Monthly Archive:: July 2015

Aside from the app void and the questionable value of Scopes, Ubuntu Phone is a bit of a nightmare to use the majority of the time. Something's often refreshing in the background, causing the phone to slow down. Apps take longer to load than they should, and even then you're probably waiting on a web app. The gesture-based navigation is unrefined; there are bugs and glitches all over the place; and in general, many core experiences are severely lacking in polish. Despite years of development, Ubuntu Phone still feels like an early beta, and I think Canonical needs to think long and hard about the implementation of Scopes and bump native apps up the agenda. There's nothing wrong with trying to be different, but there's a reason Android/iOS are so popular. Ignoring the headway they've made in refining the mobile experience is, in my mind, setting yourself up for failure.

With the permission of Electronic Arts, Inc. the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code to the 1986 version I of DeluxePaint. There are 89 files of C language source, comprising almost 17,000 lines of code in about 474 KB of text.

Apple needs to change its priorities for the Mac App Store or just shut the whole thing down. As it now stands, developers who are tired of being second-class citizens are making that decision for them and leaving on their own.

The change should help end the annual frustration experienced by app developers when users running beta versions of iOS discovered a third party app wasn't compatible with the beta software and then left a 1-star rating on the App Store. Poor reviews on the App Store can hurt sales, and developers often can't do anything to fix the problem because they can't submit software built for the new versions of iOS whilst it remains in beta, and the bug could be one for Apple to fix, not the developer.

Got an Xperia Z3 and a home address somewhere in the Kingdom of Sweden? Sony wants your help with testing its next round of software updates for Android, which the company has rounded up in an initiative it's calling "Android concept." The goal, says Sony, is to develop new software "from the ground up," meaning no additional Google Play apps like YouTube on the test build, just the core Google communications software and Sony's stack of custom apps like Camera, Music, and Xperia Lounge.

For its part, Vector Graphic went on to become one of the best known PC makers of the late 1970s. Like Apple, it was one of the first computer companies to go public, and like Apple, it set its products apart from the crowd with its attention to industrial design.

But unlike Apple, Vector vanished from the face of the earth. It faded from our collective memory because it did not survive the massive industry upheaval brought about by the release of the IBM PC in late 1981. Very few PC makers did. But the story of how the Vector trio went from nothing to soaring success - and then collapse - is a tale worth retelling.

Beats 1 radio wasn't the only Apple service to temporarily go down during the MTV's VMA nominee announcements. As TechCrunch first reported and Apple's own status page confirmed, many more of Apple's services experienced issues Tuesday morning that stretched into the afternoon. Normal service was restored just before 2PM ET. The outages appeared limited to services related to Apple's online storefronts, but "limited" here is a relative term as many popular services are apparently tied in: Apple Music, Apple Radio, the App Store, Apple TV, the Mac App Store, iTunes Match, and even OS X Software Update all suffered problems. The outage wasn't universal, but still proved an unexpected headache for users.

With Google Drive, you can keep all your important files in one place, then open them with your choice of apps and devices. Building on this open approach, we recently made it possible to launch your favorite desktop applications directly from Google Drive. And today we're taking it a step further by bringing Google Drive to Microsoft Office. Using the new Google Drive plug-in, people using Office for Windows can now open their Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents stored in Drive, then save any changes back to Drive once they're done.

Now, your reaction to this might be, "How could this possibly work? You are just randomly ignoring instructions!" But the strange thing is, this idea was so crazy it actually worked, or at least worked a lot of the time. You might have to hit Ignore a dozen times, but there's a good chance that eventually the bad values in the registers will get overwritten by good values (and it probably won't take long because the 8086 has so few registers), and the program will continue seemingly-normally.

Ashley Madison, an online dating website that specifically targets people looking to have an affair, has been hacked by a group that calls itself Impact Team. A cache of data has been released by the Impact Team, including user profiles, company financial records, and "other proprietary information." The company's CEO, Noel Bilderman, confirmed with KrebsOnSecurity that they had been hacked, but did not speak about the extent of the breach.

After 22 years, 2 months, 2 days and 2 hours since System 6.0.1 was released, this is a summary of the visible changes. There have been many bugs fixed and many features added that are not immediately visible - they will enable developers to create better future products. Be sure to also read the Shortcuts file on the SystemTools3 disk for more information.

Today, I am excited to announce that Visual Studio 2015 and .Net 4.6 are available for download.

These releases are the next big step in the journey we outlined last November to bring the productivity of Visual Studio and .NET to any developer working on any kind of application while also delivering a new level of innovation in developer productivity for all Visual Studio developers.

Since the switch to our package manager, there was no longer a way to influence the boot process at all. The only file you could change was the UserBootscript which is started only after Tracker and Deskbar; the whole system is already up at this point.

The launch_daemon gives the power back to you, but also allow software you install to automatically be started on system boot as well. You can also even prevent system components from being started at all if you so wish.

Furthermore, it allows for event based application start, start on demand, a multi-threaded boot process, and even enables you to talk to servers before they actually started.