Monthly Archive:: May 2015

In a midnight session, the Senate has voted down the USA Freedom Act, putting one of the legal bedrocks of the NSA's bulk surveillance programs into jeopardy. The Patriot Act is set to expire at the end of the month, and the USA Freedom Act would have extended large portions of the act in modified form. Tonight's failure to arrive at a vote makes it likely that many of those powers will automatically expire, although Senate Majority Leader McConnell (R-KY) scheduled a last-minute session on May 31st for one last shot at passing the bill.

Mozilla has revamped its Firefox OS mobile software project after concluding that ultra-affordable $25 handsets aren't enough to take on the biggest powers of the smartphone world, CNET has learned.

Michael Bromwich was in court with the most powerful company and the top government law agency in the country when he seemed to get antsy. Apple and the United States Department of Justice had, after all, been exchanging jabs about him. “I'd like to be heard, your Honor, if I can,” he told the judge, who said they’d need to “exhaust the arguments of the main combatants” first.

Wanting to interject would be understandable, considering how long Bromwich and Apple had been putting up their dukes inside and outside of court in a bloody fight over cash and corporate power. In July 2013, Apple was found guilty of conspiring to fix market prices for ebooks. The judge in the case, Denise Cote, said there was "a clear portrait of a conscious commitment to cross a line and engage in illegal behavior." The prosecution’s case was so clear-cut, and Apple showed such little contrition, according to Cote, that it wasn’t enough to take the company’s word that it would change. To make sure Apple fell in line, she called in help.

That would turn out to be Bromwich, a bearded, bespectacled attorney appointed by the court to be Apple’s corporate monitor for two years, a job made to ensure Apple complied with court rulings.

For the first time in several years, Apple is changing up its annual iOS and OS X upgrade cycle by limiting new feature additions in favor of a "big focus on quality," according to multiple sources familiar with the company's operating system development plans. We first reported in February that iOS 9, codenamed "Monarch," would heavily feature under-the-hood optimizations, and we've now learned that Apple is taking the same approach with OS X 10.11, codenamed "Gala." Sources have revealed additional new details on how Apple will optimize the new operating systems for improved stability and performance, add several new security features, and make important changes to its Swift programming tools for developers.

While AMD seems to have made up with Slightly Mad Studios, at least if this tweet from Taylor is anything to go by, the company is facing yet another supposedly GameWorks-related struggle with CD Projekt Red's freshly released RPG The Witcher 3. The game makes use of several GameWorks technologies, most notably HBAO+ and HairWorks. The latter, which adds tens of thousands of tessellated hair strands to characters, dramatically decreases frame rate performance on AMD graphics cards, sometimes by as much as 50 percent.

Over on its product forums, Google announced that it has started rolling out Android 5.1.1 to Android Wear watches. Additionally, according to several users on Reddit, and at least one person on our own forums, the update has already started landing on the LG G Watch and G Watch R.

WCF targets the .NET Core framework which is designed to support multiple computer architectures and to run cross-platform. Right now the WCF project builds on Windows, but .NET Core offers the potential for it to run on OS X and Linux. The WCF team are working hard to make this a reality and to keep up to date as platform support for .NET Core grows, but if you want to help I know they would love contributions especially around improving and testing the platform support.

I've mentioned it before, but I'll happily mention it again: When MorphOS gets ported to AMD64, we will not be supporting Macs. AMD64 Macs have all the wrong hardware for that to make any sense. When such a time does come, expect us to support one desktop motherboard (with one family of CPUs and GPUs) and one laptop. We'll of course make sure it's hardware that's actually available one way or another.

"We're evolving Android and creating an open computing platform that will change the way consumers interact with their mobile devices," said Kirt McMaster, CEO of Cyanogen Inc. "Foxconn and our diverse group of strategic investors and partners reflect the mobile value chain, from device manufacturers and mobile network operators to chipset makers and 3rd party developers. They see the great potential of what we're doing in creating the next major paradigm shift in mobile computing."

According to the RBC Newspaper, The Russian Ministry of Communications has decided that the country needs a national phone operating system which accordingly will be Jolla's own Sailfish OS which has been built from the scratch and the ashes oc MeeGo after the death of the mentioned OS announced by Nokia as The Burning Platform.

The MorphOS development team is proud to announce the public release of MorphOS 3.8, which introduces support for ACube's Sam460 series of mainboards and numerous Radeon graphics cards from AMD's X1000 and HD series. In addition to various performance improvements related to the Quark kernel, Exec, 3D graphics and video playback, MorphOS 3.8 also adds the ability to use state-of-the-art 4K displays in their native resolution. For a more extensive overview of the included changes, please read our release notes.

Microsoft and our OEM partners know that many consumers are unwitting victims of piracy, and with Windows 10, we would like all of our customers to move forward with us together. While our free offer to upgrade to Windows 10 will not apply to Non-Genuine Windows devices, and as we've always done, we will continue to offer Windows 10 to customers running devices in a Non-Genuine state. In addition, in partnership with some of our valued OEM partners, we are planning very attractive Windows 10 upgrade offers for their customers running one of their older devices in a Non-Genuine state.

Panasonic Smart TVs powered by Firefox OS are optimized for HTML5 to provide strong performance of Web apps and come with a new intuitive and customizable user interface which allows quick access to favorite channels, apps, websites and content on other devices. Through Mozilla-pioneered WebAPIs, developers can leverage the flexibility of the Web to create customized and innovative apps and experiences across connected devices.

It all started as a question if computer programming could be made more efficient. And Menuet has matured to be an operating system with modern features including pre-emptive multitasking, smp, usb, tcp/ip, transparent GUI and many other features. And above all, MenuetOS is 100% assembly written operating system. With version 1.00, we made small history today.