes, optimizations, and diagnostics improvements. Read the release notes for the detailed information.
Obviously, the most notable aspect of the Chinese-made handset is the distinct lack of official access to Google apps and services. This is the first flagship to be released by Huawei since being blacklisted by the US government, therefore it is the first new release to explicitly come without access to common Google Play Services. Side-loading these services is likely to be possible but it is unclear just how this will be possible for most non-techie buyers. The Huawei Mate 30 Pro does come EMUI 10, which is based upon the recently released Android 10. Although, as expected, this build does not come with any Google apps. It will be interesting to see how well this handset will perform outside of China. I have my sincerest doubts.
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